Investigating Anomalous Experiences in Dreams
by Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. (c) 2010 All Rights Reserved
Note: The portion below comes from a presentation by Stanley Krippner at the International Association for the Study of Dreams conference at Sonoma State University in 2009:
Laboratory Studies
The first attempt to study telepathic dreams experimentally was reported by G.B. Ermacora (1895) in a publication of the Society for Psychical Research. Ermacora worked with an Italian medium who tried to influence the dreams of a child at a distance, an attempt that was deemed successful. Although amateurish by contemporary standards (evaluation procedures lacked rigor and the child was the medium’s cousin), the attempt was of historical importance because Ermacora had placed an anomalous phenomenon into a controlled setting, attempting to falsify (refute) or verify (confirm) the medium’s claims.
It was not until the middle of the 20th century that telepathic dream studies were again investigated in a disciplined manner, this time using newly developed electroencephalographic technology to monitor the rapid eye movements and brain waves found to correspond with most periods of nighttime dreaming. This work was spurred by a collection of some 7,000 self-reported anecdotal telepathic experiences that had been collected by Louisa Rhine (1961); nearly two thirds of them reputedly had occurred in dreams. Rhine also collected presumptive precognitive dream reports, which allegedly forecast events that had not yet occurred, and clairvoyant dreams in which distant events are depicted. For example, at the end of World War II, a woman in Florida claimed that she awakened one night crying out between sobs that she had seen her soldier son die in the crash of a burning airplane. The next day, a cheerful letter arrived from her son, and the woman regained her composure. Five nights later, however, the same nightmare occurred, and she was sent to the psychiatric ward of a hospital for treatment. The next day a telegram arrived relaying the news that her son had been killed in an airplane crash on the night of her initial dream (J.B. Rhine, 1953, p. 105).
In his work as a psychoanalyst, Ullman (1969) often had patients reporting dreams that coincided with events in his personal life. Realizing that the correspondences could have been coincidental, or due to sensory clues or faulty memory, Ullman arranged for a “target picture,” sealed in an envelope, to be randomly selected once the research participant had retired for the night. His first research participant was the celebrated medium Eileen Garrett who had agreed to have electrodes glued to her head and connected to an electrode box that was linked to an electroencephalograph (EEG), placed in another room. A clairvoyant task had been arranged, and one of the pictures was a color photo of the chariot race from the film Ben-Hur, currently in release. Garrett reported a dream concerning horses going uphill and associated the image with Ben-Hur, which she had seen two weeks previously (Ullman & Krippner, 1970, pp. 32-33).
In 1966, Ullman moved his operation into Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York, where he was soon joined by Stanley Krippner who became director of the new laboratory. A protocol was devised in which a “telepathic transmitter” would interact with the research participant, and then separated for the night. The transmitter threw dice to select one of a stack of double-sealed envelopes, which he or she took to a distant room. Upon opening the two envelopes and discovering the identity of the target picture, the transmitter spent much of the night attempting to relate to the picture contents through associations, enactments, and emotionality. The participant, although virtually immobile in a sound-attenuated room, attempted to “reach out” and incorporate the picture’s images into his or her dreams (Ullman & Krippner, with Vaughan, 2002).
An experimenter awakened the participant when the EEG tracings (and similar tracings that tracked eye movements and muscle tension) indicated that a dream had been in process, asking “What has been going through your mind?” The dream report was tape recorded for subsequent transcription. In the morning, the research participant was asked to provide associations for each dream report, and then was shown copies of each picture in the “target pool,” arranging them in order of correspondence to the dream reports. These selections provided statistical data that would verify or falsify the telepathy hypothesis on that particular night and for the experimental series as a whole. In the precognition dream studies, the target was randomly selected following the participant’s night in the laboratory, typically while he or she was showering and dressing. The judging proceeded in the same way, with the research participant arranging the potential targets in order of closeness to his or her recalled dreams.
Over the years that the Maimonides laboratory was in operation, five professional magicians visited the premises to determine if sleight of hand or fraudulent transmitter/participant collaboration could have accounted for the results. The magicians filed negative reports, stating that the only opportunities for fraud would have been on the part of the staff members who could have altered transcripts before mailing them to the statisticians, or by the statisticians who analyzed the data. As a result of this suggestion, statistical analysis was carried out by outside experts who were never present during experimental sessions (Krippner, 1991, p. 47). Data given the statisticians included participants’ scores as well as scores given by three outside evaluators, none of whom had been present during the experimental sessions. In most cases, there were between 8 and 12 target pictures (most of them art prints) in the target pool; evaluators matched every picture against the total transcript containing dream reports and the participants’ associations to those reports.
