Do you think it’s possible to see images in your dreams if someone is thinking them to you? British psychologists Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe of University College Northhampton say, yes.

In 2003, after analyzing 47 separate dream experiments involving 1,270 individual trials, the duo found the overall accuracy in receiving an image was 59.1 percent. According to chance and the science of random event generators, like a coin toss it should have been 50 percent. But according to the odds of the results being chance, the statistics of the experiment were calculated at an astronomical 22 billion to one.

In 2004, in a similar study at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, senior scientist Dean Radin and his colleagues tested 13 sets of friends who were not emotionally bonded as couples, but shared an interest in the study. One person (the receiver) in each pair was connected to an EEG machine with a closed-circuit TV camera pointed at them. The other (the sender) sat in front of a TV screen in another room, also connected to an EEG machine. At randomly timed intervals the sender’s TV screen flashed up a live image of the receiver’s face.

With the sudden appearance of their friend’s face on the screen, as you might expect there was a peak in the EEG machine in the brain of the person directly viewing the image. What was surprising, however, was that the receiver’s EEG also showed a peak in their brain activity, which was being affected from a remote location by the sender. Did the receiver sense that someone was looking at them?  Did he or she know—either consciously or unconsciously—that the other person was thinking of them?  The results certainly imply a non-local connection between them. 

Could we be thinking about consciousness all wrong?

In the scientific community, the lack of scientific understanding about the nature of consciousness and from where it emerges is commonly referred to as the ‘hard’ problem. The standard view of science is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the body—meaning it arises as a result of the anatomy, complexity, and wiring of the brain. It is said to be a product of neurological activity, yet there is a great deal of published research and philosophy that challenges this idea.

The latest research in quantum physics demonstrates that everything material, at its most fundamental sub-atomic level, is made up of information and energy—and it is consciousness that is connecting, organizing, and directing energy to give life and form to all things material. Since everything physical is made of atoms (including you and me), then in some way we are bound by an invisible field of information beyond this space and time.

We don’t need a study to know that the people we’re bonded to can pick up our thoughts and feelings. For instance, one minute we may find ourselves thinking of a friend who we haven’t thought of in weeks, and the next we get a call from them or see them at the store. Or we walk into a room and instantly know if someone is angry or upset without even seeing their face. These types of events have happened to all of us and are real demonstrations of our connections across time and space.

In the physical world, we only have to cast our eyes on the brilliance of nature to see the interconnectedness of all things. A great example is a trophic cascade, an ecological process that starts at the top of the food chain and ripples all the way down to the bottom. There are few better cases than the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995. The result was a cascading effect among plants and animals, restoring balance to the ecosystem to the point that it flourished. Perhaps the most remarkable event was that even the river changed its behavior.

The interconnection of all things starts at the subatomic level, flows through atoms, molecules, chemicals, cells, tissues, organs, the body, relationships, communities, planets and solar systems, and so on. If it is true for the physical nature of reality that all things are interconnected, why then should there be any difference with the connection between minds? What if consciousness is an infinitely connected gossamer web upon which ripples of information travel, after all, how does a spider know it has trapped prey in its web? It feels the vibration. Could the universe then feel all of our thoughts and feelings in a collective unconsciousness, as Carl Jung speculated?

From the esoteric to possibility

While these are more esoteric ideas which will require more research, if you apply this line of thinking to sending someone a good intention, or you think of your brother or sister with love, then shouldn’t that have an effect? If you’re bound to your best friend through suffering, then when you think about suffering, wouldn’t that have an effect on your friend because you are bound by the energy of that emotion? And finally, when you or a community of people think healing thoughts by praying for a sick person, should that not have an effect as well?

A good way to imagine consciousness is to think of it as the internet. We all have computers that are separate from one another in physical spaces, just as each of us are our own person. But when we connect our computers to the internet, although they are in different locations, they are connected—and all information flows—through an information network. If this is the case with consciousness, then consciousness is not confined inside the head, but a fundamental property of reality that spans time and space.

Here’s a final thought to leave you with; what if consciousness is actually the fabric that holds matter together, as opposed to the way it is scientifically accepted today? Just think of all those possibilities awaiting you. What if we could connect to that field of information and learn how to direct our mind and energy to an outcome? Maybe we should begin our own scientific experiment by changing the belief governed by our senses that we are separate from all people, species, things, objects, and places. If we did, perhaps we would see we are both the spider and the web.

Photo by LuciaJoy