The Akashic Field and Psychic Dreams*

Stanley Krippner**

The Akashic Records have been written about over the millennia and were the topic of oral mythology even earlier. In ancient India, the Sanskrit word "akashic" or "cosmic sky" resembled the contemporary concept of "space." But the term referred not only to intergalactic space but also to space (and time) in the loftier dimensions of life, the source from which creation flowed, the divine domain. Therefore, this ancient term signified a space-time continuum that is all pervasive.

Robert Cheney, in his 1996 book, Akashic Records, suggested that "Perhaps the vibrational threads of a single life…permeates the entire universe, interacting with other vibrational energies…. Just as the words and music of a song are preserved on audiotape, or a compact disc, so is the story of your life saved in the Akashic Records" (p. 6). In the Old Testament, the prophet Joshua takes a stone and proclaims "Behold, this stone shall be a witness to us, for it has heard all the words of the Lord that he spoke unto us." The book of Daniel cites the Archangel Michael as saying that all people will be delivered if their names "shall be found written in the book." The book of Malachi speaks of a "book of remembrance," and St. Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians describes a book "written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God." Hence, the notion of a "universal record" is not limited to Hindu traditions. In addition, the Islamic Holy Koran refers to such a "universal record" in terms that Cheney suggests are reminiscent of modern computer files.

Cheney suggests that the Akashic Records "are the imprint of the Self on the eternal, universal, electromagnetic atmosphere of primary substance" and that this "substance is everywhere" (p. 9). He continues to conjecture that each single event is entered in its own "electromagnetic field" (p. 11). These concepts are similar to those discussed in parapsychology, the scientific study of anomalous interactions.

These interactions may be between organisms and their environment or between organisms and other organisms. They are anomalous because they seem to disregard mainstream science's notions of time, space, and energy. Parapsychology is sometimes called "psychical research”, or "psi research”. The word "psi" refers to the anomalous interactions studied by parapsychologists. Examples of these interactions are reports of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis; life after death and past-life experiences are added to the list by some investigators. Each example may be part of the "cosmic information field" discussed by Ervin Laszlo (2004), who, like Cheney, calls it the "Akashic field."

Each of these reports can be studied in several ways. Parapsychologists use questionnaires, interviews, and field observations. In each of these cases, there is a possibility that conventional scientific explanations can account for the report. Some of these phenomena may be explained as the result of subtle sensory or motor activities, misinterpretation of natural events, poor memory for a particular event or the context of that event, or deliberate fraud. However, if an investigation systematically eliminates conventional scientific explanations, that research produces data that is considered "anomalous" because they appear to transcend the constraints of time, space, or energy.

Over the past century, hundreds of research studies have been conducted in an attempt to understand psi phenomena and to determine whether they deserve continued attention and investigation. A greater understanding of the conditions under which psi phenomena take place would accelerate acceptance of these phenomena as legitimate areas of investigation by mainstream science.

Experiments with Anomalous Dreams

Dreams are a series of images that occur during sleep. If recalled, the dreamer typically reports these images in narrative form, resembling a sketch or a story. The night's first period of rapid eye movements, in which the most vivid dreams seem to occur, generally begins about 90 minutes after a person falls asleep. The nerve cells at the base of the skull initiate a chain of events that unleash a cascade of potent chemicals that pour into the forebrain. The brain's visual and motor centers are stimulated, triggering memories that are combined in original and often puzzling ways. Immediately, the brain's mind creates a story that will make sense of these fragments, either using a pre-existing script that serves as a template for the images, or producing a narrative on the spot that matches -- as best it can -- the images that have been evoked (Kahn, Combs, & Krippner, 2002).

Sometimes these stories reflect basic problems in living with which the dreamer has wrestled for years. At other times they reflect the events of the past few days or hours, some of them trivial, some of them vital. And in other instances, as far as we know, the mind’s search for meaning produces little more than a jumble of disparate pictures and events. This process of tale telling and story making is remarkably similar to what transpires when language is used while a person is awake. Dreams can be thought of as a language of the night, a language that emphasizes feelings, persons, objects, and settings. The mental and emotional processes involved in dreamtime are similar in many ways to the thoughts and feelings experienced while someone is awake. If people are asked to make up a dream while awake, they produce accounts that a panel of judges can not discriminate from written reports of their nighttime dreams.

