Psi in dreams
During the many years the Rhines conducted their research people from all over the US upon hearing about it began sending them anecdotal stories of their own spontaneous psychic experiences. In 1948 Louisa Rhine began to systematically analyze these accounts. Based on an impressive data base that by 1978, when she retired, had reached some 14,000. Among other things this data revealed that nearly 60 percent of the reported ESP experiences occurred during dreams. The majority involved receipt of important life or death information. However, a significant number involved trivial unimportant things such as the color skirt a friend might wear the following day
From 1966 through 1973, Ullman and psychologist Stanley Krippner conducted a total of 379 dream psi sessions. The typical experimental procedure was for a volunteer receiver, Jill, to spend a night in the Maimonides dream lab. When she was about to go to sleep, she was taken into a soundproof and electromagnetically shielded room where electrodes were attached to her head to monitor her brainwaves and eye movements. Following that, she had no further contact with anyone else until the session was completed. A second volunteer, the sender, Jack, was given a sealed envelope containing a picture randomly selected from a pool of 8 – 12 pictures. When he was alerted by a technician monitoring the receiver that she appeared to have entered the dream state, he was to look at the picture and try to send it telepathically to Jill to influence her dream.
Prior to the start of an experimental session Jill had an opportunity to talk with Jack and meet the investigators. During the actual session she was completely isolated with the sender located at distances from her of 32 feet, 98 feet, 14 miles, and in one case 45 miles. To make sure that no one could accidentally figure out what the target picture was during a session, the only contact between the sender and the investigators was a buzzer tone or series of telephone rings alerting him to start sending.
When Jill was observed via monitoring to have stopped dreaming a signal was sent to Jack to stop trying to send. Jill was then awakened and asked to describe her most recent dream on audio tape. She then could go back to sleep. Each time during that night she was observed to be in the dream state the process was repeated. This happened three to six times over the course of a typical night’s sleep. In the morning, Jill was roused again and asked for her overall impressions of the picture that Jack was trying to send. Her responses were recorded and transcribed for later analysis.
Following completion of a dream session one or more independent judges examined the transcript of the descriptions of each dream and compared it to the full pool of possible pictures the target was chosen from. They didn’t know which actual target the sender was using. They were asked to rank how well each picture matched the description of a dream. The picture with the highest correspondence was ranked one and the lowest say eight if there were eight possible pictures in the pool. If the picture was ranked in the upper half of the pool, it was considered a hit, if in the lower half a miss. If nothing but chance was operating with no psi, then the chance of a hit would be 50 percent.
These laboratory psi dream studies were time consuming requiring seven years to complete 379 sessions. More recent investigators designed a speeded-up process that could be completed in a volunteer’s own home based on the fact that everyone dreams every night, and most people can learn to recall their dreams the next morning. A computer was programmed to automatically select a target picture from a random pool and display it repeatedly, usually between 3 and 4 a.m., on a computer monitor. The computer was in a locked room shielded from view so nobody could figure out what the target was. Participants kept track of their dreams at home, then gathered at the lab the next morning where they viewed four pictures, the target and three decoys. They each ranked the four pictures according to how well each matched their dreams. The ranks were combined to create one consensus selection for the best possible match. Participants then got to see if their choice was correct.
Both the dream lab and at-home experiments demonstrated under controlled conditions that information at a distance could be perceived in dreams. In 2003 psychologists Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe employed meta-analysis to review all of the dream psi studies from the original Maimonides series through the latest at-home dream experiments involving 47 experiments with a total of 1,270 trials. Overall the hit rate was 59.1%, which was a 9.1% increase over chance. The odds against chance of a rate this high is 22 billion to 1. Coincidence can be ruled out convincingly as a viable explanation.
Radin, D. (2009). Entangled Minds