Dream weavers

Hard-nosed science types like myself are often criticized by the paranormal enthusiasts for setting too high a bar for what we'll accept as evidence.  The supernatural world, they say, doesn't come when called, is highly sensitive to the mental states of people who are nearby, and isn't necessarily going to be detectable to scientific measurement devices.  Also, since a lot of the skeptics come into the discussion with a bias toward disbelief, they'll be likely to discount any hard evidence that does arise as a hoax or misinterpretation of natural phenomena.

Which, as I've mentioned before, is mighty convenient.  It seems to boil down to, "It exists, and you have to believe because I know it exists."  And I'm sorry, this simply isn't good enough.  If there are real paranormal phenomena out there, they should be accessible to the scientific method.  Such claims should stand or fall on the basis of evidence, just like any other proposed model of how things work.

The problem becomes more difficult with the specific claim of precognition/clairvoyance -- the idea that some of us (perhaps all of us) are capable of predicting the future, either through visions or dreams.  The special difficulty with this realm of the paranormal world is that a dream can't be proven to be precognitive until after the event it predicts actually happens; before that, it's just a weird dream, and you would have no particular reason to record it for posterity.  And given the human propensity for hoaxing, not to mention the general plasticity of memory, a claim that a specific dream was precognitive is inadmissible as evidence after the event in question has occurred.  It always reminds me of the quote from the 19th century Danish philosopher and writer, Søren Kierkegaard: "The tragedy of life is that it can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards."

This double-bind has foiled any attempts to study precognition... until now.  According to an article in Vice, a man named Hunter Lee Soik is attempting to create the world's largest database of dreams, in the hopes that the evidence from it will establish once and for all that clairvoyance exists.

Soik is the man behind Shadow, an app for recording your dreams.  You enter them into the app upon waking, and they are timestamped and placed in a worldwide dream database.  The database software is able to identify keywords; what Soik is hoping is that prior to major world events, there will be a spike in keywords relating to those events.  And given that the transcripts are timestamped, such spikes (should they occur) would be incontrovertible evidence that precognition, or at the very least some kind of collective consciousness, is occurring while people are asleep.

[image courtesy of photographer Rachel Calamusa and the Wikimedia Commons]

"(W)hat happens if we can start looking at precognitive dreams, and say, 'Oh, there are actually correlations that are happening in real time?'" Soik asks.  "If we had this data back during 9/11, we could point to a time-stamped audio file describing the dream that predates the actual event. So, how could you then refute that kind of hard data?"

Which certainly is approaching the question the right way.  My only concern is that the keywords would be specific enough, and the spikes analyzed for statistical significance.  Even if you accept particular accounts of dreams as true, the difficulty is that humans have dreams about a rather narrow range of things -- some of the more common ones reported are dreams of being chased, of falling, of death (either our own or of someone we know), of sex, of being naked, of being lost.  To represent an actual signal -- evidence of precognition -- you would have to establish (for example) that a statistically-significant spike in dreams about death had a direct relationship to a particular violent occurrence in the world, and wasn't just representing an upsurge in anxiety over the state of things.

But like I said: Shadow, and its creator Soik, seem to be taking the correct approach.  I do wish, however, that Soik wouldn't sail off into the ether so regularly, because it doesn't do anything for his credibility.  In his Vice interview, he states that precognition is like Schrödinger's Cat (a comparison that escapes me completely) and goes on to say, "Who else is dreaming what you're dreaming, for example?  I really believe a lot in quantum field mechanics.  And I believe that a lot of the science jargon [means] simply: If you're happy, and you hang out with someone, you make them happy, and they make someone else happy."

To which I respond:  (1) No, that is not what the science says.  (2) What the fuck does this even mean?

Be that as it may, I encourage any of my readers who are interested in contributing to get the Shadow app (you can download it from the link I included above).  The bigger the database, the easier it will be to establish whether any data generated is statistically significant.  And it would be nice to have a wide variety of people involved with contributing dream data, not just the woo crowd that usually gravitates toward such endeavors.

I'm thinking of doing it myself.  I could include last night's dream, which was about a state senator from Alaska who accidentally chopped my dog's tail off, and whom I was trying to talk into paying me $10,000 in damages for the mental anguish she was experiencing, because she could no longer wag to express "I'm happy" and "Oh, look, a squirrel," which seem to be the two most sophisticated concepts her lone functioning brain cell is capable of processing.

I wonder what world event that might be predicting?

Grist for the mill

Over the Thanksgiving holiday we were in Northampton, Massachusetts visiting family, and we took the opportunity to visit an amazing used bookstore called The Bookmill, in Montague.

