Where are we and how are we found?

Last night I dreamed that I looked over the shoulder of a young woman as she read my book. She was on page 76, reading the section where I describe seeing a future TIME magazine cover. My impression was that she thought the book was interesting, but that this page was particularly interesting. She was outside, seated on the ground, with other people walking by from time to time. Not a particularly interesting vignette in itself, but it did suggest an interesting question.

I have a large number of dreams where I go and visit people while I sleep. If the person is known to me, I am often able to confirm that the details I remember from the dream match a recent event in the subject's life, often an event that is roughly simultaneous with the dream or no more than a a couple days old. In some of these, I was surprised to discover that the person I saw had actually wanted me to come. Admittedly, we are only talking about a couple of people here, but they enjoyed remarkable success when they tried to get me to visit them during my sleep by focusing on me mentally.

There are hundreds of other dreams in my journals that appear no different from my visits to friends, except they are visits to people I don't know. There is no way to verify these dreams because I have no way of contacting these people. Imagine if you could hover invisibly near a random stranger in a park in some town you've never seen before. How would you know who the person is? In many cases, there wouldn't be any way at all. These dreams have always bothered me because I would have liked to confirm at least a few of these stranger visits. This brings us to the question raised by last night's dream.

If my friends can get me to visit them while I sleep by focusing on me, could strangers accomplish it also? Is it possible that the mere act of reading my book could, in certain conditions, lead to an OOB visit from me? Is that what happened last night? It is at the least an intriguing possibility. If it happens again, I'll post the details.

Of possibly greater interest is that this dream and others like it suggest that at least some amount of navigation from within a dream state is done via telepathic communication. Not only that, but that the sending of such a signal is equivalent to pinpointing the origin and a correct path to the sender. If this is true, does it shed light on the remarkable navigation skills of some animals? The reason I ask is because it seems to me that people and animals frequently resort to psi in everyday life without realizing it. It is called instinct sometimes, but is actually the act of tuning in to this inner source of information.

AP