Part two of an interview conducted by JohnB at DreamKoan. October 2010 timeframe. Reproduced here with his permission:
DK: I'm intrigued by your idea of using PSI to chase PSI. How would that would work? Would you do something like ask the dreamspace whether or not a particular PSI phenomenon is real, or maybe ask it for ideas on how to design an experiment to prove that it's real?
DrT: Great question. One I would have answered in one part until you suggested the other way of doing this. So it becomes a two parter. Well conceptually, I'm looking for insights outside of my usual clear-minded wakeful beta state. I'm sure the motive is obvious. What I tend to explore are different dissociative states. Now that can mean pychoactively driven, but it does not have to be. For example, I might have a question on my mind before a meditation session. Using binaural beats, I can obtain a very deep dissociative state and leverage that state for idea generation or insights. Sometimes the hypnagogic imagery itself can yield usable ideas. If you follow PSI research, experiments that leverage the Ganzfeld effect are also creating a strong dissociative state. Going back to a previous point I made, attenuating our usual wakeful mental filters does seem to allow PSI info to flow into our awareness more effectively. So yes, I have used these states to ponder scenarios and design experiments, quite literally.
But there is arguably a deeper level to dive into as well. You mentioned it yourself. Using the dreamspace to answer questions. I hadn't even pondered that point until I read the works of Waggoner and Monroe. Concentrating on Waggoner, the concept is simple. State a specific question out loud to your dreamspace and see what you get back. Now it's literally a question to your dreamspace, not a dream character. So don't expect a literal answer. Expect a visual and symbolic answer of some kind. But it does work.
Monroe's case is even more interesting and seems to parallel my own experiences. Monroe firmly believed that he had "helpers" guiding his path. Certainly in my case, I have been involved in scenarios where my dreamspace seemed to prod me in a particular direction to facilitate an experiment, or laid down certain clues which were helpful in driving at a result. Sometimes the clues were immediate. At other times I had to unravel a larger and more complex set of clues and experiences. So yes, it seems very reasonable to me that one's dreamspace can be leveraged to obtain insights of all kinds. It is more powerful than we can imagine and as we've already discussed, it does not seem to be constrained by space and time as we know it.
DK: I'd like to hear more about CES (cranial electro-stimulation). What is it and how does it work? I think pj mentioned that you're patenting it. Are you thinking of making it available as a product?
DrT: The CES idea started out as an odd compulsion I had. I had read on the subject and it just seemed like a great tool for exploring unique brain states in general. When I eventually bought a generic CES device, I leveraged one of my special dissociative states to ponder its usage. I arrived at a theory and a few things to try. Suffice it to say that CES is a pretty old technology. It involves the application of a low-level biphasic micro current across the brain, typically via electrodes clipped to the ear lobes. It is well known and understood for certain medical applications (e.g. depression relief, etc ...). But it remained unexplored in terms of dream lucidity. I formulated a number of theories as to how it might be leveraged and honed in on a successful protocol and signal pretty quick. After all, awareness does have certain electrochemical signatures and it seems reasonable to think that awareness can be enhanced or regressed with the right approach and CES signal. Now the technique itself really involves a dual approach. The signal affects a brain state that is known to have a relation to PSI and precognition, which in and of itself is interesting. But it's useless for immediate lucid dream induction without the right timing and usage strategy (overall approach). I've probably used it about 80 times now with only a handful of misses. It is pretty clear that it is not stimulating the nicotinic receptors, which is perhaps it's main value added. It's another tool to use in lieu of AcH impacting supplements (or in combination with) to add to the effect. I was able to procure some additional devices and we're doing some trials over at MM. There is a questionnaire and sign up for anyone interesting in partaking. Results have been favorable by and large.
