Since writing the above tale it has become evident that it is in fact only a small part of a much larger and rather mindboggling web of synchronicity triggered by an experiment in dream telepathy.
This is a long tale, but I hope worth it. I shall try my best to break it up into small bite sized chunks to aid clarity.
The two key names are Gadge (Gary) and Rennie (Renato). The former is a brit living in Holland and the latter is the Australian friend from the story above. They don't know each other, have never met or had any contact.
It all began a few weeks ago when, following a seemingly successful attempt to "will" a long lost friend to get in touch by sending telepathic instructions at night while he dreamt - a success that could have been coincidence and so needed to be tested - I set upon the idea of actually planting an image into the mind of someone else. Gadge was chosen as he's an artist and so would have a strong visual imagination and a possible propensity for "psi".
The exact nature and purpose of the experiment seemed to change each day over the course of a week and was all rather half-arsed. But the essential point was to get him to dream about, and report that he'd dreamt about, an image of which he had no knowledge and could not reasonably hit upon by chance. The image was of a winged elephant.
Rennie was one of the handful of people I was keeping informed of my activities. Intriguingly no sooner had we begun but Rennie himself had a startling precognitive dream. It involved someone he'd never seen before turning up in real life the following day.
The experiments with Gadge meanwhile were generally a flop. He kept a dream diary but no elephant, winged or otherwise, turned up in his recollections. On the 3rd night of trying I altered things slightly and to aid me in properly "aiming" my thoughts I chose to look at a printed out photo of Gadge as I willed him to dream of the elephant. The only photo I had to hand was of him at a halloween do dressed rather like Freddie Kruger, and I was looking at it in the dark by the dim light of my phone which added to its rather creepy appearance. But I didn't think it relevant.
Once more no winged elephant appeared in his reported dream. But - and it took a while for the potential significance to occur to me - he reported that night he'd had a nightmare He was at home and being pursued by a horror movie bogeyman trying to kill him.....
Realising that the photo of him I'd been looking at might have worked its way into his dreams, where the elephant motif had not, we changed tack. The elephant was sacked and replaced by a vivid image, produced in photoshop, of Gadge himself as a Spanish bullfighter. Would this have more success? That night - nothing. He had almost no dream material to report and certainly nothing related to the image in question.
However....another change of tack that very night was deciding to record my own dreams, to see if anything interesting happened. Nothing of note did...at first. It was only 3 days later that one of the dreams (arial footage of a german city and the place of Hitler's birth being singled out) was replayed before my very eyes on a television documentary. This represent the 3rd Psi-seeming event in the course of the week, not one of which involved the images I was actually trying to send.
At this point we decided the dream influencing experiment was a flop. It occurred to me that it was bound to be so. I'd heard of the Maimonides program, and how its procedures involved sending the image while the subject was categorically in a dream state, then waking them from the dream before anything has a chance to fade. This we clearly weren't in a position to do.
So a final change of tack. A daytime remote viewing exercise, still using the bullfighter image. I would concentrate on it for 15 minutes while Gadge in Holland tried to clairvoyantly perceive what I was looking at. Again, a complete failure.
And so the experiments came to an end with only the "bogeyman" dream, at this point, suggestive of any kind of success.
Several days passed and on Sunday night the account at the beginning of this topic involving a semi-shared and eerily timed dream with Rennie in Australia occurred. He happened to be sending me a message at the very time I was dreaming about him, and I woke at 4am...then later found that he had woken at 4am his time from a symbolically related dream.
Two things struck me about this. The first was that we had accidentally followed the procedures of the aforementioned Maionides project - thoughts "sent" during the actual dream state, and being woken from the dream so as to report it fresh - this inspired me to send off for the book of those events, Dream Telepathy by Ullman, Krippner and Vaughan, which arrived yesterday. The second thing that passed my thoughts was the essential similarity between Rennie's dream - which involved a killer trying to break into his house to get him - and the "bogeyman" dream of Gadge's over a week earlier during the experiments. But as there was no connection between the two individuals or events I thought it not worth expressing.
Yesterday the book arrived and I began reading it while the television was on in the background, showing a repeat of the sitcom Duty Free. My attention was pulled suddenly from the book by the certainty someone on the television had just used the word "mulato". This word had been the key element of a much earlier "telepathic" experience, but one which I'd been recounting just a couple of days ago. So I payed attention to the TV show and found that this episode largely revolved around an encounter with a bull fighter......
Hmmm...2 similarities to the Gadge experiments within a couple of days? Still perhaps too far fetched to mention. So I carried on reading the book and within minutes........
I come to an account of a famous psychiatrist in 1914 being pestered by a clairvoyant to do some ESP experiments. He agrees and they do exactly what we were doing. For 15 minutes at lunchtime the psychiatrist is concentrating on an object in his study while the clairvoyant tries to see it psychically. The clairvoyant's reading, like ours, turned out to be complete rubbish. But here's the twist...
Before the clairvoyant's report arrived the psychiatrist heard first from a friend of his who'd just had a remarkable dream...involving the very thing the shrink was concentrating on and trying to send. What was it? The image of an elephant.....
(From the book "Would suggest evidence for Jung's hypothesis of synchronicity - an intricate web of meaningful coincidences clustered around an emotional situation.")
Every thought I have about this whole thing is also constantly turning up in the book. Does the idea that Rennie and Gadge should share a dream sound like total nonsense when they've no connection to each other? On the subject of cases in the world of psychoanalysis it remarks " When patients who have never met have intermeshing dreams on different nights (Gadge and Rennie?) and these dreams become meaningful only when discussed with their common point of contact, the psychiatrist (me?), one begins to wonder just who might be sending telepathic messages to whom."
My head hurts.