When someone records a dream, he or she writes a report that typically connects a series of action-oriented images that are usually visual but may include other senses as well. Many investigators believe that these reports can help people to understand their own behavior, experiences, and intentions. Some psychotherapists are convinced that their clients will benefit from an understanding of their dreams because, on reflection, many dream activities appear to be metaphors for the dreamer’s waking concerns; furthermore, they believe it is often helpful to find a metaphorical image or activity for a client's problems. Some writers, artists, and other creative people have made deliberate use of dream narratives and images in their work. An even larger number of individuals have claimed that scientific, technological, athletic, or artistic breakthroughs have resulted from dreams that they recalled.

Some dreams are "anomalous" (or "psychic") because they appear to bypass the ordinary constraints of time and space. Examples would be so-called telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive dreams that appear to incorporate another person's thoughts, activities occurring at a distance, or events that later occur and appear to match the dream content (Krippner, Bogzaran, & de Carvalho, 2002).

For ten years, I conducted research on the problem of anomalous dreams at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City. With Montague Ullman, Charles Honorton, and other colleagues, I published dozens of articles on this research in scientific journals. Our team used volunteer dreamers who spent one or more nights in a sleep laboratory. They were awakened whenever their brain waves and eye movements indicated that they were dreaming. In some experiments they attempted to dream about a picture postcard that would be randomly selected the next day. In other experiments, they tried to dream about a picture that had been chosen randomly once they went to bed and that was being focused upon by an experimenter in a distant room. In other experiments, they tried to dream about a picture that had been chosen randomly but kept in a sealed envelope during the night. In this way, we studied possible precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance in dreams under tightly controlled conditions.

One night, the postcard depicted a statue by the Italian sculptor Cellini of the mythic Greek hero Perseus. The statue portrays Perseus holding a sword in one hand and the head of the slain Medusa in the other. The first report given by Pam, the research participant for that night, was about her own head. She stated, "It's not a headache. It's dizziness. My head is heavy." Later she had the image of "something bloody. There's something disturbing." Finally, she reported an image of "a man, and his arms were out. His head was over to the right side." In the morning, Pam was asked to guess what the picture might have been. She discussed the odd feeling in her own head and continued, "A picture of somebody with a bandage around their skull. There was something bloody, and there was vomit around it. Something painful. Very painful. It's kind of like a killing” (Ullman & Krippner, with Vaughan, 1973, p. 152).

A team of judges attempted to match dreams and postcard pictures without knowing the actual order or dates of the pairings. In the case of this experimental session, all three judges correctly matched the postcard picture and the dream reports. We also asked the research participants to fill out our rating forms. Most of our research studies produced statistically significant results; in other words, the matchings (by both judges and research participants) were so accurate that they could not be accounted for by chance (Ullman & Krippner, with Vaughan, 2002).

Studying Field Effects

I had met Ludwig von Bertalanfy (1968), the founder of "general systems theory," as a graduate student at Northwestern University. Over the years, I had maintained my interest in his theory of general systems. A system may be described as any pattern of elements in mutual interaction. The boundaries of a system depend on the activity under consideration. It was apparent to me that what is called "psi" probably is a complex system with very wide boundaries. I speculated on the conditions that would increase the appearance of psi in our experiments, especially environmental field effects.

A "field" is a matrix, or region of influence, that connects two or more points in space or time, usually by means of a force or energy. In other words, a field is held together by something capable of manifesting a noticeable change (McTaggart, 2002). A field is presumed to exist in physical reality even though it usually cannot be observed directly. Instead, it is inferred through its observable effects. A magnet exerts a field, even though that field can not be seen. But when a magnet attracts small pieces of metal, these are the "observable effects" that demonstrate the existence of the magnetic field.

The appearance of psi in dreams suggested that there are psychological conditions that favor its appearance. These conditions might include altered states of consciousness, the relationship between the dreamer and the researcher, and the nature of the postcard picture used for the experiment. Various aspects of a research participant's personality also seem to be important, and have been intensively studied over the years (see Palmer, 1994). However, environmental conditions, such as physical fields that could influence psi phenomena, have been virtually ignored.

In 1970, our research team gathered data on three of these possibilities. They were the lunar cycle, sunspot activity, and changes in the geomagnetic field (Krippner, 1975, p.127). Our research team found some evidence of a relationship between all three of these factors and psi in dreams. A few years later I met Michael Persinger, a Canadian neuroscientist who was conducting research with geomagnetic fields and psi that was far more sophisticated than my earlier efforts. In 1975 I invited him to write an article about his work and published it in a journal I was editing.

