On 17 April 2022, a mere seven and a half months late, I finally submitted what I hoped was the complete and final draft of my book, The Science of Weird Shit, to my extremely patient editor Matt Browne at MIT Press. Matt sent the manuscript out to four independent reviewers who were all very positive in their feedback. However, Reviewer 3 did suggest including an Epilogue where I could offer “an acknowledgment of the potential limitations of skepticism” and “give readers something to hold on to”.
My editor liked the suggestion, so I had to come up with some ideas regarding what to actually include in such a piece. I decided to explore the question of what, if anything, would persuade me that at least some paranormal phenomena were indeed genuine. As it turned out, although I did not know it at the time, this was the beginning of an episode that was to shake my scepticism to the core.
For reasons that I discuss in the book, I am very much of the opinion that a single robust and replicable demonstration of a paranormal effect obtained under well-controlled conditions is worth much more in evidential terms than any number of anecdotal accounts. As it happened, at that time I was just about to embark on an interesting investigation of the possibility that lucid dreams might be precognitive in nature; that is, lucid dreams may contain information about future events before they happen.
Lucid dreams are those in which the dreamer becomes aware of the fact that they are dreaming during the dream itself. With practice, skilled lucid dreamers can actually exert a degree of control over the contents of the dream. The phenomenon of lucid dreaming has been shown to be genuine in numerous studies from sleep laboratories around the world.
I had been contacted by artist and lucid dreamer Dave Green after I had put out an appeal for people with firsthand experience of out-of-body states. Dave’s unique selling point as an artist is that he creates his pictures while in the lucid state and then recreates them when he wakes up. There is a short video on Dave’s website describing his technique. In his words:
“The dream begins with me separating from my body. Now this is a lucid dream so I know what I need to do. I go over to my desk. I grab a dream pen and a dream piece of paper and I attempt to create a drawing. Now this is nothing like drawing in waking life. The image behaves really strangely. Usually I draw just one or two lines, but then the rest of the image gets filled in by the dream. It’s like a live interaction between my conscious and my subconscious mind just playing itself out on the page. When I feel like it’s done, I memorize the image, then I wake myself up and then, back in my physical body, I go back to my desk and recreate the drawing in waking life.”
It turned out that Dave was already involved in a collaborative study with experimental psychologist Julia Mossbridge aimed at testing the hypothesis that lucid dreams may sometimes be precognitive in nature. He asked if I might be interested in getting involved. It sounded like an interesting project so I responded affirmatively. Julia was happy to have me on board. Dave was on the fence regarding whether he himself believed in precognition. Julia was absolutely certain that precognition was real based upon her assessment of the available research literature. I, as you might have guessed, was sceptical.
As I describe in my book, at this point Julia and Dave had carried out one small-scale pilot study and had obtained results that were just about statistically significant. We all agreed that a second small pilot study would be a good idea, this time with my involvement, aimed primarily at deciding on the best methodology to use for a planned larger-scale study.
The second pilot study used a similar methodology to the first. It was agreed that we would collect data from five consecutive lucid dreams, each separated by at least a few nights. On the nights when Dave went into the lucid state, he would remember that he was taking part in the study and attempt to draw a picture that he hoped would be related in some way to a target that would not actually be randomly chosen until the next day. When he awoke, he would recreate the drawing as well as he could and also write a brief verbal description of the dream.
Each dream record, consisting of any pictures plus the verbal description, would then be emailed to me. I would store the record digitally without looking at the contents. I would then randomly select a target from a large target pool. This was the “Target of the Week” database produced by Lyn Buchanan for use in this type of parapsychological research. It consists of hundreds of potential targets. Each target consists of interesting news events and stories from publicly available sources usually in the form of text and a few photographs, sometimes accompanied by short video clips. I would then send the link to the chosen target to Dave and send both the dream record and the target link to Julia.
Once we had data from five consecutive lucid dreams, the judging phase began. Independent judges would be asked to rate the degree of similarity between the five dream records and the five targets. There are several different methods available for rating the degree of match and Julia and I spent some considerable time trying to decide which would be the best method to use. Without going into detail regarding which method we decided to use, the important point to note is that the use of such methods allows the results to be analysed statistically. Much to my surprise, it appeared that the results were, once again, marginally significant. This was getting interesting!
In the second part of this article, I will reveal the outcome of the larger scale study that we had been working towards.
