In the book, Our Dreaming Mind, Robert van de Castle, Ph.D., states “The most systematic study of paranormal dreams in a laboratory setting was initiated by Montague Ullman in 1962. Ullman established a dream laboratory at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, where he was chairman of the psychiatry department.” Joined by psychologist, Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., the two men began almost ten years of formal study of dream telepathy, and summarized their research findings in the book, Dream Telepathy (1973).
As Van De Castle notes, “A very thorough and scholarly review of the Maimonides research program was published in the American Psychologist by Irvin L. Child, the chairperson of psychology at Yale University. He carefully described the procedures and results and independently evaluated the statistical significance of the overall findings. Child concluded:
The outcome is clear. Several segments of the data, considered separately, yield significant evidence that dreams (and associations to them) tended to resemble the picture chosen randomly as target more than they resembled other pictures in the pool.” (p. 423)
Van de Castle goes on to note that Child mentions how other research programs had “misrepresented or ignored” the Maimonides experiments. Did these other reviewers engage in ‘scientism’, where their prejudice does not allow them to look at the evidence in a scientific manner?
Another researcher, David Foulkes, who apparently sought to replicate the experiment, reflected that his research team may have created conditions for the experiment to fail. In Our Dreaming Mind, Foulkes is quoted as saying,
“The replication experiment was unsuccessful. In retrospect, we may have erred too much on the side of ‘scientism’ to the exclusion of creating conditions in which telepathy might reasonably (if it exists) be expected to flourish. It proved hard to escape the role of protector of scientific purity or guardian of the scientific morals.” (p. 427)
The successful dream telepathy experiments noted by Ullman and Krippner endured misrepresentations by some reviewers and apparent ‘scientism’ by other research scientists, who felt a need to protect science by creating unfavorable experimental conditions. Yet, the question remains: Does dream telepathy occur, and if so, under what conditions?
On this website, I hope to introduce you to the idea of dream telepathy, as well as the practice of dream telepathy. Rational people with good dream recall following a clear protocol for ‘sender’ and ‘receiver’ can actually conduct their own personal experiments, and resolve those questions.
Perhaps some day, science will return to this issue with greater thoughtfulness, and dare I say, integrity. For the field of physics, dream telepathy (conclusively shown) may provide evidence of an implicate order or quantum entanglement. Until that day, I hope you the reader will investigate it personally, and see what you discover.
Citation and quotes from:
Robert L. Van de Castle, Our Dreaming Mind, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994).
For more information about the Maimonides dream telepathy studies and their results, please read the book, Dream Telepathy by Montague Ullman, M.D. and Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.