Before the laboratory closed in 1978, Ullman and his team had conducted thirteen formal experimental studies (eleven focusing on telepathy, two on precognition) and three groups of pilot studies in which telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance were investigated. A meta-analysis of 450 nighttime dream sessions was conducted by Dean Radin (1997, pp. 71-72) who concluded that the overall confirmatory rate of 63% produced odds of 75 million to one against achieving such a result by chance. However, the studies can not be considered conclusive because of the lack of replication, the loss of some early data, and the variation in evaluation procedures over the years (Child, 1985; Hyman, 1986; Krippner, 1991). On the other hand, both Child (1985) and Krippner (1991) have compiled a list of misrepresentations of the Maimonides experiments in the psychological literature, one of which contained no less than four errors (i.e., Zusne & Jones, 1982, pp. 260-261).
Some two dozen attempts have been made by other laboratories to replicate the Maimonides work. For example, Gordon Globus and his associates conducted a l7-night experiment with a pair of friends serving as agent and research participant. The judges’ attempts to match the target picture with the correct night of dreams reports were not statistically significant. However, the judges had also been asked to rank the confidence they had in their ratings; those scores ranked with high confidence correctly identified the correct pairs of targets and dreams at a statistically significant level. It was concluded, “Further conservatively designed research does seem indicated because of these findings” (Globus, Knapp, Skinner, & Healy, 1968, 365).
It is difficult to make comparisons between the Maimonides studies and the attempted replications because many of them used different outcome measures and most relied upon home dreams instead of on dream reports collected in the laboratory. Nevertheless, Simon J. Sherwood and Chris A. Roe (2003) made a valiant attempt, concluding that in both sets of studies “raters could correctly identify target materials more often than would be expected by chance using dream mentation” (p. 85). The Maimonides studies were seen to be “significantly more successful…than post-Maimonides studies,” but Sherwood and Roe stated, “We can be 95% confident that the true effect size is positive and therefore better than chance expectations for both sets of studies” (pp. 104, 106).
Because lack of replication and the absence of an exploratory mechanism were the major obstacles to mainstream science’s serious consideration of dream telepathy and associated phenomena, Michael A. Persinger and Krippner (1989) explored the geomagnetic ambience during the first night each research participant engaged in an experimental session at Maimonides. A significant difference was observed between “high” and “low” scoring nights, the former being linked to the absence of electrical storms and sunspots. Krippner and Persinger (1996) repeated this analysis with the participant who had spent more nights at Maimonides than any other participant, again attaining significant results. These data may indicate that the telepathic and clairvoyant capacities of the human brain are sensitive to geomagnetic activity, which could interfere with the dreaming participant’s ability to transcend customary time and space constraints.
When individuals have out-of-body experiences during wakefulness, they often report a rush of energy, bodily paralysis and vibrations, and strange sounds. To the dream researcher, these symptoms resemble sleep paralysis, which typically takes place when someone is waking up from or falling into rapid eye movement sleep. Out-of-body experiences during sleep were linked to lucidity 9% of the time in a study involving 107 lucid dreams (Levitan & LaBerge, 1991).
One of the Maimonides research participants was a medical student who claimed to have occasional out-of-body experiences, purportedly as a result of correspondence courses taken with the Order of the Rosicrucians, a school in San Jose, California. A four-night pilot study was designed in which there was a telepathic transmitter in a distant room as well as a randomly selected clairvoyant target resting in an open box near the ceiling of the sound-attenuated room where the participant spent the night. Care was taken so that the clairvoyant target was taken from its envelope and placed in the box in such a way that the experimenter did not observe the images on the target.
On the final night of the study, the clairvoyant target was a postcard-size reproduction of Berman’s painting, “View in Perspective of a Perfect Sunset.” The participant’s dream reports read, in part, “It was dark outside and light inside….It was dusk….It was just getting dark. Sunset. Very hazy. It was hazy. It wasn’t a clear sunset….It reminds me of a chilly or cold winter’s day which is coming to an end. A day which has been cloudy all day long and the sun in just beginning to go down.” In his morning interview, the participant reported having had an out-of-body experience during one of the dreams. An inspection of the EEG record disclosed an unusual pattern of slow brain waves in the theta and delta frequencies, interrupting rapid eye movement sleep shortly before he was awakened for his final dream report. The EEG records were shown to several sleep experts who commented that the interruption of rapid eye movement sleep by slow brain wave activity is unusual, but not unknown.