Yes, I applied for a US patent on the technology, but chose not to publish it. Quite frankly, I didn't want a scenario like the one Laberge has right now. In 2004, he published his patent on LDS usage, only to have everyone else read it, productize it and exploit his ideas. His patent hasn't issued yet and he hasn't collected a dime as far as I know. It's too bad how that works. So for now, the CES patent application is getting soak time, I'm collecting more data and user experience and we'll see where this all leads.
DK: I can't wait to try your CES method! I've read in some of your material on MM that, unlike many supplement-based induction methods, it can be used as often as desired without building up a tolerance. That coupled with its high reliability means that it should be considered a major advance in lucid-dream induction techniques. You're smart not to divulge the details at this point.
Now, I'd like to get back to the topic of PSI phenomena. Can you describe some of the experiments you've been conducting in this area?
DrT: The first structured experiment I designed and explored was the Zener card experiment. It went through a few iterations based on trial and error which were effectively documented in real time over the better portion of a year. The details are documented in the user accessible General Deep Dreaming folder on MM. But I can succinctly describe it here.
I constructed three Zener cards (Star, Cross, Squigly Lines). I would get up for WBTB, randomize the cards and place them face down on the kitchen countertop. I would be squinting during this process to insure that I was not picking up on any unique aspects of the blank side that I might identify subconsciously. I would then induce an OBE. Once out of body I would flip a random dream card, note the image, and carry on with some other task. I would purposely leave the dream card flipped over to insure no other odd phenomenon was going on (like sleep walking, which would be easy to identify at the last step here ...). When I woke, I would confirm that all three WRS cards were still face down and would map the dream image to the closest actual Zener card symbol. I would make a decision and flip the real card to see if I got a match or not.
In summary, with three cards one would expect a hit probability of 1/3. By the final phase of this experiment, I had learned how to perform better and learned that FA based experimental events should be discarded as unusable. The remaining 27 events contained 18 hits. Now the statistical relevance of this is not necessarily clear until you do the analysis. I've got a pretty strong background in probability theory and did a little analysis. I even wrote a little C code and included it in the thread. The result is that the odds of 18/27 hits is only 3 in 10,000. The odds of 18 or more hits out of 27 is about 4 in 10,000. That is pretty statistically relevant. Proof of anything? No. Again, it's statistical inference. But interesting indeed.
DK: At this point in my life I'm agnostic about PSI phenomena. Yet I have to admit that those are impressive statistics! Makes me want to try it myself. Guess I'd first have to learn how to have OBE's. I know you've done other types of dream-related PSI experiments. Could you talk a little bit about that?
DrT: The Zener card experiment gave me certain insights and allowed me to identify various generalizations. One day it dawned on me that if info can flow from WRS into the dreamspace, then maybe it can flow the other way as well? It may sound silly and so be it. But the issue of force transfer into our space reminds me a great deal of the basic ghost hunting problem. Now I'm sure that a lot of what goes on during those TV shows is fabricated and overly dramatized. But let's look at the concept and tools. EM meters. Ion detectors. Voice recorders for EVP (electronic voice phenomena). By and large, devices that measure subtle changes in fundamental force meaningful to our 4-D world.
So what if we flipped the Zener card experiment around quite literally. Leave out some device that detects a change in force. Train a video camera on it. Induce an OBE and try to perturb the "dream device". Wake, review the video and see what we get?
Suffice it to say that I took the most obvious possible approach on this one. What I got is not what I expected. But I appear to have gotten something. I've been able to repeat this 6 times now. I also have two other possible manifestations or evidence of physical changes in target items. Going back to the initial 6 hits, it's very hard to model the likelihood of what I observed relative to chance. But the observations showed a monotonic relationship to the level of interaction with the dream device (better dream interaction yielded more profound WRS measurements) and in several cases showed a cadence consistent with what was implemented in my dreamspace. Modeling the likelihood becomes a little academic. But if I were to do this, I can assure you that the odds against chance are significantly smaller than the 3 in 10,000 odds I realized in the Zener card experiments. So coming full circle, I restate the question I posed earlier. At what point do we conclude something interesting is going on? If you multiply out the odds against chance of the Zener card and Dreamspace to WRS force transfer experiments, the results are probably much less than a million to one.