Persinger told his readers that a geomagnetic field has several components. The main component is created by the Earth itself, as if a huge bar magnet were running through the core of the Earth. Regular daily and monthly variations occur. These variations are due to several factors. Weather affects the daily or diurnal variations. Phases of the moon affect the monthly variations. In addition, major variations occur due to sunspot activity. Changes in a geomagnetic field can be sudden and unpredictable. The best known example of charged particles from the sun interacting with the Earth's magnetic field is the aurora borealis, often called the "Northern Lights."

Persinger conducted an analysis of reports of telepathy and clairvoyance from a popular magazine. He found that these reported experiences were more likely to occur when the global geomagnetic activity was significantly quieter than the days before or the days after the experience. A day characterized by slow, predictable variations in the field is referred to as a "quiet" magnetic day. These were the days that were associated with reports of telepathy and clairvoyance (Persinger, 1985). About the same time, Marcia Adams (1986) studied the relationship between quiet magnetic days with success in clairvoyance experiments that had been conducted in another laboratory, finding a positive connection.

A day of sudden and large field changes is referred to as a magnetically stormy day. Persinger noted a tendency for reports of poltergeist and haunting experiences to occur on these days (Persinger, 1989). Psychokinesis (in other words, anomalous effects on distant objects or activity) has been studied in the laboratory under psi task conditions. One analysis of these experiments has indicated a tendency for them to occur most frequently on magnetically stormy days (Braud & Dennis, 1989).

Possible Geomagnetic Associations with Psi

Our work at Maimonides Medical Center provided experimental support for the occurrence of psi in dreams. The support was not conclusive, because we could not repeat it on demand, and many other laboratories that tried to repeat our work were unsuccessful. However, I told Persinger of my speculation that environmental factors were associated with this phenomenon. As a result of our discussion, Persinger suggested two hypotheses:

1. Nights on which psi in dreams was strong would also be nights that displayed the quietest geomagnetic activity compared to the days before and after.

2. Nights on which psi in dreams was weak or absent would not demonstrate this effect.

Persinger and I tested these hypotheses in two ways. First, we examined the initial night that each of sixty-two research participants spent at our laboratory participating in telepathic and clairvoyance dream experiments. For our analysis, we used the results of the matchings made by the research participants themselves. We classified the matches as "High Hits,” "Low Hits,” "High Misses,” and "Low Misses.” Geomagnetic measures for the northern hemisphere were determined for each night in the study. There were too few "Misses" to yield data adequate for analysis. However, a significant difference was observed between "High Hits" and "Low Hits”. "High Hits" were more likely to occur on quiet magnetic days when there were few electrical storms and sunspots (Persinger & Krippner, 1989).

Second, we tested these hypotheses with the matches made by a single research participant named William Erwin. Dr. Erwin was a psychoanalyst who had spent twenty different nights at our laboratory. We assumed that using matches from a single subject would eliminate individual differences, and these differences were the largest source of variability in our studies.

The typical procedure followed by Erwin was for him to arrive at the laboratory in time to interact with the "transmitter.” The transmitter was the person who would spend much of the night looking at the picture. This picture was randomly selected from a stack of postcards after Erwin had gone to bed. The transmitter, a psychologist named Sol Feldstein, was isolated from Erwin. He spent the night in a distant room. After electrodes were attached to Erwin's head, he parted company with the transmitter and entered a soundproof room.

Two experimenters took turns watching Erwin's brain waves and eye movements on an EEG machine. Near the end of each period of rapid eye movement sleep, Erwin was awakened and was asked to describe the dream content that he remembered. His remarks were tape recorded. We also recorded a morning interview in which he reviewed his dream reports and guessed the nature of the postcard picture. Neither Erwin nor the experimenters knew the identity of the picture.

The tape-recorded remarks were typed and sent to three judges. Erwin also attempted to match his own dreams to the postcard pictures when the experiment ended. Ten of his nights yielded "High Hits" while the remaining ten fell outside of this range. One of the "High Hits" was obtained when "The Sacrament of the Last Supper" by the Spanish painter Dali was randomly selected as the picture. The painting portrays Jesus Christ at the center of a table surrounded by his twelve disciplines; a fishing boat can be seen through the window of the room they are in. Erwin's dream reports included one in which "small size fishing boats" were mentioned several times, and others about a "Christmas catalog," a "place to eat," a "Biblical time," and "the fish and the loaf, or even the feeding of the multitudes" (Ullman & Krippner, 1969). Not all of the matches were so exact, of course. However, the overall results were statistically significant.