According to the norms reported in A Content Analysis of Dreams (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966), sunsets appear in less than 1 out of every 500 male dreams. In 1968, Charles Tart reported a study in which a sleep laboratory participant correctly identified a 5-digit numeral, placed on a ledge above her bed. Tart went to great lengths to identify possible flaws with this study, and the Maimonides study attempted to avoid each of the defects pointed out by Tart. When the outside raters matched the telepathic and the clairvoyant targets against each night of dreams, sheer chance results were obtained for the telepathic condition. The clairvoyant matches were more numerous; there was only a 1 in 10 chance that they would have occurred by coincidence. Although not statistically significant, it must be recalled that this study was limited to four nights due to the participant’s medical school schedule.
Out-of-body experiences, by themselves, are not considered to be parapsychological phenomena because there are several plausible psychophysiological explanations for the phenomena, such as their association with vestibular sensations and body schema disorders associated with temporo-parietal dysfunction (Blanke, Landis, Spinelli, & Seeck, 2004; Blanke, Ortigue, Landis, & Seeck, 2002; Persinger, 1995). Nonetheless, they sometimes contain anomalies such as the “sunset” dream report of the medical student investigated in the Maimonides laboratory. As for the possible link between parapsychological-related dreams and the geomagnetic field, Persinger (1989) has proposed two interpretations. The first is that such anomalies as telepathy are geomagnetic field correlates; solar disturbances and electrical storms may disrupt this connection. Secondly, the geomagnetic field affects the brain’s receptivity to such phenomena as telepathy, which remains constant. In the latter speculation, telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance are always present, waiting to be accessed by emotions, crises, or by optimal laboratory conditions. Geomagnetic activity, and other yet-to-be discovered correlates, may affect the detection capacity of the brain for this information, especially the neural pathways that facilitate the consolidation and conscious access to this information. Without the geomagnetic activity, awareness of the anomalous stimuli might not be as likely. Persinger adds that temporal lobe activity exists in equilibrium with the global geomagnetic condition. When there is a sudden decrease in geomagnetic activity, there could be an enhancement of processes that facilitate telepathy and related phenomena. Such proposals, and those like them (e.g., Laszlo, 2004; Sheldrake, 2006) can lead to experiments that would verify or refute these speculations. Of course, there is the distinct possibility that the phenomena are not anomalous at all, and will eventually be explained by ordinary psychological principles.
Anomalous Dream Reports
Laboratory studies focus on verifying or refuting hypotheses, on determining whether reports are subjective experiences or objective events, on examining the conditions under which those events can be observed, and on determining the variables that are helpful in explaining the mechanisms that trigger and sustain those events. Despite the data that has been collected regarding such anomalies as telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive dreams, mainstream science refuses to place them in the “events” category due to their ephemeral nature, their resistance to appearing on demand, and their lack of satisfactory explanatory mechanisms. As a result, they remain in the “reports” category, while advocates struggle with the replication and explanation issues that prevent their acceptance as “events.”
Even so, anomalous dream reports can be extremely useful to science; the identification of such variables as gender differences, age differences, and cross-cultural differences can assist investigators understand the roles that dreams play in human development. Stanley Krippner and Laura Faith (2001) looked for “exotic dreams” (i.e., anomalies) in a collection of 910 dream reports from women and 756 from men. All reports had been collected by Krippner in seminars presented in six different countries between 1990 and 1998. Seminar participants were simply asked to volunteer a recent dream, and only one dream per participant was utilized in the analysis. When a dream report was not written in English, it was translated by a native speaker of that language. Krippner and Faith made no pretense that the dream reports were representative of the general population of the countries investigated. Scoring guidelines were applied to the dreams, and when a report fell into more than one category, half a point was given for each category. Two raters scored each of the 1,666 dreams; inter-rater reliability was .95; in other words, the scoring guidelines were clear with minimal overlap. The categories used were those described in the book Extraordinary Dreams (Krippner, Bogzaran, & de Carvalho, 2002).
There were no statistically significant differences between genders; 8.5% of all female dreams were anomalous versus 7.7% of male dream reports. The country with the highest number of anomalous dreams was Russia (12.7%), followed by Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Ukraine, and the United States (5.7%). The only categories that surpassed 1% of all dream reports were lucid dreams (1.7%), out-of-body dreams (1.4%), visitation dreams (1.1%), and precognitive dreams (1.1%). To be scored as a visitation dream, a deceased person or an entity from another reality provided counsel or direction that the dreamer felt of comfort or value. For example, a Ukrainian woman reported, “In this dream, I am afraid of dying because my neighbors start to die, one by one. I think of what a short period of time it took for so many of them to die, both men and women. I would like to live a more spiritual life, but the conditions around me do not permit it, so I must work very hard each day. Then one of my dead neighbors comes to see me and tells me that I can lead a spiritual life through my work.” Of course, the existence of the deceased neighbor can not be verified, but the dream assisted the dreamer in resolving an existential dilemma in her life.
