Many kinds of psychic experiences happen in dreams - clairvoyance, telepathy, out of body experiences, precognition and more. Dreams are the most active channel for psychic experiences. Although Freud believed that wish-fulfillment is the underlying motive in all dreams, most dreams are unpleasant and this includes the extrasensory kind. The emotional tone of an unpleasant dream probably makes a stronger impact on the dreamer then a pleasant or neutral dream would. Death is common in dreams, coming to the dreamer, his relatives or friends. Such cases of dreams of death, either clairvoyant or precognative are staggering and several are recorded by famous reputable people such as Mark Twian and Abraham Lincoln.

One of the most fascinating aspects of dreams is the problem solving ability they offer. A great example of this is demonstraited by inventor Elias Howe who perfected the sewing machine by a dream. One night he had a dream that he had been captured by a savage tribe whose king warned him that his problem must be solved within 24 hours. At the end of that period in his dream, the savages terrorized him with spears and as he saw the points coming toward him in the dream, he noted that each spear had an eye shaped hole at the sharp tip. He woke up with the realization that insted of putting the hole of the needle near the top or the middle, that the hole should be near the point. Many other scientists and inventors have used dreams in similar ways to solve problems including James Watt, Louis Agassiz and Niels Bohr, the physicist.

One of the main problems with psychic experiences in dreams is the difficulty of proof. Generally speaking, the dream is not reported or recalled until the dreamer learns from other sources that it may have been psychic. Verification comes only with writing down the details upon waking and telling others. Experiments in dream laboratories are also making it easier to prove dream telepathy and clairvoyance. Eva Hellstrom, founder of the Swedish Society for Psychical Research writes her dreams in a diary each morning and has them witnessed by members of her family to provide proof of psychic phenomena. In addition to this, she has trained herself to analyze the qualities of a psychic dream. Mrs. Hellstrom believes that like other psychic phenomena, the motivation for psychic dreams are the dreamers emotional links to persons, events and locations.

Mrs. Hellstrom and other psychics make a very interesting note that their dreams are more likely to be extrasensory when they are observers of the dream actions rather then taking participation in the dream itself. Another characteristics of psychic dreams are often attributed to the color versus black and white. When the dream is very vivid, it is much more realistic then an ordinary dream. The dreamer usually has a feeling that his dream is extrasensory in origin. As in ordinary dreams, symbols are also of significance, representing people, attitudes of mind and so forth.

Since the late 1950's, there have been numerous experiments of dream telepathy by parapsychologists and dream researchers, the best known and most impressive are those undertaken at the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. The dreamer sleeps in a soundproof room while he is hooked up to an EEG machine routed into a central control room where the experimenter watches his brain wave patterns traced on graph paper. The agent sits in a third room and tries to project the details of an art print into the dreamer's mind. The dreamer has no previous information of what the art print will be, as it is chosen by a random proceedure after the dreamer has gone into the sound proof room and prepares to sleep. When the EEG shows that the sleeper is dreaming, the experimenter wakes him up over the intercom and asks him to describe his dreams and his words are tape recorded. Later the dreams are compared with the target painting for evidence of ESP. Both the dreamer and 3 independent judges, not connected with the Dream Laboratory, compare the dreams with the target paintings and their evaluations are given a statistical rating. The results have often shown significant statistical scoring.

During the experiments at the Dream Laboratory, Dr. Kippner started to note that accidental dream precognition patterns were significant amongst many of subjects with many of them dreaming about a painting that would not be shown until several weeks later. In 2 series of experiments, one in 1969 and the other in 1970, the English psychic Malcolm Bessant slept in the laboratory and tried to dream about paintings that would not be chosen until the following day. No agents were used in this experiment to wake up the dreamer as in the telepathy/clairvoyance experiments and no one knew at the time which paintings would be selected. Bessant once dreamed of a mental hospital, people drinking water, doctors and psychiatrists, a female patient running down the corridor and escaping, and a feeling of hostility. The next morning, the painting selected was Van Gogh's Corridor of the Saint Paul Hospital in a randomised proceedure. The correspondence between the Van Gogh painting and the dreams was so striking that when Bessant walking into Krippner's office and saw the painting selected on the wall, he gasped, "My God, that's my dream!"

Bessent had many such successes and in a second series of tests in 1970, the experiments were modified. Bessent was now asked to dream about the content of a sequence of slides that he would not be allowed to see until the following night. No one in the laboratory knew what the slides would be until they were chosen at random many hours after the dreaming was over. When Bessent dreamed of religious overtones and symbology and describing the main theme as religious, philosophical and mystical, the matching slide sequence content was of Christ on the cross. In another experiment Bessent dreampt of a boy and a girl on some Mediterranean island and someone being transported to the Middle East. These matched the slide sequence on Egyptian art. Yet another ocassion he dreampt of the sky, the color blue and many different kinds of doves. The next morning he noted "I just have the feeling that the next target material will be about birds and amazingly, the sequence choosen was indeed about birds.

Hypnosis has also been used at the Dream Laboratory to induce ESP in dreams. This experiment began during the day with 2 groups, one hypnotized and the other acting as the control group. As in the other telepathy experiments, the agent sat in another room and projected his impressions of the paintings. The subjects in both groups then took a nap and told what images came to mind when they woke up. They then went home and kept records of their night dreams for the following week. For the hypnotized group, the daytime images showed striking similarities to the paintings but the later night time dreams were much less impressive. However, for the control group the results were just the opposite.

Art paintings with vivid colors, archetypal themes and emotional associations are often chosen for subliminal effects on dreamers during experiments to sharpen the dreamer's telepathic images. It should then come as no surprize that dreams have long been a rich source of inspiration for many creative thinkers, artists, writers, scientists, and others. When we can begin to seek the truth through the subconscious mind and through perceptions so subtle as to often escape the conscious filters, we have a vast treasure of knowledge before us that was before untapped and limited. Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist, scientist, architect, and genius was once quoted as saying, "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?"