During the time period when Erwin was asleep, there was a significant positive correlation between geomagnetic activity and his scores. The strongest correlations between the score and the geomagnetic activity occurred during the time when most of the dream reports were collected, that is, during the latter part of the night (Krippner & Persinger, 1996).

Possible Geomagnetic Associations with Precognition

Telepathy and clairvoyance are examples of psi that involve a short period of time between the event and the experience. However, precognition is an example of psi that involves a larger gap in time between the experience and the event. Some research studies in precognition showed little or no geomagnetic effect, so we decided to investigate the possible connection between the geomagnetic field and precognition in dreams.

Alan Vaughan was one of the "sensitives" who had obtained many "High Hits" in our dream studies. Dr. Vaughan had been recording his dreams since 1968 when he participated in a study focusing on precognition. He recorded those dreams that contained what he considered a detailed, literal correspondence to a future event. Most of these contained three or more exact details about the future event.

Vaughan sent the physicist James Spottiswoode the dates of sixty-one of his own dreams that he thought might have been precognitive. Spottiswoode compared the geomagnetic activity of the nights of these dreams with that of ten days before and ten days after. There was significantly less geomagnetic activity on the nights of the precognitive dreams than ten days before and ten days after. Of course, Vaughan's dreams were not collected under ideal conditions. As a result, they are only suggestive of an association with geomagnetic activity. However, the association is strong enough to justify further research under better conditions.

One of these dreams took place when Vaughan was living in Germany. He described the dream to me in a letter, which I received on June fourth, 1968. The dream contained many frightening episodes involving the murder of Robert Kennedy. At that time, Kennedy was trying to obtain the Democratic Party's nomination for the presidency of the United States. On June sixth, Senator Kennedy was assassinated (Krippner, Vaughan, & Spottiswoode, 2000).

Psi Phenomena and Complex Field Effects

My perspective on psi phenomena is that they may not be understandable using simple research methods. Psi research may require more holistic approaches that regard psi as a complex system. Once this has been done, it may be possible to describe psi in terms of specific mechanisms. In other words, psi may reflect the operations of an interactive, dynamic system. If so, chaos and complexity theories as well as systems methodologies would be needed to understand how psi phenomena operate (see Combs & Krippner, 2003).

It is likely that geomagnetic activity is only one of several factors in a complex field effect that favors the occurrence of psi phenomena. Some other factors might include humidity, temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, and ozone levels. Perhaps this field can be enhanced or disrupted by environmental conditions (Laszlo, 1993, 1995). Furthermore, the field may operate differently for psychokinesis than it does for other psi phenomena. Two Brazilian investigators, Hernani Andrade (1967) and Carlos Tinoco (1982) also have written about field effects and parapsychology. In both instances, their models could be used to develop experimental programs.

It would be premature to state that the importance of the geomagnetic field has been conclusively demonstrated. There are dozens of research studies on this topic in the literature, and most of them show an association between geomagnetic activity and psi. However, the research methodology in these investigations varies from study to study. For example, there are two types of geomagnetic measures; the first is used in some studies while the second is used in other studies. Some studies employ measures of relationships to assess the geomagnetic effect but others use comparisons between two groups.

In the meantime, an analysis of nearly three thousand experimental sessions has been reported by James Spottiswoode and Edwin May (1997; Spottiswoode, 1997). Dr. Spottiswoode and Dr. May found statistically significant correlations between geomagnetic measurements taken every three hours and accuracy on telepathy and clairvoyance tests. Spottiswoode and May reported that the significant results were most evident when anomalous events were clearly present, as determined by tests conducted under rigorous conditions. In other words, if there was no evidence of psi, there were no significant relationships between the intensity of the geomagnetic activity and the magnitude of psi.

Could the geomagnetic effect help explain the mechanisms behind psi phenomena? Perhaps geomagnetic fields can carry psi information and influence it in some unusual manner. Perhaps geomagnetic activity can produce subtle changes in the brain that enable it to obtain information or exert influence in unusual manners. Perhaps geomagnetic activity helps one's consciousness produce an anomalous effect on matter through quantum processes. The domain of dreams is an ideal place to investigate these possible effects because dreams contain images that are not articulated or expressed during waking life. This domain represents a type of consciousness from which concepts emerge, a quantum world in which there is no distinction between what contemporary writers term the "mental" and the "physical," between "mind" and "matter." Lynne McTaggart (2002) has synthesized ideas of several theoreticians on this topic, proposing that consciousness may result from "a rippling cascade of subatomic coherence -- when individual quantum particles…lose their individuality and start acting as a single unit, like an army calling each soldier into line" (p. 120).

