|
|
|
|
|
|
unfortunately, what many hope to find. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
We also know that forced-choice ESP tests are a very inefficient way to elicit psi functioning. For example, in the above studies, the experimenters, on the average, had to carry out 3,600 trials to achieve a statistically significant result. With the free-response type of experiment, such as remote viewing, we typically have to do only six to nine trials. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In an imaginative series of experiments in the 1970s involving precognitive dreams, Stanley Krippner, Montague Ullman, and Charles Honorton found that only eight trials were needed to show the effects of precognition. These researchers at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory worked with Malcolm Besant, a very successful English psychic and the grandson of Annie Besant, one of the founders of The Theosophical Society. In two formal series of eight trials each, Malcolm was asked to dream in the laboratory about the events that he would experience the next morning. Several dozen of these possible feedback experiences had been previously made up by the creative laboratory staff, and written down on file cards. Malcolm was awakened from time to time during the night, when his EEG showed by the appearance of rapid eye movements (REM sleep) that he was dreaming. His dream reports were all tape-recorded. The next morning other lab staff used a random number generator to choose one of the experience cards. Malcolm would then be given that experience. In one typical case Malcolm dreamed of being in a cold, white room with small, blue objects, while experiencing the feeling of being very chilled. When he awakened, the experimenters randomly chose an experience card that instructed them to take him into another room and drop ice cubes down his shirt, while two blue electric fans blew cold air on him.
14 We would say that the morning's ice cubes were the cause of his chilly dream the previous night. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In our experiments at SRI, the first case of precognition appeared spontaneously. I was sitting with Pat Price in our little shielded room, about to start one of the trials in the formal series described in Chapter 2. I had described who we were and what we were doing for the tape recorder, and pat and I were chatting about the experiment in progress. Our lab director, Bart Cox, was the target selector for this trial, because he wanted to have the |
|
|
|
|
|