Beyond Space and Time: Personal Experiences with PSI Dreaming
by
 Beverly (Kedzierski Heart) D’Urso, Ph.D.
 Copyright (c) 2006

For the Psi Dreaming panel at the International Association for the Study of Dreams Conference in Bridgewater, MA, June 2006.


INTRODUCTION

Good afternoon.

Today, for the first time in public, I plan to share my very personal experiences with psi dreaming. After some brief background information, I will focus on an important and verified precognitive dream that I had in 1982, which changed my view of the world upside down.

I will also share what happened when I once tried to avoid a manifestation of a precognitive dream, as well as a case where sharing my dream and trusting my guidance seemed to benefit another person.

I will talk about my feelings in the middle of such dreams, when I wake up from them, and during their manifestations in waking physical reality. Finally, I will share some of my success with dream telepathy, and how I learned to best record and share psi dreams.

I will not have time to get into dream healing, which I presented in a symposium yesterday. However, you can find this material on my website: beverly.durso.org.

MY BACKGROUND

I will begin with a brief description of my background.

People know me as mainly as a lucid dreamer. I define a lucid dream as one where I know, at some level, that I am dreaming while I am dreaming.

Starting in the late 1970’s, I helped do research on lucid dreaming at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory. These experiences of monitoring my physical conditions and later seeing how they changed, as I attempted various tasks with my dream body, proved to me that what I dream can affect my waking life. Most of my precognitive dreams, however, occurred in non-lucid dreams.

BEACH DREAM

Although I have had various psi experiences since childhood, I will go into the details of an extremely intense, documented, and verified precognitive dream that I had in 1982. It occurred during a time that I felt at a crossroads in my personal life and in my Ph.D. work in Artificial Intelligence.

The experience turned my view of the world upside down. My scientific training did not prepare me for this ability to personally know a future event in amazingly rich detail.

In the interest of their privacy, I’ve changed the names of the characters in the following dream. One night, in the summer of 1982, while living in Palo Alto, CA, I woke up from a dream screaming. In the dream, I find myself going to a house where a girl, named Darcy, from my high school years, supposedly now lived. I went to high school over ten years earlier in the Chicago area.

I enter the house from the left. I talk with Darcy in her kitchen area under an archway. I ask her if she knows the whereabouts of my high school boyfriend, Geoff. She tells me he now lives in the mountains of New Mexico. At this point, she reveals something else that affects me very deeply. After awhile, I leave the house on my own. On my way, some people ask me for directions. Then the dream ends.

This dream had such a different feeling to it, as if I just had to pay attention to it. It seemed both shiny and loud.  I couldn’t get back to sleep after having it. I spent a long time recording the dream and drawing sketches of the dreamscape.

Whenever I thought about the part of the dream where Darcy talks about Geoff, my brain seems to freeze in pain and I can’t remember what she told me. The pain seems so severe that I focus on it for days, not even going in to work.

When a coworker acts concerned, I insist on telling him the details of this dream. I do so over and over again, showing him the sketches I made. In response to my overreaction, he invites me to come with him on Saturday to a beach in Santa Cruz which I had never been to, so I can relax.

Therefore, four days after the dream, in physical reality, I go to an unknown beach with my coworker. He brings along a friend, a dark haired guy I do not know, but who eventually plays a larger role in my life. The guys play some frisbee, while I sit on a blanket about thirty feet in front of the ocean waves. They eventually sit down, on both sides of me, exhausted.

At this point, I barely notice a woman walk in front of me, holding the hand of a child. As she passes me, I look down and then up again. I see her looking backwards toward me. In total shock, I say, “Darcy?” She responds with, “Beverly?”

My coworker looks at me confused, wondering why I am saying the name of the girl from my dream. I say, “It’s her!” and get up to greet her. She seems amazed to see me in California after all these years. I feel even more flabbergasted that I am seeing her now right after the dream I just had of her.

I want to talk to her more and try to get her phone number, but I don’t have a pencil. I begin to scream out to everyone around us, “Anyone have a pencil?” No one does. Darcy then says “I have rented a place near here for the summer. Why don’t you come with us?”

