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.

Williams: Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 4

Maimonides Dream ESP Experiments: 1966 - 1972

100

Cumulative Hit Rate (%) Rate Hit Cumulative 40

20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10111213141516171819202122232425 Study Number

Figure 1. Results summary showing the accumulating hit rate (with the associated 95% confidence intervals) over the course of the 25 dream ESP experiments conducted as part of the Maimonides series. The thick horizontal line at 50% indicates the average hit that would be expected purely by chance. Based on the judges’ evaluation data published in the table found in Appendix C of Ullman et al. (1973).

Koestler Group Studies

In the two and a half decades following the completion of the Maimonides series, a total of 22 dream‐related ESP studies were conducted (for a review, see Sherwood & Roe, 2003). Among these were five studies which comprised the second extensive experimental effort, conducted by researchers who were affiliated with the Koestler Parapsychology Unit (KPU) at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from 1996 to 2001. Four of these five studies were specifically designed to test for clairvoyance, and instead of having just one participant attempt to dream about the ESP target (as in most of the Maimonides studies), there were multiple participants attempting to do so. One of the central aims of these studies was to determine whether combining the dream‐related impressions of the participants would be more effective in achieving successful ESP results than just considering their impressions individually. The initial study (Dalton, Steinkamp, & Sherwood, 1999) involved three researchers who acted as their own participants, spending each night at home attempting to dream about a target film clip (randomly selected from a pool of 4 clips) that was being repeatedly played on a monitor screen in an empty and locked room at the KPU. The system which selected and presented the clip was controlled by computer, and was programmed to play the clip roughly between 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. The next morning, the three researchers gathered together at the KPU to view each clip in the pool one at a time, ranking each one according to how closely it seemed to match their Williams: Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 5 dreams from the night before. Once they’d ranked them individually, the researchers discussed their dreams together as a group and came to a shared decision on which clip they all thought was the likely target. With a 1 in 4 probability of selected the correct clip (i.e., scoring a “hit”), the average hit rate that would expected over time by chance alone is 25%. A graphical summary of the result can be seen along the far left side of the graph shown in Figure 2 below. Out of a total of 32 individual test trials, there were 15 direct hits, amounting to a significant overall hit rate of 46.9% (z = 2.514, p = .006), with an associated odds ratio of about 160 to one.

Consensus-Voting Dream ESP: Koestler Group Studies (1999 - 2002)

Hit Rate(%) 20

-10 Dalton et al 1999 Sherwood et al 2000 Dalton et al 2000 Roe et al 2002 Sherwood et al 2002 All Study

Figure 2. Results summary for the series of five dream ESP studies conducted by researchers affiliated with the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Each black diamond represents the overall hit rate (with 95% confidence intervals) for each study in the series. The diamond along the far right side of the graph marked “All” indicates the hit rate for all five studies combined. The thick horizontal line at 25% indicates the average hit rate expected by chance.

