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Montague Ullman och Stanley Krippner vid Maimonides Medical Center i New York ville undervälkontrollerade laboratoriebetingelser demonstrera att ESP kunde uppträda i drömmar. Procedurcn gick ut på att jämföra försökspersonens berättelse med slumpvis valda målningar som sänts av en sändare i ett annat rum. Försökspersonen får på morgonen se åtta eller tolv malningar, av vilka en var en kopia av den malbild sändaren försökte sända. Han fick sedan rangordna bilderna utifrån hur mycket den svarade mot hans drömmar. Denna rangordning gjordes också av tre utomståcnde som fick jämföra uppställningen målningar mot den inspelade beskrivningen.
Resultaten från försöken [6] visar på ett övertygande sätt att man i laboratoriemiljö kan förmedla ESP i drömmar.
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Ullman's first subject was Eileen Garrett, the medium. Electrodes were attached to her head so that the objective EEG indicators for dreaming (e.g., rapid eye movement activity, changes in brain waves) could be observed. Ullman himself served as the telepathic sender and some striking correspondences between target pictures and dreams were reported during both nights of a pilot study (Ullman & Krippner, 1989). In 1962, a dream laboratory was established at Brooklyn's Maimonides Medical Center where Ullman initiated formal experimental work. I joined him in 1964, and we conducted 13 dream and ESP experiments over the next decade. In 9 instances the results were statistically sign)ficant; in 7 instances the ESP task was telepathic, in the other 2 it was precognitive (Krippner, 1991).
Both precognitive dream experiments utilized a British psychic sensitive, Malcom Bessent, as the recipient. The Maimonides team attempted to explore whether or not Bessent could dream about a waking life experience which would be arranged for him after his night of dreaming was over. When Bessent was awakened after his final period of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, an experimenter (who had not been presented while Bessent's dreams were collected) selected a random number which directed him to a list of dream images. An experience was created around the randomly selected image. One morning, the image parka hood was randomly chosen by a toss of dice, and the experimenters had an hour to prepare a post-sleep experience based on the image. When Bessent left the soundproof sleep room, he was taken to an of fice draped with sheets to resemble snow. As he inspected a photograph of an Eskimo wearing a parka hood, an ice cube was dropped down his back. Several hours earlier, Bessent had dreamed about ice, a room in which everything was white, and a man with white hair. His dreams on each of the 8 nights of the study were congruent with the following morning's experience, and outside judges were able to match the correct dream with the correct post-sleep experience with an accuracy that was statistically sign)ficant. Bessent returned the following year for a similar experiment, but one in which the controls were even tighter. A dozen experiences were packaged by an experimenter who left for Europe shortly after he selected the props and wrote the instructions. Again, a team of EEG specialists put Bessent to bed and collected the dreams. Another experimenter selected a number randomly, and picked the sealed container to which it corresponded. Outside judges (unaware of the correct matches) were able to detect traces of the postsleep experiences in Bessent's pre-experience dreams, and their judgments again yielded statistically significant results, indicating that coincidence was highly unlikely. One night Bessent had several dreams about birds, one of which he reported as
Just water....A few ducks and things. It's fairly misty, but there are quite a lot mandrake geese and various birds of some kind swimming around in rushes or reeds.... I just have a feeling that the next target material will be about birds.
The following day, Bessent was taken into a darkened room, sat before a screen, and watched several dozen slides of birds - birds in the water, birds in the air, birds on the land. And an accompanying tape played bird calls!
For the telepathic dreams studies, our basic research procedure was to fasten electrodes to the head of a subject, take him or her to a soundproof room, then randomly select a sealed, opaque envelope containing a colorful art print. A psychologist would then take the envelope to a distant room, open it, and study the art print while the laboratory subject (in bed and asleep) attempted to incorporate material from the art print into his or her dreams without ever seeing it. The subject would be awakened at the end of each REM period and his or her dreams would be take recorded and later transcribed. Upon completion of a series of experiments, outside judges compared the typed dream reports with the total collection of art prints, attempting to identify the print used on the night of each experiment.
Such prominent dream researchers as David Foulkes, Gordon Globus, Calvin Hall, and Robert Van de Castle attempted to replicate our findings. Because the replication rate from other laboratories was inconsistent, we did not claim to have conclusively demonstrated that communication in dreams can sometimes transcend space and time; however, we did open a promising line of investigation and stimulated the study of psi phenomena in altered states of consciousness.
Like Freud, Ullman took the position that sleep, especially REM sleep, is a favorable setting for telepathy and other forms of psi. But Ullman's perspective is different than that of Freud. Ullman (1961) believes that REM sleep is a natural arena in which creativity is at play. Dreams tend to arrange information in unique and emotionally-related ways. They depart from rational thought, grouping images together in bizarre associations, and making liberal use of metaphor in constructing the dream story. As a consequence, new relationships emerge that sometimes provide a breakthrough for a waiting and observant mind. Dreams serve a vigilance function - like a sentry alerting the dreamer to whatever may intrude into his or her dream consciousness. Ullman's vigilance theory of dreaming posits that during REM sleep, the dreamer scans not only the intemal environment but also those aspects of the external environment that he or she can perceive by anomalous means. During sleep, hunters and gatherers were vulnerable to attack. Contemporary human beings respond to symbolic threats, rather than to physical dangers. Yet vigilance still operates, and REM sleep, perhaps because of its linkage to a primordial danger sensing mechanism, provides a favorable state for anomalous communication.
Ullman's theory is not incompatible with J.A. Hobson's (1988) proposal that, during REM sleep, the brain is activated internally by random neural firing from lower brain centers that stimulate higher brain centers. For Hobson, the dream results from a knitting together of these neurologically evoked memories and images. I would propose that the random nature of this neurological firing provides an opportunity for anomalous effects to operate, either influencing portions of the cortex that are stimulated or the images that are evoked.