Our walk seems very surreal. In a manner of minutes, I recognize the street and the house from my dream, and although I know I am in waking physical reality, it feels very dreamlike. We enter the house on the left, as we do in the dream, and go into her kitchen.

As she talks, I look up and see the archway above us, exactly as in the dream. I can hardly focus on the present, but I find myself asking the question, “Do you know what happened to Geoff?” She tells me he’s living in the mountains of New Mexico, just as she did in the dream.

Then she continues with the part that my mind could not bring to waking physical reality. She says that she just got his number from a private investigator she hired to serve him papers so that he would give up rights to their child. Geoff was the father of her five year old girl. He had left her before her baby was born.

I feel as if I am exploding. Not only do I have to face the fact that Darcy had Geoff’s child, which I did not seem able to remember after the dream, but I also must face the fact that I dreamed all this four days earlier.

Darcy writes down Geoff’s number on a small slip of green paper that I take with me as proof that this experience really happened. When I finally leave her house, still in shock, I walk back towards our spot on the beach. Some people ask me for directions, just as in the dream.

When I get back to the guys on the beach, I desperately want to talk about my experience, especially to my coworker who had heard all about the dream before it manifested. I expect him to feel as amazed as I do. However, both guys seem preoccupied with leaving in order to get back in time for a party.

I realize that the physical experience of my visit with Darcy may not have happened if I had not had such as “upsetting” dream and needed to go to the beach to “relax.”

I will share only a few of the many interesting side notes concerning this adventure.  First of all, I have since figured out that Geoff must have gotten Darcy pregnant a few months after he and I met up again after finishing college. I once again refused to “be intimate” with him, as I did in high school,  and he took off quite upset.

Secondly, as I started preparing this presentation a few months ago, twenty-four years after the 1982 dream, I surprisingly got an email from someone who found me on the internet and sent me Geoff’s current phone number. I still have not called him because I don’t know what I’d say to him.

Amazingly, just a week ago Sunday, I went to a party that started on a “Beach in Santa Cruz!” The dark haired guy from the 1982 precognitive dream turned up. We talked about that day, and I told him that I would present my dream at this conference, but once again, he didn’t seem very amazed.  He took off to talk to other people.

Finally, I discovered, over a decade after I’d last seen him, that my coworker has a son in my son’s school classroom.

Well, after this intense and verified precognitive dream, I started having precognitive dreams almost every night. Their manifestations occurred within days.  After having these intensely personal psi experiences, anything psi related now seemed possible. I started reading books, such as Jane Robert’s Seth material, and other channeled works which earlier made no sense to me.

Around this time, I also formulated my philosophy called “lucid living” in which I truly believe that “life is but a dream!”

Eventually, I felt compelled to pay less attention to my psi experiences so I could focus on completing my Ph.D., and afterwards on having a family. However, I would like to share a few other psi dreams from this time period which I felt I had to act upon.

ACCIDENT DREAM

In this next precognitive dream, I got involved in an accident. I felt confused and upset about the way I handled the situation in the dream. I woke up feeling awful. I wanted to avoid the accident, which I decided would probably happen on the way to work. Therefore, I went out of my way to take a very indirect route to work that day.

On this route, which I never took before, I, indeed, got involved in an accident. In the flurry of activity, I still felt unsure how to handle it. Afterwards, I realized that I may have handled it just as badly as I did in the dream. In fact, that seems one of the reasons why it felt so similar to the accident in my dream. The dream and the manifestation had many elements in common, especially emotional ones.

I often wonder if the accident needed to happen in physical reality no matter what I did to try and avoid it. Would it not have happened if I didn’t try to avoid it, which I tried to do because of the dream? Surely, the particular event could not have occurred had I not driven the new route. Why didn’t I act differently having the knowledge that I seemed to handle it badly in the dream?

The event caused more questions than answers. It did, however, teach me that sometimes we can  not solve problems just because we have “inside” information. At times, we might make matters worse by trying to avoid disasters. Perhaps we even help bring them into existence. In this case, I especially regret acting out of fear.