The second study (Sherwood et al., 2000) was an attempted replication of the first, with only slight modifications made to the procedure. All three of the researchers from the first study again took part as participants, with one of them now being distantly located in a small town in England, about 220 miles away from KPU. To allow her to make her rankings for each test trial, this distant researcher kept a duplicate set of the pool of 4 video clips, which she could watch at home. She then sent a copy of her rankings and her dream description to a KPU staff member via e‐mail, who collected them and made them available to the other two researchers. When combining their responses together in a consensus vote, the two researchers at KPU achieved 12 hits in 28 test trials for an overall hit rate of 42.9% (z = 1.889, p = .029), with odds of about 34 to one against chance (odds of at least 20 to one are considered significant in Williams: Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 6 psychology). The distant researcher scored 9 hits for a total hit rate of 32%, which, although it wasn’t significant, was higher than the hit rates individually obtained by the two KPU researchers. This study eventually found its way into the mainstream literature by being published in Dreaming, the journal of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. The third study (Dalton et al., 2000) was an effort to replicate the first two studies, with four college students attempting to dream about randomly‐selected target film clips on 16 separate nights. As before, the students viewed a pool of four film clips the next morning, with one of the clips being the target. After ranking the clips individually, the students discussed their dreams together and came to a consensus vote on the likely target. A total of 7 direct hits were obtained for an overall hit rate of 43.8% (z = 1.408, p = .079), which is a suggestively positive outcome with odds of about 13 to one against chance.1 Three researchers again participated in the fourth study (Roe et al., 2002), in which they attempted to dream about a target film clip being shown by an automated computer system from 4:00 to 6:00 A.M. The next morning they viewed the clips and ranked them for correspondence with their dreams, and then formed a group consensus vote on the likely target. There were 9 direct hits out of 31 individual test trials, for a nonsignificant overall hit rate of 29% (z = 0.342, p = .366), with an associated odds ratio of only about three to one. As an added measure of security, the last study of the series (Sherwood et al., 2002) was designed to test for precognition. Here, three researchers attempted to dream about a picture that they would be shown the next day, after they viewed the four pictures in the pool, ranked them for correspondence with their dreams, and formed a group decision on the likely target (i.e., it was only after they did all this that the target picture was randomly selected by the computer). Only two direct hits were obtained in all 12 test trials, amounting to a hit rate that was below chance (16.7%) and nonsignificant overall (z = .278, p = .391), with odds of again only about three to one against chance. Although the results varied from study to study, one can see from the right side of Figure 2 that when the results from all five studies are combined, the overall hit rate of 37.8% is significantly above expectation (z = 3.00, p = .001), with an associated odds ratio of about 1,000 to one against chance. This clearly seems to indicate that something of interest is occurring in these studies, something other than chance coincidence. Considered alongside the anecdotal reports collected by Louisa Rhine (1961), the results of the Maimonides studies and the Koestler group studies seem to lend weight toward serious consideration of there being a psychic nature to some dream reports. We have yet to learn about the exact nature of what may be involved here, but as the British physician Havelock Ellis (1911) had once surmised, there seems to be a chance that it may involve something “...which stretches far beyond the boundaries of our own personality.”

1 It should be noted that this result differs from the one reported in the original study, which had pre‐specified a two‐choice “hit/miss” assessment of the outcome (as in the Maimonides studies). When assessed in that manner, the overall result is significant with a hit rate of 81% (p = .01) and an odds ratio of about 100 to one. For the purpose of including them in a way that would make them comparable with those of the other four studies, the results were reanalyzed here in terms of a direct hit assessment, with a 1 in 4 probability of correctly selecting the target clip. Williams: Exploring the Psychic Nature of Dreams 7

References

Child, I. L. (1985). Psychology and anomalous observations: The question of ESP in dreams. American Psychologist, 40, 1219 – 1230. Dalton, K., Steinkamp, F., & Sherwood, S. J. (1999). A dream GESP experiment using dynamic targets and consensus vote. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 93, 145 – 166. Dalton, K., Utts, J., Novotny, G., Sickafoose, L., Burrone, J., & Phillips, C. (2000). Dream GESP and consensus vote: A replication. Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 43rd Annual Convention (pp. 74 – 85). Durham, NC: Parapsychological Association, Inc. Ellis, H. (1911). The World of Dreams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Rhine, L. E. (1961). Hidden Channels of the Mind. New York: William Sloane Associates, Inc. Roe, C. A., Sherwood, S. J., Luke, D. P., & Farrell, L. M. (2002). An exploratory investigation of dream GESP using consensus judging and dynamic targets. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 66, 225 – 238. Sherwood, S. J., Dalton, K., Steinkamp, F., & Watt, C. (2000). Dream clairvoyance study II using dynamic video‐clips: Investigation of consensus voting judging procedures and target emotionality. Dreaming, 10, 221 – 236. Sherwood, S. J., & Roe, C. A. (2003). A review of dream ESP studies conducted since the Maimonides dream ESP programme. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 85 – 109. Sherwood, S. J., Roe, C. A., Simmonds, C. A., & Biles, C. (2002). An exploratory investigation of dream precognition using consensus judging and static targets. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 66, 22 – 28. Ullman, M., Krippner, S., with Vaughan, A. (1973). Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal ESP. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Van de Castle, R. L. (1994). Our Dreaming Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.