For balance i should outline some failures, unknown results and borderline ones that raise questions. All from this week.
A dream with a strong emotional content involving my closest friend, who appears frequently in these dreams - both the spontaneous and the experimental ones - His reaction suggested nothing in it meant anything to him
A dream about a friend ive had no personal or online exchange with in literally a few years - it felt like it must be meaningful (he turns up at my front door. When I greet him he opens his mouth but can't speak.). I message him in the morning. The message was read but he never replied..so there's no way of knowing if it was a clear hit, a hit he failed to recognise and he thought i was a nut, or a complete miss
An American who, given the time difference insisted i try to influence his dreams as he was about to go to sleep. On this occasion i saw it as an opportunity to test the idea that the catalyst is the subject thinking about the dreamer while they're dreaming. I perform a task - gardening/brushing up blossoms - while maintaining daydreaming thoughts of him, and an occasional internal monologue directed at him throughout. He reported his dreams in full.. nothing he dreamt of related to my immediate activities or anything else likely to be floating around my mind on that day.
This latter exercise was at least useful for suggesting that thinking of the dreamer is probably not the (sole) catalyst for spontaneous cases. Perhaps its about the dreamer chancing to think of the subject instead. It also lead me to notice something for the first time. The nature of the spontaneous cases is I dream of the person whose mind i seem to be extracting information from...yet in the deliberate experimental cases where someone was trying to transmit an image into my dreams, the person involved never featured in the dream. That never dawned on me before! It suggests the two means of influencing a dream are different in nature as well as practice. Once again it might suggest the receiver (me) is the instigator in spontaneous cases while its the other party in deliberate cases.
Other random realisations: Since "telepathy" has been the main subject of enquiry and interest, ive not noticed any personal examples of precognition occurring in my dreams. For years they were my primary contribution to these boards. The fact that they're no longer apparent while telepathic exchange is appears to undermine my expressed conviction that precognition is happening in everyone's dreams all of the time if they'd only look and pay attention. Now im beginning to wonder if the nature of dreams is to be whatever you come to expect them to be. If you expect dreams to be about metaphor and symbolism then yours will be. If you think dreams are precognitive they will conform to your belief. If you consider lucidity to be inevitable, it becomes standard. And once you've had a few examples of telepathy and accept its normal, that's exactly what they provide in ever greater numbers.
Then we come to today's example. This raises many questions. The lady addressed in the following exchange is a friend of a friend. I've only met her twice. 7 years ago. She's on my facebook, but ive never had reason to message her privately before now. So question one is why i should dream of her and why any form of unconscious entanglement should or could exist between us. With her initial reply it was tantalising, and placed side by side with the question looks like it qualifies as a hit. Though the "last week" bothered me in accepting it as such. Time is clearly very malleable in all of this but surely there has to be a time limit otherwise we could accept incidents that happened10 years ago or 10 years hence. Still the bf incident could still have been passing her thoughts in the last 24 hours or in her sleep. But then, extraordinary twist, a much more direct "hit" occurred. It happened before my dream but her knowledge of it occurred after. Once more suggesting information about her father may have been lurking in her subconscious, whether telepathically or clairvoyantly it was already there for me to retrieve. But if this was what the dream referred to, what do we do with the boyfriend and the brambles in her initial response? Do they have any relevance at all?