Psi Phenomena and the Akashic Field

Laszlo's (2004) concept of an Akashic field (or "A-field") provides a depth to this discussion that is both original and productive. In his applications of the A-field to consciousness research, he observes, that the connections that tie one person's consciousness to the consciousness of others "are rediscovered today in controlled experiments with thought and image transference" (p. 39). Traditional peoples and indigenous tribes see nothing unusual about the distant transference of impressions and images, even thought the sophisticated Westerners who study them dismiss this belief as "magical thinking," "sympathetic magic," and "irrational superstition." Taking exception to this dismissal of the phenomena, Laszlo suggests that one person's consciousness may be linked with other people's consciousness through an interconnecting A-field, "much as galaxies are linked in the cosmos, quanta in the microworld, and organisms in the world of the living" (p. 44).

Many Eastern traditions considered Akasha to be a light carrying "ether," and many Western physicists and cosmologists entertained the "ether" hypothesis until it was laid to rest by the Michelson-Morley experiments and similar refutations. However, as Laszlo (2004, pp. 47-51) points out, the cosmic vacuum is far from empty space. It might not be filled with "ether," but may be thought of as the medium that carries the "zero-point field," a field marked by an absolute zero of temperature in which energies appear to be present even when all known forms of energy vanish. Several contemporary "grand unified theories" conceptualize the zero-point field as a "unified vacuum" that is the root of all nature's fields and forces. Besides being an "energy sea," this vacuum transports light, pressure, and sound. Besides being a sea of energy, could it also be a sea of information, serving as a holographic information mechanism?

Laszlo hypothesizes that this vacuum "generates the holographic field that is the memory of the universe" (p. 55). He infers that this holographic field is more easily accessible, at least to Westerners, in altered states of consciousness (p. 99). Unfortunately, altered states and purported psi experiences are often looked upon as symptoms of emotional disturbance by Western cultures, even by mental health professionals. Laszlo cites my co-edited book Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000) as having a positive corrective impact (p. 103). Published by the American Psychological Association, the chapters in this volume assessed synesthesia, hallucinations, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, alien-abduction experiences, past-life experiences, anomalous healing experiences, and mystical experiences, as well as psi-related experiences. We concluded that these reports, in most cases, could not be dismissed as signs of psychopathology and that they are more widespread than had been assumed. In addition, they often have a positive effect upon those who report the experience, even if there are no definitive explanations for them.

Laszlo (2004) admits that "exploring the workings of the A-field is not a simple matter" (p. 106). However, if the A-field conveys information it makes sense that this information conveys images and impressions that are direct and intense (p. 107). For this reason, our experiments in anomalous dreaming utilized pictures that were likely to evoke emotion and capture the dreamer's interest. According to Laszlo, A-field information is carried by "vacuum wave-interference patterns" that are equivalent to a hologram, and in a hologram every element of the image is present (p. 107).

Because holograms reflect what Laszlo (2004) describes as a "welter" of wave patterns and a phenomenon similar to "resonance" (p. 107), it makes sense that anything that disturbs these waves would reduce the holographic effect and lead to lower scores when telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition is evaluated. In our experiments, we discovered that geomagnetic fluctuations were associated with psi scores at statistically significant levels. As a result, the possible contribution of geomagnetic field data to psi phenomena makes it imperative that researchers carefully record the date and hour of their experiments. Without this information, it is impossible to make the greatest possible use of experimental data. In a field where financial resources are meager, it is essential to utilize as completely as possible those data that are obtained under psi task conditions.

If I am correct that psi is a complex system, the psychological, sociological, physiological, and environmental aspects of this system all deserve intense and sustained investigation. If Laszlo is correct in his descriptions of the A-field, psi research has a useful explanatory model that can be used to design new experiments and to assist in the explanation of earlier investigations. In any event, our modest work with anomalous dreams is one of many strands of evidence supporting the existence of the A-field, a fabric that connects all humanity, all living organisms, and all the elements of our universe. If we take the A-field to heart, we will arrive at a more profound understanding of the folly of war, the foolishness of ecological destruction, and the fabrication that the elements of our cosmos are detached, disconnected, and disengaged. These links may be subtle and not immediately evident; however, reflection, contemplation, and observation will confirm the worldview of indigenous people that there is a web that envelops us all, and that we disregard it at our peril.

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*Preparation of this paper was supported by the Chair for Consciousness Research, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco, California.

**Alan Watts Professor of Psychology, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco, California.