Dream Telepathy
Category: Spiritual
The attempt to measure a matching dream in the laboratory
Dream Telepathy is the idea that information passes through dreams between people who are apart, and it is one of the subjects parapsychology has taken up. From the 1960s into the 1970s, the psychiatrist Montague Ullman and the psychologist Stanley Krippner set out to test that idea in a laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York. A "sender" concentrated on a randomly chosen painting while a "receiver" in a separate room entered REM sleep, and the question was whether the content of that painting would be drawn into the receiver's dream.
The receiver was woken during REM periods to report the dream, and judges who had not been told which painting was the target rated how closely the dream report matched it. The research team reported statistically significant results in several experimental series, and the study drew attention as a parapsychology experiment with orderly procedure. Even so, a report having been made and the phenomenon existing are two different things.
The fact that the results were not reproduced
The Maimonides reports were argued over on the scientific side for a long time. Supporters pointed to the strictness of the procedure, including randomization and keeping the judges blind; critics raised the handling of the statistics, the chance that the experimenters' expectations worked their way into the outcome, and the existence of trials that were never published. The largest point of dispute is replication.
Attempts to repeat the work by teams other than the original one did not produce consistent results, reports that pool several such attempts found the effect very small, and a bias toward publishing only convenient outcomes is suspected. Mainstream science does not treat the existence of telepathy as demonstrated. It is more accurate to place Dream Telepathy not as a phenomenon confirmed by experiment but as a hypothesis that was put to the test and left without support. At the same time, the way these experiments were built raised the standard of procedure expected in parapsychological research.
The history of the idea before the experiments
The notion of learning about distant events through a dream goes back far earlier than the experiments. Ancient dream books collect anecdotes about hearing of events in a faraway place through a dream, and the habit of talking over what appeared in a dream within the community is recorded in ethnographies from many regions. Refusing to see a dream as something sealed inside one person is nothing new.
In "Dreams and Telepathy" (1922), Freud took up reports of telepathic dreams brought to him by his patients. He did not accept there that telepathy exists; he took the position of analyzing how such a dream had been put together and how it came to be reported. Jung touched on parapsychological experiments while discussing synchronicity, a meaningful coincidence not linked by cause and effect, and his account is sometimes drawn on when thinking about the experience of a matching dream.
How to read the sense that you shared a dream
From here on, this is not the argument about whether the phenomenon exists but our own position on how to read that kind of experience. Having "the same dream as someone I know" or learning "how someone living far away is doing" through a dream is not a rare experience. The first things to hold on to are that the parts that match are the parts most likely to stay in memory, which is confirmation bias, and that people caught up in the same event or carrying the same worry are prone to similar dreams anyway. When two people who watched the same news the night before report similar dreams, nothing mysterious has happened.
On top of that, what the experience means to the person who had it is a separate matter. When a dream feels as though it connected you with someone, what the dream is facing is usually the relationship with that person itself. A wish to be bound more closely, unease about being apart, guilt over having failed to get in touch: these rise up in the shape of a dream. Writing down, alongside the dream itself, the day you last saw that person and what you could not say at the time makes it easier to see what the dream is handling.
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