Fariba Bogzaran related a dream by one of her clients, an illustrator named “Louise” (in Krippner, Bogzaran, & de Carvalho, 2002, pp. 109-110). “I am racing about in a distant city, trying desperately to reach a friend. The nature of the urgency is unclear; I only know that I must find her. I awake feeling frantic and distraught. I then return to dreaming. I hear a woman’s voice repeating, ‘It was the worst pain—terrifying. I thought I was dying.’ There is no accompanying imagery. I awake confused with the bizarre thought that I am having someone else’s dream.”
That morning, Louise woke up puzzling over this dream and decided to give her friend a call. The friend told Louise that her timing was remarkable. The night before, at the time of Louise’s dream, the friend had been rushed to the hospital in excruciating pain. Her friend repeated the exact words Louise had heard in her dream. She had thought she was dying, but the doctors had denied Louise’s friend any pain reliever until the nature of her condition had been determined.
Louise told Bogzaran that there was now an explanation for the sense of urgency in her dream. She had been looking for her friend who was being rushed to the hospital. This dream not only connected Louise more closely to her friend, but also prepared her for the worst – the possibility of her friend’s death. Again, the anomalous elements in this dream may have been coincidental; however, in retrospect the dream served a useful purpose.
Not all anomalous dreams are intentional in nature. Some serve no apparent purpose but, at best, are mere curiosities; others can have unforeseen maladaptive consequences. In 1980, Steve Linscott was awakened by a dream in which a man had approached a young woman with a blunt object in his hand. In a second dream, this man “was beating her on the head….She was on her hands and knees…and didn’t resist….Blood flying everywhere.” Linscott went back to sleep, but later that day he noticed police cars two doors away from his house. A young woman had been brutally beaten and murdered in a nearby apartment building. He told the dream to his wife and two colleagues at the Christian halfway house in the Chicago suburb where he worked. They all persuaded Linscott to tell his dream to the police, and he complied with their suggestions.
A few weeks later, Linscott was charged with the murder of the young woman. The dreams, according to the police, included too many accurate details to be coincidental. Linscott was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison. The prosecution finally dropped the case after several appeals by defense attorneys. Apparently, the police department did not consider the possibility that the dreams might have represented anomalies, nor did they realize that coincidental “matches” frequently occur in dreams (Krippner, 1995).
Past-life dreams occur most frequently where the doctrine of reincarnation forms a basic part of a society’s religions and philosophies. Many Asian, Australian aboriginal, tribal African, Pacific Island, and Native American cultural groups have adopted this perspective. The concept is an appealing one; it satisfies the hope for immortality and assures eventual justice as right actions in one’s current life are rewarded in the next one. The “return” of a deceased person is often “announced” in a dream; shortly after this announcement, a pregnant woman might adopt food preferences that match those of the person who is “returning,” and preparations are made for the event. However, there are cultural differences; “announcements” generally occur in the final months of pregnancy in Alaskan Tlinget groups but shortly before conception in rural Burmese families where the “returning” person requests permission to be reborn there (Matlock, 1990).
Bogzaran reported the case of “Antonia” who had been suffering from acute neck pains that had not yielded to conventional medical treatment (in Krippner, Bogzaran, & de Carvalho, 2002, pp. 132-134). During a psychotherapy session, she related a recent dream: “I am a seamstress in France, and a revolution has just taken place. I am taken before a tribunal and am called an enemy of the people because I worked for a countess. I protest my innocence, but to no avail. I am condemned to death, and taken to the guillotine where I am beheaded.” The psychotherapist had Antonia associate to each salient word or phrase in the dream, and to divide the dream into scenes. In the first scene, Antonia is a hard worker engaged in a feminine occupation where she carries out detailed work during a time of momentous challenge in a setting that is imperious. In the second scene, neither her employer’s power nor her own protest is a match for the male tribunal that condemns her. In the third scene, Antonia “gets it in the neck.”
Antonia applied these scenarios to her everyday life, observing that she worked very hard, providing basic necessities for her family and mediating disputes between her husband and their children. Despite her husband’s high-paying job, he would frequently be drunk upon his arrival home, throwing the household into disarray; Antonia’s feminine skills were no match for his demands and accusations. His abuse was verbal rather than physical, but Antonia would still suffer neck pains after each of his temper outbursts. The psychotherapist viewed the dream narrative as metaphorical, but Antonia became convinced that it represented an actual past life. Once she announced this conviction, her neck pain disappeared; within a few years, Antonia’s husband entered psychotherapy and reduced his alcohol consumption and abusive behavior.
