Last year, within a few months of each other, two different friends wrote to me to tell me that a photograph I’d taken was of a landscape within their dream.
The First Dream: Train Station in England
The first was Jonathan. I posted a picture to Facebook of a train station in Carlisle, England. Within a few minutes he commented that it was the train station from a dream he’d had in 2009. In 2009 he and I were in a class on facilitating dream groups.
Here is part of his dream:
I am outside on what appears to be a nice sunny day. I am talking to a nice looking but older dark haired woman. She has short hair and is dressed like she is on a business trip. I think we are both on a business trip. We seem to be outside a train station, a nice modern train station. We have just arrived from somewhere but are going our separate ways. We don’t seem to know each other well, but yet we are intimate in some way. I am wanting to or considering having an affair with her even though I think she is married. Her name is Mrs. McDonald. I think she says her first name but I do not remember. She tells me that she lives in Carlisle.
Jonathan’s astonishment at seeing the train station from his dream was apparent. He said it looked exactly like the one in his dream and he didn’t expect it to be in England, because in the dream he assumed it was a place in Southern California. The fact that the woman in the dream was from Carlisle added to his excitement.
The Second Dream: Mount Diablo in California
The second friend to write about one of my photos was Trude, a woman I met while in Norway this summer. We had an immediate connection when we met and have since maintained email contact. I sent out an email about re-opening my online photography shop, and not long after she emailed me.
“The photograph of Mount Diablo is an exact image of a dream I once had, a long time before I met you. In this dream I was running in a landscape and feeling extremely light. Happiness is perhaps the best word to describe the feeling.
“I can’t remember ever having seen such a landscape other than in my dream. I remember this dream so well because I had it in a time where I had a lot of terrible dreams, and I started to draw my dreams in a book, and interpreted them. This dream was one of comfort and joy.”
Trude has never been to the United States, so she wouldn’t have seen the Mount Diablo landscape in waking life. She did draw the dream after having it and said the drawing looks similar to my photograph.
So how did this happen?
How did Jonathan dream of a place I visited in England?
How did Trude dream of a landscape in California that I photographed?
Is there some innate connection between me and Trude and me and Jonathan that allowed this kind of synchronicity to occur?
There are no straightforward answers to this question, but one place to find clues is in dream telepathy research.
Dream Telepathy Research
In the 1960s and 70s, Stanley Krippner, along with other researchers at Maimondes Medical Center, conducted a study on dream telepathy. In the experiments, one person was asleep in a room. In another room, a second person looked at a picture. The scientists would wake the sleeper from REM (rapid eye movement) sleep while the second person was looking at the picture. Often, the sleeper remembered dreams that included images from the pictures seen by the person in the other room.
This research seems to indicate telepathic communication happens between the dreamer and the “sender,” the person looking at the photograph. Of course, this communication happens in real time. How can we explain dream telepathy that occurs with a gap of several years in between?
In the case of Trude’s dream I took the photograph in 2006 and she had the dream in 2010. Jonathan dreamed of the Carlilse train station in 2009 and I didn’t visit it until 2011.
This leaves me with more questions than answers. If time is an illusion and everything is really happening at once, that might get us a little closer to an explanation. It doesn’t matter what year I took the picture or what year the dreamers had their dreams.
Another question: why did I photograph these specific people’s dreams? Often, when people are incredibly close, like twins or spouses, mutual and/or paranormal dreaming occurs. But Jonathan and I don’t know each other all that well and Trude is someone I only met for a few days this summer.
Something dream researcher Montague Ullman said about the unique relationships formed during communal dreamwork might explain why I photographed Jonathan’s dream. As I mentioned, Jonathan and I were in a dream group facilitation class together. The class consisted of a two-hour dream group once a week for several weeks.
Ullman writes that, “Experiential dream work generates emotional closeness among the participants. It is expected that this developing rapport in combination with the natural psi facilitating effect of the dream itself, would result in an increasing number of identifiable psi occurrences among the members of the group.”
Since Jonathan and I did experiential dream work together, it makes sense that we’d have a “psi occurrence.”
But how to explain photographing the dream of a woman in Norway who I’d never met before and only spent time with for a few days?