[image courtesy of photographer John Phelan and the Wikimedia Commons]

The Bookmill is sited in an old mill house on the Sawmill River, and bills itself as "books you don't need in a place you can't find."  We found it anyhow, and spent a diverting couple of hours wandering around its maze of little wood-floored rooms and creaking, narrow staircases, and (of course) came away with a box full of books, which we did too need, thank you very much.

For my son Nathan: a book on quantum physics and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy.  For my wife Carol: several books of poetry and essays.  For me, on the other hand, three masterpieces:

• Ghosts Among Us: Eyewitness Accounts of True Hauntings, by Harry Ludlum
• UFOs and How to See Them, by Jenny Randles
• How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, by W. E. Butler

All of this elicited a great amount of eye-rolling on the part of various family members.  Myself, I was thrilled, and these books will now occupy a nice spot on my bookshelf next to Abominable Snowmen: Legend Come to Life by Ivan T. Sanderson.

But not, of course, before I entertain you with a few excerpts.

From Ghosts Among Us, we read the following, in a story called "The Council House Horrors:"

A family of four, a couple and their grown-up son and daughter, living in a post-war council house in Swindon, Wiltshire, were rehoused when it was feared they were heading for nervous breakdowns. 

First, Mrs. Gladys Tucker saw the shadow of a man standing on the landing.  Then all manner of strange things began to happen.  Objects moved themselves mysteriously; windows that should have been shut were found open; door handles raised and lowered themselves.  Apparitions of animals were seen.  The daughter saw strange lights on her bed and bedroom walls.  The son was held pinned to a wall by an unseen force. 

The daughter was driven to seeing a nerve specialist, while the son was so shaken that he left home to live with a relation. 

When their father, Mr. Herbert Tucker, a storekeeper, now deeply concerned for the health of his wife and daughter, called on the council for help, police went over the house thoroughly and the local electricity board inspected wires and lights, but they found nothing.

Because that's a logical thing to do if your kid is "pinned to a wall by an unseen force."  "Well, Mr. Tucker, your son may have been thrown against a wall by an evil spirit, but your wires and breaker boxes look fine.  I'll leave you with my bill, shall I?"

We are told that the Tuckers moved out, but were followed by other tenants who had bizarre experiences, including seeing the ghost of a dead window-washer who had fallen and broken his neck, and a specter of a headless girl.  But eventually the whole thing died down, presumably because the ghosts got bored and moved to somewhere nicer than a "post-war council house."


Now, let's turn to my second find, UFOs and How to See Them.  My first thought, on picking this one up, was, "How can you write an instruction manual on how to see UFOs?  It's not like they come when called, or anything."  But this is exactly what Ms. Randles has set out to do.  In it, we read such tantalizing hints as:

• UFOs are often sighted near geologic fault zones
• UFOs are more likely to be seen after cold fronts pass through an area
• Crop circles are left behind by aliens as an intelligence test
• William Shatner got lost on his motorcycle in the Mojave Desert, and was guided to safety by a "silvery UFO"
• Ezekiel's visions in the bible were UFO sightings
• "City folk are largely unobservant.  A giant UFO could drift overhead and many of them would never see it!"

So there you are, then.  To her credit, Ms. Randles does give a lot of information on "IFOs" -- "identified flying objects."  She tells you how to recognize known phenomena, so you are less likely to be fooled if you see a weather balloon, a distant jet, a bird, or the planet Venus.  So that's all to the good, although I do sort of wish the aliens had left William Shatner out there in the desert.

Then we have the amazing How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy, and Clairvoyance, the book that was thrown across the room in disgust by my brother-in-law after reading the following:

The etheric vision is sometimes called "X ray vision" as it allows its possessor to see through physical matter.  In the early days of mesmerism it was developed for the medical diagnosis of diseases, and since the etheric clairvoyant can, in some cases, apparently see into the interior of the human body and closely observe the working of its various organs, it is easy to see how very helpful this form of clairvoyance can be.

My sense is that it wouldn't be so much "helpful" as "disgusting," but that's just me.

Of course, I was curious about auras, and so I turned to the chapter called "What is the Aura?" to read the following:

... (T)he aura is defined as "a subtle invisible essence or fluid said to emanate from human and animal bodies, and even from things; a psychic electro-vital, electro-mental effluvium, partaking of both mind and body, hence the atmosphere surrounding a person..."  The aura is usually seen as a luminous atmosphere around all living things, including what we regard as inanimate matter.

So, living things, including non-living things.  Got it.

Nathan's comment about the above was that if you're experiencing an electro-mental effluvium, you should probably see a doctor.  I replied that he only thought that because he had a puce-colored aura.


Anyhow.  If you're ever in northwestern Massachusetts, you should definitely visit The Bookmill.  You probably won't find books as entertaining as the three I bought, but I'm sure you'll come away with something awesome.