Thread: What are Your Thoughts on This?

What are your Thoughts on This

Exogenous dream continuity: Exploring the matrix of entangled dreams | Van de Castle | International Journal of Dream Research

I found it Here:
Exogenous dream continuity: Exploring the matrix of entangled dreams | Van de Castle | International Journal of Dream Research | Notes From a Dreamer | Scoop.it

One has to print out the whole PDF because the PDF program won’t let one copy and paste.

What are your Thoughts on This

Exogenous dream continuity: Exploring the matrix of entangled dreams | Van de Castle | International Journal of Dream Research

I found it Here:
Exogenous dream continuity: Exploring the matrix of entangled dreams | Van de Castle | International Journal of Dream Research | Notes From a Dreamer | Scoop.it

One has to print out the whole PDF because the PDF program won’t let one copy and paste. The PDF begins at page 9 and is 8 pages. I will type it out. The real paragraphs begin where I put a (*). I break-up long paragraphs to keep it easy to read for folk like me.

Commentary IJODR

Exogenous dream continuity: Exploring the matrix of entangled dreams

Commentary on “The continuity and discontinuity between waking and dreaming: A Dialogue between Michael Schredl and Allan Hobson concerning the adequacy and completeness of these notions”

Robert L. Van de Castle

University of Virginia Medical Center, Charlottesville, VA, USA

*The topic under discussion in this issue of IJoDR (International Journal of Dream Research) involves the adequacy and completeness of the notions concerning what the primary authors (Schredl and Hobson) have offered concerning this topic, and then comment about the much more extensive critical evaluations proffered by Kelly Bulkeley and William Domhoff.

I will subsequently make available material from a previously unpublished chapter by Calvin Hall describing some of his laboratory studies that I think raise profound questions about how far ranging the parameters of dream continuity may extend. To amplify those questions, I describe some related [B]research by myself and others that support Hall’s empirical findings.

*I found the overall collection of papers in this dialogue interesting, although I was disappointed in the shallowness of the way that Schredl and Hobson presented their arguments regarding the continuity hypothesis. I completely agree with Kelly Bulkeley’s statement: “To neglect Domhoff’s word in a discussion of the scientific merits of the continuity hypothesis call into question the adequacy of any conclusions drawn from that discussion” (p. 48).

Similarly, I strongly concur with the opening paragraph by Domhoff: “The Schredl/Hobson discussion of continuity and discontinuity between dreaming and waking goes astray from the outset because Schredl provides an inadequate characterization of Calvin S. Hall’s “continuity hypothesis” in his opening statement and in Box 1.

More generally, their discussion minimizes and trivializes Hall’s main ideas and findings to the borderline of caricature. His continuity hypothesis and its anticipation of later developments in cognitive psychology deserves better (pg. 50). Domhoff then goes on to present a masterful and wide ranging summary of just how extensive the contributions were that Hall had made to the topic of dream continuity.

*Not covered in Domhoff’s review was the information that Calvin Hall was writhin a book entitled The scientific Study of Dreams that he did not complete before his death. He had chapter (7) entitled: “The Effects of Subliminal Stimuli on Dreams.” In his opening paragraph, Hall indicated (p. 139): “The procedure in the investigations to be reported consisted of presenting material to a person while he was in such a manner that all the ordinary channels of communication appeared to have been excluded.

Studies of this character are usually referred to as extrasensory perception or ESP experiments. … I prefer to use the term “subliminal stimulation” because it makes no assumptions about the manner in which the stimulus is transmitted or received. (~400 words)
(to be continued)

Studies of this character are usually referred to as extrasensory perception or ESP experiments. … I prefer to use the term “subliminal stimulation” because it makes no assumptions about the manner in which the stimulus is transmitted or received. (~400 words)

(continued)

It is a purely descriptive and theoretical term which describes the nature of the stimulating conditions.

In a subsequent paragraph. Hall notes (p.140):

“The literature abounds with accounts of prophetic and telepathic dreams, many of which have been reported by well-know people. A majority of persons with whom I have spoken on the subject can recall at least one dream that came true, and many of them have unshakable convictions that dreams can foretell the future. A psychologist with whom I am acquainted kept a record of his dreams for many years. In the beginning, he repudiated the idea of prophetic dreams as a primitive superstition. Gradually, his attitude began to change when he observed that some of he\is dreams presaged future events.

