In the last issue of Freemasonry Today we looked at the practice of ‘temple sleep’, conducted at selected sacred sites by numerous ancient cultures in order to obtain dreams for initiation, divination, or healing purposes. It was noted that 50 years ago the novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell had found evidence that modern people sleeping near ancient Greek dream temples experienced unusual, powerful, and disturbing dreams, causing him to wonder if the ancient dreams experienced at those places were somehow able to linger and be picked up, if in a garbled fashion, by dreaming minds much later on.
    To mainstream modern thinking such an idea seems laughable. Dreams are supposed to live only inside the head – aren’t they? Well, perhaps not if some current theorists are correct. They argue that mind is a field rather than a kind of buzz produced by brain activity, that our neurons process a raw mindstuff inherent in the fabric of the universe creating what we call human consciousness. Some scientists are actually attempting to identify specific neurophysiological structures that could enable this process.
    Biologist Rupert Sheldrake has proposed a controversial theory he calls ‘morphic resonance’ which states that a person or any individual organism is informed by a memory field belonging to the species as a whole.1
    In 1990, a multi-disciplinary research group entitled the Dragon Project Trust wondered if places could also have ‘memory fields’. If so, how and where could they be accessed? The group reasoned that the dreaming mind, operating in the deep unconscious realms of the psyche, was the most likely candidate for picking up information at this subtle level if it existed at all, and that the place being used should be sacred, in that it might hold more information than a secular one due to intense spiritual and purposeful usage. Sacred and ancient, so it would have been deeply imbued with what C.G. Jung called ‘numinosity’. So the trust set up an ancient sites dream research programme, and enrolled Dr. Stanley Krippner, a renowned professor of psychology at the Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco, as its consultant.

Dreaming in Action

    The Dragon Project Trust effort was aimed at making on-site dreaming as transpersonal and objective as possible. It was decided to use four ancient sites and have as many people as possible dream at them in order to see if there arose sitespecific elements in the dreams – themes, sequences, images, motifs, symbols, even colours. The selected sites consisted of one natural and three monumental examples. The natural location is Carn Ingli, ‘The Hill of Angels’, a rugged ridge in the Preseli hills of south-west Wales, source of the Stonehenge bluestones. People resorted to it from at least as far back c.5,000 B.C. up until the sixth century A.D., when it was used by St. Brynach as a place of meditation and fasting. It was his visions of angels there that gave the peak its name. It also possesses a magnetic anomaly strong enough to spin compass needles.
    The monumental sites are all in the Land’s End district of Cornwall: Chûn Quoit, an isolated moorland dolmen dating to c.3,000 B.C., Madron Well, located in the ruins of a tiny medieval chapel where an ancient healing ritual involving sleep was carried out up until recent centuries, and Carn Euny, an underground passage and chamber complex of unknown purpose whose origins date to c.500 B.C.
    The volunteer dreamers who became involved in the exercise came from many walks of life and various countries, ranging in age from teenagers to senior citizens, though most were in their thirties and forties. They were asked to record six dreams obtained in their familiar home environment for comparison with any on-site dreams they had. A local Dragon Project Trust facilitator then took them to the site they had volunteered to dream at. Dreamers would snuggle into a sleeping bag and generally fall asleep a little before midnight. Using a shaded or red-filtered flashlight, a helper checked periodically for REMs - i.e. Rapid Eye Movements visible beneath closed eyelids denoting dreaming sleep. Dreamers were awoken when these occurred and had their dream reports immediately taperecorded. These were later transcribed.
    Because of the sporadic, volunteer nature of the exercise along with limited resources, daunting logistics, and often harsh on-site conditions, it took until 2000 to assemble sufficient dream data for scientific analysis. The transcripts were then sent to Krippner in San Francisco. There they were re-typed onto standardised forms so work could commence on processing their data; this involved tabulating the dream elements according to a professionally-accepted analytical tool called the Strauch Scale.
    Subsequently, The Dragon Project Trust and Saybrook sought further funds to enable a more sophisticated and complete system of content analysis (the Hall-Van de Castle analytical tool) which would provide a much better way of determining if the home dreams and site dreams differ significantly. This analysis was conducted independently and the raw results came in to Saybrook at the end of 2004. Krippner immediately noted that there are ‘lots of statistically significant differences between the home and site dreams’. For example, ‘home dreams had more familiar persons, less aggression, more friendliness, more success but also more failure, and less striving.’ The processing of this raw analytical data is now under way to enable an evaluation of what the differences signify, and there will also be an analysis site by site. This latter is most important, as the original main aim of the dream programme was to provide a systematic analysis of any sitespecific dream content. Unlike the analysis comparing on-site with home or control dream data, this will be able to use the full range of the on-site dream report data.

