Chasing The Dream

Quantum effects in physics have been used by new agers and others to argue for all kinds of silly things concerning consciousness and human behavior, but it has to be said that at least these folks have tried to come to grips with philosophical issues of this science. Quantum information theory in particular, which sees the basic constituents of physical reality as bits of information, carries huge philosophical implications for psychology because the Mind is essentially an information processing system. Yet I can find no mainstream psychology reviews of quantum information theory at all. Even a cursory understanding of this new science suggests that the mind simply cannot be understood in terms of the old mechanical materialist dogmas that holds so many psychologists in thrall and unable to see facts that present themselves before their very eyes. We need to, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett (himself enthralled by mechanical materialism and speaking about religion rather than his favored ‘materialist' convictions) said in another context, ‘Break the Spell' of the materialist dogma. One of these dogmas is that the future cannot influence the present or past. But we have data to the contrary. While there have been dozens of conferences in physics on the nature of time and such mind-bending effects as retro causality, psychology has completely missed the boat in this respect.

Two streams of research in psychology, however, have been conducting pilot studies into time anomalies. One concerns precognition in the lab and the other concerns precognition in dreams. Daryl Bem, perhaps the most creative of the scientists investigating precognition ran some classic affective priming paradigms but modified them slightly in order to examine a subject's responses to priming stimuli before the prime even occurs. In a standard priming set-up, affectively positive or negative words appear on a computer screen and then positive or negative pictures appear briefly and the subject has to hit a button as quickly as possible to indicate whether the picture is pleasant or unpleasant. Generally what happens is that if the positive picture comes after the positive word reaction times (RTs) are faster. RTs are also faster if a negative picture comes after a negative word and so forth. These are called congruent conditions. Bem modified this procedure by presenting the picture, then asked for responses from subjects as to whether the picture is pleasant or unpleasant and only then did he present the actual prime (negative or positive word). When the prime word was congruent with the original picture stimulus Bem still got priming effects! It should be noted that Bem presented nine carefully designed and controlled experiments to rule out potential confounding factors in these retroactive priming effects. Like any other biologic capacity, people are expected to vary in their ability to perform precognitive tasks and Bem found evidence of this in his studies. Participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieved a mean effect size of 0.43 on precog tasks. That effect size is not huge but it is respectable.

Bem did not address the issue of precognitive effects associated with dreams but people interested in dreams have noted these effects for millennia. Surveys show that upwards 50% of the general population reports that they experienced at least one recent precognitive dream. A precognitive dream is defined as a dream that exhibits knowledge about the future that the dreamer could not have obtained via nay normal channels.

The most extensive studies on precognition in dreams were carried out by the research group at the Maimonides hospital in New York (Ullman, Krippner, & Vaughan, 1989). In these studies, a ‘sender' attempted to send images to a ‘receiver' who slept in another room and whose sleep was recorded with standard EEG leads. When the sleeper entered REM he was awakened and reported whatever he was dreaming. Independent judges blind to the purpose and procedures of the experiment then took the dreams and judged if they contained any of the images sent by the sender. The experiments were monitored by independent observers and professional magicians to make sure that there was no possible leakage occurring between the experimenters, the sender or receiver. Subsequent analyses of hit rates yielded highly significant results. Dream images very frequently contained images sent by the sender. Further studies in other labs involved the dreamer attempting to dream about a target that would be randomly selected once he awoke. Once again hit rates were far beyond chance levels. Despite these exciting results some labs have failed to replicate the highly significant hit rates while other Labs have replicated the basic findings. Differences in replication may be due to many factors. Psi may not exist at all. Or it may be that you are much more likely to get significant hit rates if you use participants with high Psi abilities like the high stimulus seekers in Bem's studies.

Patrick McNamara, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychology at Northcentral University, Associate Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and Research Associate Professor of Neurology at Department of Neurology, University of Minnesota School Of Medicine in Minneapolis. He is the author of over 60 papers on sleep and dreams several single author books and co-edited volumes on sleep and dreams. His most recent book is 'The Neuroscience of Sleep and Dreams'. He maintains a blog on sleep and dreams for Psychology Today online. He has been awarded grants from the National Institutes of Health to study evolutionary biology and functions of sleep and dreams as well as REM and NREM dream differences. In 2009-10 he appeared on the PBS (NOVA), program ‘What Are Dreams?’ In 2012-13 he appeared in PBS 'Closer to Truth' series on sleep and dreams. In 2013 he was named Chief Science Advisor to Dreamboard.com. He is regularly interviewed on sleep and dreams in international media forums including online blogs, traditional radio and TV, and traditional print magazines/newspapers such as Time magazine, Science Weekly, and the Daily Mail in London. His work on nightmares and dreams has been turned into a theater production and an art installation in Washington DC.

Michelle Carr, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Rochester in the Department of Psychiatry, working in the Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Laboratory with Dr. Wilfred Pigeon. She previously completed postdoctoral training at the Swansea University Sleep Laboratory with Dr. Mark Blagrove, and received her PhD in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Montreal in 2016, conducting research with Dr. Tore Nielsen at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory. Her research interests center on sleep psychophysiology, disturbed dreaming, and dream engineering - applying technologies to influence sleep and dreams to benefit memory, creativity, emotional or physical well-being. She led the organization of the Dream Engineering Workshop at MIT Media Laboratory in January 2019, and guest edited a Special Issue on Dream Engineering with the journal Consciousness and Cognition. She also translates dream science research to the public by writing for Psychology Today.

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