Did Antonia’s dream reflect reality or create it? There were not enough historical details in the dream report to verify the possibility of a past life; nevertheless, the dream report served a useful purpose, thanks to the therapist’s willingness to spend time discussing it and to refrain from making a judgment concerning the dream’s veridicality.
Conclusion
It is tempting to ignore or dismiss dreams that simply do not “fit” mainstream scientific concepts of time, space, and energy. Nevertheless, such psychiatrists as Ullman and such psychologists as Bogzaran have used unusual dreams advantageously in psychotherapy. Alfred Adler, Calvin Hall, and other dream theorists have traced the connection between dreams and waking life; these connections usually are apparent even in anomalous dream reports.
Those writers who would dismiss or belittle anomalous dreams often assume that the universe operates on a linear, cause-and-effect manner that precludes consideration of such phenomena as telepathy or precognition. But what if the universe is non-linear, at least in part, and if interactions between people do not always follow linear causality? These propositions have been considered by non-linear dynamical theory or “chaos theory,” and the resulting model of dreaming may allow for the operation of anomalous effects. Stanley Krippner and Allan Combs (2000) have observed that those parts of the brain ordinarily involved in practical activity based on working memory are less active during the night, giving other brain centers the opportunity to organize dream content, much of which is randomly generated by the brain’s internal mechanisms. As a result, many of the resulting dream stories are bizarre, marked by abrupt transitions, quick changes of scene, and actions that would seem illogical in daily life.
At the same time, dreams provide “networks of meaning” that reflect “emotional intelligence,” assisting dreamers to understand emotional relationships and their own personal feelings (Hardy, 1998). Dreams often reflect conflicts between two or more “chaotic attractors,” for example, between activity and passivity or between authenticity and superficiality. Christine Hardy (1998) has described a dreamer whose reliance on social interactions based on authority and hierarchy was undermined by a powerful dream focusing on cooperation and synergy, leading him to adopt a new set of values. This clash between chaotic attractors provides the opportunity for anomalous dream content to emerge and to find its niche in the resulting synthesis.
Krippner and Combs have proposed that there are two other important qualities of the sleeping brain that make people sensitive to subtle influences. The first of these is the brain’s susceptibility to what chaos theorists call the “butterfly effect”; very small alternations in the present condition of the weather or the stock market can lead to major variations in its future status. A small shift in the brain’s neurochemistry can introduce a new image into an ongoing dream narrative, and the integration of this element into someone’s dream demonstrates the brain’s creative potential, even though the result may seem illogical, irrational, or unrealistic upon awakening.
The second remarkable quality of the sleeping brain is its capacity to respond to signals so tiny that the brain would not otherwise be affected by them. Known to chaos theorists as “stochastic resonance,” this effect has been noted in electronic circuits as well as in nerve cells. The quality of this type of resonance keeps a system in motion; the signal follows the path of least resistance, rather than disappearing or getting trapped. As a result, small emotional residues of the day’s experience may return during a dream or nightmare on the given night or later in the week (Hartmann, 1998). Examples would be a dramatic scene from a movie, an intriguing face in the crowd, a sarcastic comment from an email, or a poignant phrase from an overheard conversation.
In other words, chaotic attractors, the butterfly effect, and stochastic resonance are qualities of the sleeping brain that make it susceptible to anomalous interactions, especially if geomagnetic and other environmental conditions provide a suitable milieu. Emotion in dreams may provide a network that assists self-organization of diverse images, memories, and even some events distant in space and time that are attracted to the dream’s formulating emotional vortex.
Ernest Hartmann (1998) has described how the brain’s neural networks are open to greater novelty and emotional impact during sleep than during wakefulness, and notes that anomalous dreams often involve someone close to the dreamer with whom there is an emotional connection. In this manner, the self-organizing dream creates order from chaos, resulting in a unique narrative. The story may be a review of daily events, an attempt to resolve a life trauma, an inventive technological or artistic product, a metaphorical solution to a psychological problem, or a preview of an oncoming event in the dreamer’s life.
Anomalous dreams, whatever their explanations, suggest that there are profound interconnections and entanglements among human beings, as well as between humans and the rest of nature (Ullman, 1999). Perhaps these linkages can help to mend the torn social and ecological fabric of the current era. Working with dreams is one way of reweaving this tattered tapestry and anomalous dreams may represent a resource that could play a vital role in addressing the imbalance between humans and their environment.
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The preparation of this paper was supported by the Chair for the Study of Consciousness, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco, California. On June 29, it served as the basis of a pre-conference workshop for the annual convention of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California.