Clairvoyance and Dreams
In this section, I want to give the story of several dream phenomena that have been documented and discussed by parapsychologists. The first includes a woman who was on a farm in Oregon. One morning, she was jolted awake at 3:40 AM by the sound of people screaming. The sound quickly vanished, but she felt a smoky, unpleasant taste in her mouth. She woke up her husband, and together they searched the farm but found nothing out of the ordinary. That evening on the news, they heard about a plant explosion that started a huge chemical fire which killed six people. The explosion occurred at 3:40 AM.
In Phantasms of the Living, a classic book in psychical research, Mrs. Morris Griffith, who lived in North Wales in 1884, reported having a similar experience. On Saturday, March 11th, 1871, she awoke from a dream in a state of alarm. She had seen her oldest son, who was then off the coast of southwest Africa, looking dreadfully weak and ill. She heard his voice calling to her, saying "Mamma." This kept happening every time she would try to go back to sleep. On May 9th, a letter arrived with the news of her son's death. he had been struck with a fever on the night of March 11th, and just before he died, he kept calling for his mother.
One final example of dream clairvoyance actually includes precognition. Precognition is basically knowing something before it is going to happen, without having any knowledge of it from the five senses, or any other means of gathering information. Such an example is the Aberfan Disaster that happened on October 21, 1966. The disaster was a collapse of a coal mining operation in the Welsh village of Aberfan. Water had built up in the rock and shale, which resulted in an enormous landslide onto the town below. Eryl Mai Jones, a ten year old girl, told her mother about a dream she had the night before the disaster. She dreamed that something black had covered the entire school. The next day, the avalanche killed 116 children and 28 adults, and destroyed part of the school where Jones attended.
Remote Viewing
Remote viewing experiments were revitalized in the mid 1970s. The experiments were simple picture drawing tests. In a typical experiment, the "viewer" is asked to either sketch or describe a "target." The target could be a remote location or individual, or a hidden object, photograph, and video clip. The target is separated from the view in order to prevent any type of sensory leakage. Sometimes, the target and the viewer are separated by thousands of miles. Sometimes, the viewer sits with an interviewer who asks questions about what the viewer sees. It should go without saying that in these cases, the interviewer has no idea what the target is either.
From 1973-1988 Edwin May conducted these type of experiments at SRI. The analysis was based on 154 experiments, which consisted of more than 26,000 separate trials. Just over 1000 of them were remote viewing tests. When analyzed, the statistical results indicated odds against chance 1020
From 1989-1993, the CIA sanctioned a review of the government sponsored remote viewing research that were conducted at Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC. This study was not meant to be "proof oriented", but was rather used to try and understand how psi perception works. This is quite interesting since the government not only confirms the existence of psi phenomenon, but have actually used it.
After studying the SRI and SAIC experiments in exhaustive detail, the government review committee came to six general conclusions. 1) Free-response remote viewing was more successful than forced choice (we've discussed this in previous articles). 2) Psi performance among a small group of selected individuals far exceeded volunteers. 3) Only 1% of people showed ongoing consistency in remote viewing. 4) Nether practice nor training consistently improved a persons ability in remote viewing. 5) Feedback about the target provides a psychological boost that helps the viewers perform better for the next experiment. 6) Neither the used of electromagnetic shielding nor the distance between the target and the viewer seems to make a difference in how well someone can perform remote viewing.
Precognitive Remote Perception
In somewhat of a different flavor, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab at Princeton University, began to conduct their own studies in remote viewing. They referred to this phenomena as "precognition remote perception," or PRP. They thought that this was a better title, since in many of their trials, the targets were randomly selected after they were described. If you didn't catch that, what this means is that there is both precognition and remote viewing going on here. The viewer would "see" and object and describe it, but not target had been picked yet. After this, a site or an object would then be randomly selected. For example, in one trial, the percipient and an agent were separated by 2200 miles. About 45 miniutes before the agent randomly selected a site, the percipient described the following impression:
"Rather strange yet persistent image of (agent) inside a large bowl- a hemispheric indentation ini the gournd of some smooth man-made materials like concrete or cement. No color. Possible covered with a glass dome. Unusual sense of inside/outside simultaneity. That's all. It's a large bowl. If it was full of soup, (the agent) would be the size of a large dumpling"
The agent, as it turned out, was headed to Kitt Peak, Arizona, where he would be visiting a large radio telescope. The viewers description provides an accurate portrait, since a radio telescope resembles a "large bowl." When the PEAR trials came to an end, the final result was odds against chance 100 billion to 1.
In closing, both the anecdotal and experimental data confirm that clairvoyance/precognition/remote viewing are a real phenomena. Most mind blowing is the PEAR experiments. Not only in what they entail (PRP), but the staggering odds against chance. I find the PEAR experiments and research one of the most convincing studies of the existence of psi ability. In the next post, we will look at this phenomena from a biblical perspective.