AUNT DREAM

I’ll share another case where I think I did a better job of handling a precognitive dream. This dream essentially told me that my aunt should not have a procedure done that would change her from being a woman. I didn’t get the meaning of the dream until my mother told me, later that day, that my aunt’s doctor told her she should get a hysterectomy. I casually told my mother my dream and she took me seriously because she knew that I had other verified precognitive dreams.

My mother decided, on her own, to call my aunt and suggested that my aunt get a second opinion. My aunt did so, and ultimately she did not have the surgery.

Twenty-four years later, my aunt, unlike almost everyone else in my extended family, still lives and has relatively good health at the age of ninety.

Many other women in my family had problems due to hormonal imbalance.  Keep in mind that these days, the decision not to have an unnecessary hysterectomy seems more common sense than it did years ago.

My dream information may or may not have played a major role in my aunt’s life. Still, it seems to me, a good example of how to share precognitive information in a guided and gentle manner. The conversation seemed natural and quite easy. In contrast, my actions concerning the accident seemed based upon fear and uncertainty.

PARTY DREAM

I’ll share one more thing I notice about precognitive dreams. Other people who get involved don’t seem as shocked as I’d expect about the detailed information that comes from my dreams.

One time I dreamed I went to a party at someone's house I didn’t know. In the dream, I went up to the attic and looked at the owner’s artwork. I tripped on the second to the last step going up.

A few days later, in physical reality, I unexpectedly went to a party. I recognized the house, only from my dream, and asked the owner if I could see her artwork. Not knowing me, she didn’t seem surprised that I knew about the attic. I followed her up the stairs and asked her if she had fixed the broken step. She merely answered without any apparent suspicion, “Not yet. Be careful.”

I won’t get into them today, but I also began having waking state precognition in physical reality as well. Usually, this involved a type of “hearing” or “knowing” something before it happened, such as the name of a person I would encounter.

PSI CONTESTS

I still have psi dreams when I pay attention to them. Recently, after some success in several psi dreaming contests at the annual IASD online PsiberDreaming conferences, I decided to focus on how to record all of my dreams so that I could best capture psi information.

I record only what comes easily out of my mouth as I describe certain dreams in the middle of the night into a digital recorder. I try not to add words and descriptions to my dream reports after I feel fully awake because I have noticed how my mind tends to change images and phrases that may have unrecognized meaning.

At the last three regular IASD conferences, I participated in the dream telepathy contests with great results. I dreamed an excellent match to a non-target picture in 2003. In 2004, I served as the telepathy sender, and we got an amazing, exact hit of the picture I focused on. Last year, I won the contest.

I paid close attention to my physical reactions when first seeing the target picture. I felt a rapid tapping sensation in the center of my chest just above my heart. This seems similar to how I usually feel waking up from precognitive dreams and during their manifestations.

MANIFESTATIONS

I will offer one suggestion to help you understand what the manifestation of a precognitive experience feels like. When you find yourself away from home, clearly visualize your bedroom. Imagine that you are lying down in your bed looking around at the room.

Later, when you really do lie in your bed at home, focus on what it felt like to have had a similar experience in your mind while away from home doing the visualization. The visualization acts as the precognitive dream and remembering it while actually in bed acts as the manifestation. To have a precognitive experience we must remember both of these aspects.

A similar process can occur with lucid dreams, where the manifestation occurs in our dream. While in waking physical reality we can visualize what we’d like to do in a dream. When we later remember to act out in our dream what we merely visualized earlier, we often create a lucid dream. This lucid dream now serves as a type of manifestation of the original visualization.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, my psi experiences often have  highly charged emotional content. I often wake up from them with a rapid tapping sensation above my heart.  I feel that it definitely helps to learn to recognize the difference between dreams that have a precognitive element and those that represent something else.

Psi dreams usually feel different from regular dreams. To illustrate this difference, use the analogy of how a regular sentence looks very different from the same sentence in an unusual font and with boldface or italics style.

I have also learned, from the examples I described earlier,  that I need to pay very strict attention as to when and how I record and share these dreams. Finally, I especially feel that I need to pay attention and trust a guidance that I believe follows such psi dreams.  I think we are guided to do things with our psi dreams when our actions come easily, naturally, and without stress, or at the very least we feel compelled to share them.


Thank you.