Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 1

Williams: Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 1 Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams Bryan Williams Dreaming is thus one of our roads into the infinite....It is only by emphasizing our finiteness that we ever become conscious of the infinite. The infinite can only be that which stretches far beyond the boundaries of our own personality. It is the charm of dreams that they introduce us into a new infinity. Time and space are annihilated, gravity is suspended, and we are joyfully borne up in the air, as it were in the arms of angels; we are brought into a deeper communion with Nature. – British physician Havelock Ellis (1911, pp. 186 – 187) It’s probably not much of a stretch to say that the mental activity of dreaming has had a profound effect upon humankind. Dreams have reportedly been the basis for art, innovative thinking, spiritual enlightenment, calls to action, and a desire to find meaning and direction within our own lives (for a good overview of how dreaming has influenced various aspects of human life, see Van de Castle, 1994). At times, the images we see in dreams can be vivid, compelling, and highly bizarre. They can also appear to be so realistic that we may sometimes find ourselves waking up and saying, “I’m glad it was only a dream.” But could our dreams ever actually reflect some aspect of reality, in a way that could have direct impact upon our lives and those of the people close to us? One dream which seems to raise this question is the one that a grandmother living in California had once experienced. She later sent a written account of her frightening dream to Louisa Rhine at Duke University, in which it was noted that the grandmother ...thought she saw her baby grandson struggling and smothering in his blankets. His movements were getting weaker and weaker. It was almost the end. She awoke. It was 3:45 A.M. The young folks lived across town. Should she call them? As she says, “After all, it was only a dream. I thought, If I call and wake them they’ll think I’m crazy. But if I don’t and anything happens ‐.” So she phoned and got a surprised son‐in‐law on the wire. “What on earth are you calling for at this hour?” he cried. Williams: Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 2 “Go to the baby at once,” she said. “He’s smothering.” “Yes, he was. We’re up. We heard him” (Rhine, 1961, p. 24). How did the grandmother know that her infant grandson was in danger? Having been across town at the time, there wasn’t any way that she could’ve heard him crying. And there doesn’t seem to be any way in which she could’ve logically inferred that it was happening. Assuming that this dream experience had taken place exactly as recounted, is it possible that her experience could’ve illustrated the manifestation of a psychic dream? A number of other dream‐related experiences that Louisa Rhine describes in her classic 1961 book Hidden Channels of the Mind seem to further attest the possibility that psychic experiences can be mediated through dreaming. While some ostensibly psychic dreams may be related to moments of crisis (as in the grandmother’s experience), others may relate to more mundane events, such as the dream described by an amateur geologist living in the American Southwest, in which he saw ...a large, beautiful, agate‐encrusted, crystal geode lying in shallow water quite near the shoreline in the W‐‐‐‐‐ River which flows something like fifteen miles southeast of the city. The exact location, shoreline, a long gravel bar, everything just as plain as though I were seeing it as it is, was clearly shown. When we arose on the following Sunday morning I told my wife of my dream experience and suggested we take our lunch and drive to the scene of my dream. We had only lived in this city approximately six months at the time and I was unfamiliar with the particular location but inquired along the way a couple of times describing landmarks, etc., in detail; and within a half‐hour after we parked our car, we walked up to the big, beautiful geode lying exactly where I’d seen it in my dream. Later I was offered three hundred dollars cash for it but did not care to sell (Rhine, 1961, p. 23). But could these dreams really have had a psychic nature to them, as opposed to their merely being the product of chance coincidence, rich imagination, wishful thinking, or embellishment? Perhaps one of the most effective ways to address that question would be to have people attempt to psychically dream about a randomly‐chosen visual target (such as a painting or a film clip) under controlled conditions, in order to see whether any notable details of the target are accurately reflected within the content of their dreams. This was the basis underlying two extensive experimental efforts to study the possibility of extrasensory perception (ESP) occurring in dreams. The first effort consisted of a series of 25 dream ESP experiments conducted by Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, and Charles Honorton at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, from 1966 to 1972 (Ullman, Krippner, with Vaughan, 1973). Most of the experiments were aimed at exploring telepathy and clairvoyance manifesting in the dream state, and although there were some slight procedural variations from one experiment to another, a typical test session for telepathy roughly proceeded in the following manner: Two volunteers participated in the overnight experiment; one person would act as the telepathic “sender,” while the other would be acting as the “receiver.” The two volunteers met briefly to get acquainted with each other, and then they were isolated in separate rooms for the rest of the night. The person acting as the “receiver” was brought to a sound‐proof room where electrodes were attached at certain points around that person’s head. These electrodes would continually sent brain wave and eye movement signals to equipment being monitored by an Williams: Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 3 experimenter in an adjacent room. Once the electrodes were attached, the receiver was invited to lie down in the room’s monitoring bed and go to sleep. The person acting as the “sender” was placed alone in a room furnished with a lighted desk, which was located between 30 and 90 feet away from the receiver’s room. In the sender’s hands was an opaque envelope given to the sender by another experimenter, which contained a randomly‐selected visual target (in most cases, this was an art print). Throughout the night, the experimenter in the equipment room continually monitored the brain wave and eye movement patterns being exhibited by the sleeping receiver, looking for signs consistent with rapid eye movement (REM, a state commonly associated with dreaming). As soon as the experimenter noticed that REM patterns were present, a signal was sent to the sender in the distant room through the sounding of a buzzer. Upon hearing this signal while seated at the lighted desk, the sender opened the opaque envelope, pulled out the target inside, and visually concentrated on its features, with the goal of attempting to mentally convey the target’s content to the sleeping receiver. Towards the end of the REM period, the receiver was awakened and asked to recall the content of their dream in as much detail as possible. After the receiver’s description of the dream was recorded down, the experimenter asked the receiver to go back to sleep. The entire process was then repeated for each REM period that the receiver experienced throughout the course of the night. The procedure for testing clairvoyance was nearly identical, with the only differences being that there was no sender involved, and the envelope containing the target was simply placed unopened on the desk in the sender’s room. Later on, a judge independently compared the receiver’s dream reports to a random collection of art prints in order to assess how closely each dream report seemed to correspond to the details of each print. Based on this assessment, the judge arranged the prints in the order of how similar they seemed to be to the receiver’s dream reports (from the greatest amount of similarity, on down to the lowest). One of the art prints in the collection was the actual target that the sender had been looking at during the nightly test session, and if the target print was deemed to be among those prints within the upper half of the pool with the greatest amount of similarity, then the test session was considered a success (or a “hit”). This conveniently reduced the judge’s assessment down to a simple “hit/miss” score, with an average hit rate of 50% being expected purely by chance alone. A graphical summary of the results from the 25 dream ESP experiments of the Maimonides series is shown in Figure 1 below, in terms of the accumulating hit rate (indicated by the tiny black diamonds) over the course of the experiments. It can be seen from the graph that as the experiments accumulate, the hit rate gradually begins to level out at around 60%, and the 95% confidence intervals exclude the expected chance hit rate of 50%. From a statistical standpoint, the end hit rate of 63% for the entire Maimonides series is so far beyond what we’d expect by chance (z = 5.563, p = 1.33 × 10‐8) that it has an associated odds ratio of about 75 million to one! Highly significant results were also reported in a more in‐ depth analysis conducted by Yale University psychologist Irvin Child (1985) which appeared in American Psychologist, one of the main journals published by the American Psychological Association.

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