So where to go from here? I have turned my attention to trying to design and reproduce a more decisive force transfer experiment. That is my focus at present. It's a work in progress. But I will state a prediction. There is indeed something being uncovered here. Maybe I'll be the guy to do it. Maybe someone else will. But if open-minded, talented researchers who are adept at the OBE dig into this one, the likelihood of proving such an interaction moves from a possibility to something that approaches a certainty. There is something going on here and it ties into a much larger picture of how our universe operates.
DK: I had a follow-up question on your PSI experiments. It's really interesting that you found that you couldn't obtain information on the Zener cards during false awakenings, but you could get information during OBEs. Any idea why this would be the case? At the very least, it seems to lend credence to the theory that an OBE is not just a type of lucid dream.
DrT: I think there are a few interesting points here. Let me try to decouple them. First, the philosophy going into my dream PSI experiments was that I would attempt to model the process in some mathematical or graphical sense. Collect data, tweek the model and see where it all leads. Maybe there would be multiple iterations of this process. This type of approach is pretty common in science and engineering research. So there is a big picture I'm after here. Now, the sheer number of trials I have done is not phenomenally high, so maybe the data would level off differently with more trials. But yes, it seems like false awakenings produce a useless dreamspace, as far as this type of PSI experiment is concerned. But why?
If you are open to the theory that perhaps the dreamspace is a projection into higher dimensional space, then the next conjecture falls out pretty naturally. Transitions from WRS into your dreamspace set-up hyperdimensional links or dependencies between those spaces. False awakenings do not manifest directly from your WRS. Hence they would not "link" or bleed into WRS in any sense. That is what it seems to suggest to me.
But then there is this whole notion of LD vs. OBE. It's too bad that there are so many different views on this basic question. But in general, I think most agree that OBE's are direct transitions into your dreamspace which leave you in a scene similar to the one you left upon falling asleep. I have done enough reading on Tibetan dream yoga to appreciate their basic framework for dreaming. In their model, a karmic thead is generated based on some action in one's WRS. You hold onto this thread until something in your present thoughts and actions causes it to bubble up, and later that evening the mind creates a dream based on that thread. I like this overall framework, but as an engineer I tend to cast this into a picture that I can relate to:
In this picture, I represent this process in terms of a tree model. Your "real world thread" is in bold. Branch-offs from this thread are points where negative or positive karmic threads are generated and deviate from the "real world thread". You can imagine residual branch-offs from here, based on actions in dreams and so forth (you can spawn a karmic thread from within a dream as well). But the basic point here is that when a thread is instantiated due to some residue from the previous day, your mind probably tries to extrapolate where to go with the story. It has a root scenario but lacks a direction. The story left off months or years ago. You have had real world experiences since then. In attempting to project where to place the residual story line, the mind gets confused and can do a poor job of creating a logical extension. Hence the weird and unpredictable actions and scenarios that may unfold. Conversely, if you spawn a dream based on a karmic thread very close to your real world thread, you would project a scene very similar to the one you just left. There is less to extrapolate, less to fill in.
So coming full circle, it's been my experience that two conditions need to be in place to optimize these PSI related experiments. One, the scene cannot be FA based. Two, one needs to project a scene into their dreamspace that matches the real world scene as closely as possible. I suppose these conditions seem natural given that all of my experiments involve pulling or pushing info to real world items that were left out for that very purpose. Furthermore, I see the relationship between LD's vs. OBE's to be more about "distance" between the real world thread and the root of the karmic thread driving the dream. If these threads are close in a euclidean distance sense, I label the resulting conscious dream as an OBE. If they are far apart, the resultant dreamspace lends itself to being a lucid dream. This model seems to be a little more interesting to me from a repeatable PSI experiment perspective.
