DREAM TELEPATHY

This is a new edition of the version published by McFarland in 1989, and that was itself the second edition of the original published in 1973. That publishing history alone alerts the reader to the fact that this is a classic work on parapsychology. This third edition has some different appendices to its predecessors, including reports on two important precognitive dream studies using the sensitive Malcolm Bessant as subject and involving the experimenter, the late Charles Honorton, plus useful new introductions from Ullman and Krippner respectively. The book chronicles the parapsychological dream research studies conducted in the 1960s and early 1970s at the dream laboratory founded in the Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, and headed up by Ullman and Krippner. Over ten major experimental dream studies during the period a great many dream research sessions involving over one hundred subjects were conducted. Typically, a target such as an art picture would be randomly selected and this "transmitted" mentally by an agent to the dreamer who, fast asleep, was electronically monitored in a distant room. This attempted telepathic transmission was typically conducted when the dreamer was displaying Rapid Eye Movements (REMs) which denote dreaming sleep. The subject's dream reports were then evaluated for target correspondence(thus telepathic accuracy, theoretically speaking) using standardised parameters by judges working blind and independently, as well as by the experimenters and the subject. There were many variations on this basic model over the years, different studies employing various modifications. Sometimes the number of targets varied, from a single one to several during a session, and the sequences in which they were "transmitted" experimented with. Also, the target sometimes involved multi-sensory aspects, such as slide sequences with sound – in the case of the Bessant precognitive studies, for example, the sensitive was asked to dream on a night prior to a slide-sound presentation to see if its themes could be precognised. (They were, at statistically significant levels.) Apart from describing how the Maimonides research came about, and detailing the various experimental studies and their results, whether good, bad or ugly, the book discusses the theoretical implications of the results and catalogues responses to the studies, critical and otherwise, from fellow scientists. In his new introduction, Krippner notes that some years after the close of the studies he and Michael Persinger were able to check some of the dream data collected during the Maimonides research against standard global geomagnetic measurements. It was discovered that the greatest dream telepathic accuracy was obtained on "calm nights" with low sunspot activity and thus low geomagnetic activity. Some of the results obtained during the Maimonides dream work were so significant, in that they statistically confirmed the occurrence of telepathy and precognition during dreaming states, it is hard to understand why they have not had a more major impact on the "respectable mainstream". So even in its third edition, this book continues to present a challenge that science has so far failed to adequately address. For anyone interested in dreams and dreaming in general, and parapsychology in particular, including its philosophical implications, this classic book is essential reading.