This is a bit
of worthy work that as noted can be automated to hugely enlarge the sample size
to plausibly produce meaningful resolution.
This is important because what we are naturally generating is fuzzy
evidence in terms of reports that plausibly contain conforming data and
structure. I do this extensively with
cryptozoology where at least twenty separate observations are generally enough
to characterize the majority of conforming components.
We want much
more with dreams because we are simply unable to clearly report. They are fuzzy.
Yet important
questions do need to be queried and real tests put together. That will be very challenging but it appears
to be a valid line of work.
Dream
Telepathy Research Reborn
Posted by Greg at 04:20, 01 May 2014
by Ryan Hurd
There’s new signs of life for the study of
dream telepathy.
A compelling 2013 report published by
Carlyle Smith, Lifetime Professor Emeritus at Trent University in Ontario,
Canada, found statistically unlikely levels of targeted dream content in two
related studies of college students.
These 2 new studies are a welcome addition
to a field of inquiry that is often referred to the third rail of psychology.
(That’s a choo-choo metaphor: touch it and you’ll die!)
The New Telepathic Dreaming Studies
Both of Smith’s experiments exposed
students to a photo of an individual and asked them to try to dream about the
problems of that person. So there are sender and receivers, as is traditional
in dream telepathy studies. The identity of the senders were unknown, even to
the experimenters themselves.
In Experiment 1, the focus was on health
problems of the individual in the photo. The study compared 2 dreams that the
students submitted before the “incubation” began with 2 dreams collected
afterwards.
In Experiment 2, the focus was on life
problems of the individual in the photograph. Like the first study, students
submitted 2 dreams before they were informed about the aim of the study.
Experiment 2 also used an additional control: about half of the students (56
people) looked at a photograph that was unbeknownst to them a computer
simulated image–not a real person.
In both studies, the experimental
post-incubation groups had many more “hits” than the controls, a hit being an
image or concept in the dream that correlated to real problems of the
individual in question.
More convincing for me, in experiment 2,
the dream content of the control group (who looked at a fictional person’s
image) did not change from before and after incubation, where as the
experimental group had a large (statistically significant) change (see the
graph below).
Carlyle Smith says this about the findings:
The data from these experiments suggests
that normal undergraduates were able to have dreams with content that
reflected the real-life problems and concerns of an unknown target individual.
The content reported by each experimental individual varied somewhat and the
focus varied from dreamer to dreamer, but overall, the scores on specified
categories were quite significantly different for the target in experiment 2. Equally important was the lack of change in
content for the Controls where the target was fictitious.
Here’s where to read the study yourself. There’s great details about the dream
themes and how they related to the sender’s real-life problems.
Building on the Legacy of Maimonides
In many respects, these studies owe much to
the legacy of earlier studies conducted by Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman
in the 1970s and 1980s at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.
If you haven’t done so, pick up Dream Telepathy for an interesting read about their incredible years of
experiments, comprising over 40 studies. Here's an image of Stan Krippner on
the night shift at Maimonides Medical Center - you can see the polysomnograph
printing out on the left, recording a dreamer’s brain waves.
Like the Maimonides studies, Smith carefully
designed the experiments so the experimenters themselves did not have
information about the “sender.” Smith’s studies also used the Hall Van de Castle system to quantity the reports, making
statistical research on dream content possible.
One of Smith’s interesting innovations is
the use of a “placebo” or control. However, unlike Maimonides, these student’s
dreams were not lab verified by EEG, but rather relied on home reports.
Also, as far as I can tell, unlike some of
the Maimonides studies, Smith’s studies did not use third-party or independent
researchers to code the dream content. Because Smith’s method is so
transparent, this could be easily done at a later point. (But, then again, that’s
a big problem in this field of inquiry: getting other researchers to replicate
the conditions of a study or even look at the data in the first place.)
The Future of Dream Telepathy is in Your
Pocket
Neurologist Patrick McNamara brought these
studies to my attention in in his recent blog post on Psychology Today. McNamara stands behind Smith’s integrity
as a researcher, pointing out that he is one of the cognitive psychologists
who first revealed sleep’s role in memory consolidation. In
fact, in 2009, Smith won the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Canadian Sleep Society.
McNamara has this to say about the
significance of Smith’s findings:
Whatever the mechanism, tests of the reality
of dream telepathy should continue apace. Use
of huge dream communities, like those at dreamboard.com and dreamscloud.com, should be enlisted. If hits continue to
rise to above chance levels, as in
Smith’s studies, imagine if one had 200,000 dreamers attempting to dream the
details of a pictured individual’s problems?
Thousands to millions of dreamers might be
enlisted to dream about possible practical solutions to the target’s problems.
I agree: smart phones are
perfect data collectors because we carry them everywhere, and most us
sleep next to them too. Home reports on a mass scale are going to blow
the roof off of many
aspects of dream research, including dream telepathy and other kinds of
extraordinary dreaming. Apps, including ones McNamara didn’t mention such
as SHADOW and Dream:On could take a role in
setting up dream research, collecting reports, and even analyzing the data to
some degree.
Take it a step further: I am really looking
forward to the dream app that also functions as a home sleep lab (like sweet
sweet Zeo used to do), providing timestamps on the dream reports by actigraphy,
EEG, EOG, or a combination of these methods. Are you listening,Beddit?
By no means am I neutral about the potential
of telepathic dreaming, as I’ve experienced some pretty anomalous encounters in
my time. But is it really telepathy? Or is it clairvoyance? What about
precognitive dreams too? Is the space-time continuum just messing with us? As
Doctor Who puts it:
Who really knows at this point? I just I
know that the weirdness is built right in. I just try my best to honor these seemingly psychic dreams when they show up.
I can only assume that scientific research
will continue to reveal
how these things work, even though it may take a more radical scientific culture for more researchers to try.
Smith’s work
is poised
to reignite the debate.
Ryan Hurd is editor of Dream
Studies Portal and author of
several books on dreams and consciousness, including Dream Like a Boss (Book 1): Sleep better,
dream more and wake up to what matters most.
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