Timeless Meetings of Minds

If you subscribe to the tired old misconception that dreaming is "unscientific", listen to Judy B. Gardiner: "My dreams led to accurate explanations of geology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, paleoanthropology, neurophysiology and other areas of study in which I was not schooled." I had the great pleasure today of interviewing Judy for my radio show. When I asked her for an example of how dreams had put her on the track of specific scientific knowledge, she recounted a dream in which an astronomer friend who had passed over mentored her in exact detail on the workings of the optic nerve, leading her to much information that was previously unknown to her.

Judy Gardiner is a writer and dream explorer who left a successful corporate life to pursue the practice and understanding of what she has come to call "cosmic dreaming", an approach that values the transpersonal and spiritual aspects of dreams and their ability to introduce us to a state of "timelessness" in which knowledge of past and future and of many dimensions are instantly accessible. Judy says, "I have found that cosmic dreaming transmits a direct experience of self and world as participants in a totality and that all dreamers possess the potential for this type of dreaming."

Judy worked for many years with Dr Montague Ullman, the renowned psychiatrist, neurologist, parapsychologist and pioneer of modern dream research. Monte took dreamwork out of the consulting room and into the community in ways that laid the foundations of the contemporary dreamwork movement and I consider him one of the liberators of the modern imagination. Monte's life odyssey was greatly influenced by an adolescent experiment in communicating with the spirits in which he and his teen friends succeeded in producing seance phenomena featuring a discarnate entity who called himself "Dr Bindelof". While maintaining some skepticism about whether Bindelof was an individual spirit or some other energy, Ullman noted some sixty years later that this early encounter with the paranormal was "profoundly transformative" and "the beginning of a journey of exploration into the many ways...events, lumped together as paranormal, impinge upon our lives." [1]

Monte Ullman passed in June 2008. Given their shared interest in the transpersonal and the depth of their experience together, I was not surprised to sense, during my conversation with Judy, that Monte was not far away. She spoke of the many ways in which she has felt his presence and his effort to communicate his continued work in his present reality, at home in the "implicate order", a term he borrowed from physicist David Bohm and used in a brave effort to sketch a new "abode" for the dream late in his life [2]

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"Monte sends me songs and poems," Judy said. "When I pull out the words, after waking, they are exactly right for me." In her dreams of Monte, he is often bent on sharing his growing understanding of reality and bringing forward the work they engaged in together, which took shape as the marriage of science and spirituality. "I dreamed I had to meet Monte on the Moon in two minutes, " Judy told me. "He used to talk about squaring somethings - one of his favorite expressions - and other images of twos appeared in this dream. Notably, there were two physicists with him, which he loved, because he was always seeking the right physicist to dialogue with." Waking, and wondering how to pursue the dream, her eye fell on a book from Monte's library titled Einstein's Moon. Opening it at random, she was immediately able to identify the two scientists from Monte's Moon (Niels Bohr and Einstein).

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Sometimes, Judy went on, she feels Monte's hand in computer anomalies. Struggling to understand and confirm the message of one dream involving Monte, she turned on her computer and gaped at the missing icons on the screen when it lit up. "I have about sixty icons on my desktop. They had all vanished, except for a single icon, a link to a video clip of Monte, the only video in which he was speaking" There seemed to be no doubt that Monte was at play here, in the interspace and the internet. "I always told him he would have made a terrific stand-up comic," Judy reminisced.

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Our discussion flowed into some of my favorite tidepools. We talked about that phenomenon Yeats described as the "mingling of minds", in which we find - when we give our best to a project or course of study - that we attract the active interest and contributions of other intelligences, including those of past masters in our field. We talked about the blessing of knowing that our loved ones, and other minds, are still accessible after the death of the body, and may be progressing to higher and deeper levels of exploration and accomplishment. We discussed how, as we awaken to the many levels of dreaming and our ability to pierce the veils of consensual reality while wide awake, we can find ourselves at home in a spacious NOW that Judy likes to call the "timelessness".

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REFERENCES

1. Montague Ullman, "The Bindelof Story, Part IV: Personal Life Impact" in Exceptional Human Experience vol. 13, no. 1 (june, 1995). available online at http://siivola.org/monte/index.html

2. Montague Ullman, "The Dream: In Search of a New Abode", presentation to the 23rd conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams", July 22, 2006.

"Clues to Immortality", Robert's interview with Judy B. Gardiner, airs on http://www.healthylife.net/ on Tuesday, September 8 from 12 noon-1:00 pm Eastern, 9:00-10:00 am Pacific.