Telepathy and Dreams: A Failure to Replicate

Abstract

An attempt was made to replicate the procedures and findings of a previous dream-telepathy study conducted at the Maimonides Dream Laboratory. In that study S had, on each of 8 laboratory sessions, placed the true target in the upper half of his rankings for dream correspondence of 8 potential targets (p = .004). S was restudied for 8 nights in a different laboratory. E signaled an acoustically isolated agent at the onset of S's REM periods to concentrate on a target (magazine illustration) randomly selected from the target pool of 8. S's dreams were collected on awakenings from these REM periods. On the following morning, S was given a duplicate target pool and asked to rank the 8 pictures for their correspondence to his dream reports of the night. Two additional judges were given the same task, working both without and with S's associations to his dreams. Neither S nor the judges were able to exceed chance values in matching targets with nocturnal dream production.