With Place in Mind

    While this final processing is taking place, simple ‘eyeballing’ of the data proves interesting, for some tantalisingly site-specific elements do appear in the dream report transcripts. As one brief example of this, here are a few snatches from just seven people’s dream reports obtained at Carn Euny. It is important to remember these reports were made at different times – there was no crosscommunication. The reports’ sometimes slightly disjointed quality is accounted for by the fact that they were made verbally directly on awakening from REM sleep. The excerpts have been arranged so as to better highlight content similarities.

MS: I dreamt that I was awake … and these people turned up and they had this dog with them … a beige dog. And there was a cat …
AR: …I turned off for the Carn Euny turning … Something went across in front of the bull-bar on the jeep … I assumed it was a cat. It was big and beige …
MVB: …a sense of processing … of going from one place to another …
AR: … on this flat lane, walking with these people who were hikers or going somewhere … a very friendly bunch of people … Definitely the bustle of people going somewhere …
BH: … something to do with walking. It was sort of flattish sort of countryside … I’m definitely walking around in this countryside … I don’t think I knew of any of these people … It was a crowd of about five or six people … we were walking around the area…
DS: They’re holding my hands … [Helper: "The people?"] … Yeah … I think they’re going to take me somewhere … It was all right though … They were nice…
BH: There was quite a lot of people and it was something to do with food …
AR: …This person had set up selling ice creams and things…
MVB: …A very tall chocolate cake …
DS: I dreamt that we broke into a new tomb somewhere near here … this enormous great carved … with huge tusks and eyes, painted eyes …
GH: … little boy with an old face, deformed face or something … It was slightly nightmare-ish…
BH: …stuck on the wall… was a big round thing and it had a face on it … It wasn’t really a human face … It had big eyes, roundish eyes…
THS: … I’m in the audience … there’s someone else who’s just finishing an act. A singer or something…
BH: … watching a show that was going on, sort of play thing but it was also something people sort of partook in … we were sitting in the audience….

    Allowing for a general sense to flow from this material, are we glimpsing some transpersonal, site-associated memories showing dimly through the distorting glass of personal dream recall?
    If this is so, it will take the pending systematic analysis to make this scientifically credible. If that should prove the case then a paradigm shift in our understanding about the nature of consciousness will have been signalled by this modest pilot study, and Durrell’s intuition at the Greek dream temple sites will have been strengthened. If not, the exercise will at least have produced a unique body of dream reports that will provide a valuable database for future researchers.

1 See A New Science of Life, 1981, or The Presence of the Past, 1988.

ANCIENT HEALING PROCEDURES AT MADRON WELL Madron Well was locally famous for both its prophetic, oracular, powers and its healing properties. Although Madron Spring itself is a few hundred yards from the now ruined chapel, the healing rituals seem always to have taken place within the chapel to where the waters were carried by conduits. It was the tradition for ailing children to be brought to the chapel on the first three Sunday mornings in May, where they were plunged naked three times into the water in the granite basin or reservoir. In the 17th century, a celebrated and welldocumented case involved John Trelille, who had been a cripple for 16 years. His ritual treatment consisted of being bathed in the waters once a week for three weeks, and after each occasion being encouraged to sleep on a slight mound before the rude altar in the tiny chapel. He became fully healed, and went on to live an active life as a soldier. Author Paul Devereux once slept at this site, and was rewarded with a vivid dream of a pair of hands displaying the particular way the waters should be applied to the face and eyes. The dream awoke him and he was able to go over to the reservoir basin in the chapel and immediately rehearse the procedure before he forgot it.

Paul Devereux lectures widely, broadcasts occasionally and has written many articles, academic papers and some twenty-six books. Recent titles include, The Sacred Place (Cassell), Stone Age Soundtracks (Vega), Living Ancient Wisdom (Rider) and Mysterious Ancient America (Vega). Website: www.pauldevereux.co.uk