Charles Tart, a professor of psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California “found two graduate students, Anne and Bill, who could go into deep trance and were also skilled hypnotists in their own right. He had Anne hypnotize Bill and after he was hypnotized, he had Bill hypnotize her in return. Tart’s reasoning was that the already powerful rapport that exists between hypnotist and subject would be strengthened by using this unusual procedure.

He was right. When they opened their eyes in this mutually hypnotized state everything looked gray. However, the grayness quickly gave way to vivid colors and glowing lights, and in a few moments, they found themselves on a beach of unearthly beauty. The sand sparkles like diamonds, the sea was filled with enormous frothing bubbles and glistened like champagne, and the shoreline was dotted with translucent crystalline rocks pulsing with internal light. Although Tart could not see what Anne and Bill were seeing, from the way they were talking, he quickly realized they were experiencing the same hallucinated reality.

This was immediately obvious to Anne and Bill and they set about to explore their newfound world, swimming in the ocean and studying the glowing crystalline rocks. Unfortunately for Tart they also stopped talking, or at least they stopped talking from Tart’s perspective. When he questioned them about their silence, they told him that in their shared dream world they were talking, a phenomenon Tart feels involved some kind of paranormal communication between the two.

In session after session Anne and Bill continued to construct various realities, and all were as real, available to the five senses, and dimensionally realized, as anything they experienced in their normal waking state. In fact, Tart resolved that the worlds Anne and Bill visited were actually more real than the pale, lunar version of reality with which most of us are content. As he states, after ‘they had been talking about their experiences to each other for some time, and found they had been discussing details of the experiences they had shared for which there were no verbal stimuli on the tapes, they felt they must have been in the non-worldly locales they had experienced.

Anne and Bill’s ocean world is the perfect example of a holographic reality, a three-dimensional construct created out of interconnectedness, sustained by the flow of consciousness. The world of the subconscious, the world of dreams and magic.

Ann and Bill were quite upset when Tart was pulling them out of these states, which testifies to the power of the inner virtual landscape. As they progressed deeper into the hypnotic state, they became very concerned as to the ability to return to the waking world. Other words, they were concerned of getting lost in the inner world. If Ann and Bill only knew about double-arrow awareness, this could have been a monumental experiment.