All I can say is that, from the moment I met Trude, I knew on an intuitive, gut level we had a connection. I felt like I knew her from somewhere. A past life? A dream? It was one of those moments where you just know you’ve met the person before.
We met at a shamanic workshop weekend, another emotionally intense and experiential field where psi comes into play. Perhaps the same principles apply with me and Trude as with me and Jonathan. As a result of the time we spent together that weekend, Trude and I formed a tight emotional bond and we have remained close even though I’m now back in the United States.
Have you ever photographed something from someone else’s dream?
Have you ever seen a photograph and thought, “that’s my dream!”?
Share with us in the comments below.
Reference: Ullman, M. (1979). Psi communication through dream sharing. Paper presented at the Parapsychology Foundation Conference on “Communication and Parapsychology,” held August 9-10, 1979, in Vancouver, Canada.
This is interesting. I’ve had a similar experience. I dreamt I was in Germany, a place I haven’t visited, and a few weeks later my cousin visiting Germany posted some images on his Facebook page that looked just like the streets in the dream.
I also have a German friend and I dream about his little boy quite often. Again, a dream I had seemed to correspond heavily to where they were living at the time I had it, at least according to my friend’s response. We too have become friends through psi/dream oriented forums.
Fascinating, Donna! Thank you for sharing! I figured there would be other people out there who have experienced something similar.
Do you have any other connection to Germany besides having a cousin visit and your friend live there? Is it an ancestral place for you?
A few years back, I had a night of very vivid dreams all revolving around landslides. They were very visual, cinematic at moments. Sometimes I was watching the landslides happen; other times I was navigating along certain roads in the city where I live. I watched one very specific and dramatic scene of an entire house falling down a hillside.
When I woke the next morning and looked at the paper the front page headline was all about several landslide that had happened over night. The photograph on the front was of the very street I had been navigating in my dream. Later on the news I saw footage of an entire home that had slid down a hill; it looked almost identical to how it did in my dream. The main difference was that in my dream there weren’t as many other houses near by.
Another intriguing story, Alethea! Was the landslide one that happened in a community near you or was it far away?
It was in the city I live in: one just on the other side of the river; another southeast of here.
Wow. Sounds like you’re really tapped into the land there.
Thank you for your story about my dream and your photo, Katrina. I loved it:) I will try to post my drawing of my dream to you on facebook.
I also have a quote for us, from Paulo Coelho, (Eleven minutes):
“The most important meetings have been agreed between the souls, before their bodies have seen each other.”
trude, your dreamsister:)
Thanks Trude. 🙂
That is the perfect quote to describe us!
Interesting article. I have a similar story: I have met this woman with whom I feel a strong connection. About a week ago, I had a dream about her for the first time. We were traveling to visit a friend of hers and the friend asked if we had seen the ‘Purple Mountains’ yet. When we said no, he took us to the back of the room we were in and opened a set of double-doors and right behind the building were some of the most beautiful mountains I have ever seen. The had facets ‘cut’ out by green lines of trees growing up the sides, and purple streaks in the mountain rock. A few days later I told the woman about the dream and she grew somewhat serious, opened up her picture gallery on her iPhone and showed me a picture of what I dreamed. She then proceeded to tell me that this was one of the most special places for her, which she had not previously mentioned to me. The picture matched my desciption to a T.
Awesome story! Thank you for sharing it with us. How did you feel when you saw the picture?
As I posted as a synchronicity event on my Facebook page the past Saturday evening was that Friday night I dreamt I was at my mother’s in her kitchen with a man I’d not met before. This man was charming and had sultry eyes. We laughed and began to prepare to cook. That was the entire dream. I then went out Saturday evening to a new restaurant in a town I don’t fancy liking and my waiter was that very man from my dream. I was completely paralized to say or do anything, but stare. My biggest interest was that of the sychronicity..fascinating.
Indigo, I love this! Do you think you’ll see that man again? After all, you do know where he works now…
i have been noticing the word dragon alot since my dream in early 2009 and i Google searched pics of dragons to see if i could find the white one but had no luck never thought about Google dreams with dragons until tonight. it shoes me im not alone. it means so much to me to know there are others….
i believe its important for us to connect we are needed for something you guys i know it i feel it. please don’t just let this get put off.. we must communicate and solve this… there’s more prices to this puzzle.