Zoekresultaten

Black transparency in the era of post-truth

A new approach to veridicality in Dream Psi Studies

A problem in spontaneous dream psi studies is validation of purported psi elements. Dreams rarely have enough specifi city to satisfy critics that they point to paranormal knowledge of a specifi c event. This creates evidential hurdles to overcome when evaluating whether a dream contains psi-derived information such as scenes of future events or physically distant locations. In this study, the goal is to arrive at a reasonable method to establish that information derived from spontaneous dream experiences can be established as veridical. To accomplish this, a method for fi nding the equivalent of a target within a spontaneous experience is used to fi x a specifi c locale and time for comparison. Adverse scoring criteria are used to address complaints about confi rmation bias. The result is a psi-adverse method for scoring spontaneous experiences that are anchored to a specifi c locale and time. This method regularly produced signifi cant p-values when used to assess 20 consecutive dream records, comprising 598 individual line items. These records were taken as a sample from a group of 3,305 dream records made over the past 22 years by the author.

NDE Implications from a group of spontaneous long-distance veridical OBEs

The case for veridical out-of-body experiences (OBEs) reported in near-death experiences might be strengthened by accounts of well-documented veridical OBEs not occurring near death. However, such accounts are not easily found in the literature, particularly accounts involving events seen at great distances from the percipient. In this article, I seek to mitigate this paucity of literature using my collection of dream journal OBE cases. Out of 3,395 records contained in the database as of June 15, 2012, 226 had demonstrated veridicality. This group divides into examples of precognition, after-death communications, and OBEs. Of the OBEs, 92 are veridical. The documentation involved is stronger than is normally encountered in spontaneous cases, because it is made prior to confirmation attempts, all confirmations are contemporaneous, and the number of verified records is large relative to the total number of similar cases in the literature. This database shows that NDE-related veridical OBEs share important characteristics of veridical OBEs that are not part of an NDE. Because the OBEs are similar, but the conditions are not, skeptical arguments that depend on specific physical characteristics of the NDE-such as the use of drugs and extreme physical distress-are weakened. Other arguments against purported psi elements found in veridical OBEs are substantially weakened by the cases presented in this article.

Can death-related dreams predict future deaths? Evidence from a dream Journal comprising nearly 12,000 Dreams

Dreams that appear to predict future events that could not have been anticipated through any known inferential processes have been reported for centuries, and dreams that appear to anticipate the death of an acquaintance or loved one are particularly common. Such reports become more suggestive of genuine precognition if there are no natural cues (such as an illness) to an impending death and if the time interval between the dream and the subsequent death is brief. Most reports are difficult to evaluate because we dream many times each night but typically remember and report only a salient subset of our dreams. Thus we cannot assess whether the time interval between a death-related dream and the death of the dream character is brief or lengthy because we have no control set of non-death-related dreams to which its time interval can be compared. The study reported here provides just such a control set by comparing deathrelated and non-death-related dreams featuring the same set of dream characters who died after the dreams occurred. These were drawn from the author's own dream journal in which he has recorded his nightly dreams for nearly twenty-five years. The mean time interval between death-related dreams and the person's subsequent death was significantly shorter than the time interval between non-death-related dreams and his or her death, t(11) = 3.30, p =.004, one-tailed. Cases in which death-related dreams occurred after the characters had died are also considered. Seven of the cases are discussed in detail.