ABSTRACT

Anomalous Dreams: Insights from the Maimonides Studies and Future Directions for Research

Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. Alan Watts Professor, Saybrook Institute, past-President of the Association for the Study of Dreams, author of Dream Telepathy, Dreamscaping, Dreamwork and Dreamtime and many other publications on dreams and other topics. Dr. Krippner won a career award from the American Psychological Association for his contributions to international psychology.

Summary of Presentation

Anomalous dreams have been reported throughout history from various cultural groups throughout the world. Parapsychologists usually classify these dreams as "telepathic," "clairvoyant," and "precognitive," with considerable overlap. As a result, the attempt to verify or falsify these reports has been a crucial one for parapsychology and for interested scientists from other disciplines. An attempt was made to study anomalous dreams by Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. This presentation will summarize the research protocol and the overall results, as well as data obtained in other laboratories. Meta-analyses of the two bodies of data supported the existence of anomalous dream phenomena; however, the effect is not easily repeatable and this fact has hampered the acceptance of these investigations into mainstream dream theorizing and clinical dream interpretation.

Learning Objectives.

1) To become familiar with the attribute of anomalous dreams and key research on this topic.

2) To learn about the advantages of naturalistic techniques in dream research.

3) To learn about progress and pitfalls in understanding and researching anomalous dreams.

Evaluation Questions.

1) What is an anomalous dream?

2)  What is one advantage of home dream reports?

3) What was one significant finding of the Maimonides experiments?

Abstract 

Laboratory studies focusing on anomalous dreams were conducted at the Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York, in the 1960s and 1970s. Since that time, additional studies of anomalous dreams, both with laboratory and home dream reports, have been conducted. Combined effect size estimates for both sets of studies (Maimonides r = 0.33, 95% C.I. 0.24 to 0.43; post-Maimonides r = 0.14, 95% C.I. 0.06 to 0.22) suggest that judges could correctly identify target materials, more often than would be expected by chance, using reports of dream mentation. The Maimonides studies were significantly more successful (p< 0.05) than post-Maimonides studies, which may be due to procedural differences, including that post-Maimonides receivers tended to sleep at home and were generally not deliberately awakened from REM sleep. Methodological shortcomings of some of the studies will be discussed. Nevertheless, home dream report research has been successful and continues to be a less expensive and less labor-intensive alternative to sleep-laboratory-based research.  Most of the studies involved so-called "telepathic" effects, but "clairvoyant" and "precognitive" dreams were also investigated.

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