Today, after 30 years of keeping a dream diary, he is convinced that at least 10% of them are precognitive. By contrast, my personal dream diary contains only one dream that might be considered prophetic.”

At The International Conference of Parapsychological Association held in Utrecht in 2008, I delivered a paper entitled, “Dreams and ESP” (Van de Castle, Dreams and ESP, 2009), which reviewed the literature involving large scale surveys of spontaneous ESP dreams.

The largest collection of psychic experiences was compiled by Louisa Rhine who filed over 15,000 reports (Rhine, 1978, pg. 21). She indicated that over 60% of these reports consisted of dreams, and approximately 2/3 of these dreams could be classified as realistic. In my chapter, I listed five books about psychic experiences that each contain over 100 dream reports.

In my chapter, I listed five books about psychic experiences that each contain over 100 dream reports.

*On p. 141, Hall wrote:

“With the advent of sleep monitoring techniques and objective methods of content analysis, it has become possible to do fairly rigorous controlled experiments on the incorporation in dreams of material subliminally presented during sleep. In the language of parapsychology these are investigations of mental telepathy during sleep.”

The first set of experiments was conducted in the laboratory of the Institute of Dream Research under my personal supervision (Hall, 1967).* [*An informal discussion with Montague Ullman about his extrasensory perception experiments stimulated me to undertake these investigations.]

In this same paragraph (p. 142), Hall notes:

“It is not irrelevant to mention that when experiments were begun I was sceptical of obtaining positive results. … These personal observations are pertinent because investigators of psychic phenomena have been accused of finding what they want to find, and of not being sufficiently critical of their experiments.

Nothing that I had read concerning telepathic dreams had persuaded me of their reality.

As a result of our studies, I am fairly well convinced that dreams can be influenced by subliminal stimuli present during sleep (p.142).

Hall then provided a detailed description of the experimental procedures he utilized in his studies, and several pages later described some of his work with me.

*”The first two presentations with Van de Castle as the subject did not have any discernible effect on the dreams he reported.

*”The first two presentations with Van de Castle as the subject did not have any discernible effect on the dreams he reported.

The third topic consisted of watching a prize fight. The experimenter visualized a prize fight mentally, looked at pictures of prize fighters in a magazine, wrote out the message:

“You are watching a prize fight”.

And stood up and engaged in shadowboxing.

These activities were continued for about fifteen minutes.

When the subject was awakened, he reported a long dream into the tape recorder.

The first third of the dream was sexual in character, then the following episode was recorded:

“The setting shifted to a large auditorium and there was a boxing match going on. There were two young lightweight boxers who were fighting and one of them was doing much better than the other. It seems his opponent became vanquished and then another lightweight contender got into the ring with him. This new contender now started to give a pretty savage beating to the other boxer who was at one point kind of started to use a double punch where both hands would be brought from the outside and would simultaneously hit the other boxer’s head at the same time.

My sentiments began to be for the underdog, and I remember standing up and throwing a few imaginary punches myself because I was so involved with the action in the ring.”

The description of the fight continued for 9 more lines, and then shifted back to the theme of the first part of the dream” (p. 145).

The description of the fight continued for 9 more lines, and then shifted back to the theme of the first part of the dream” (p. 145).

*Although I experienced this dream back in 1967, I can still recall the vividness and intensity of that dream 45 years later. It served as my personal introduction to the reality of psychic phenomena, even though I had an extensive reading background on the subject matter for 15 years prior to that time. For the person experiencing this kind of impactful dream, no amount of scepticism by omniscient scientists can ever dissuade an experiencer of this kind of powerful psychic event that they were deluded.

If you get hit by a truck, you know that you hit by a truck, and no amount of critical comments ‘by these arbiters of reality’ will ever convince you that the truck that hit you was an imaginary truck.

*Given Hall’s propensity to quantify dream content, the reader should not be surprised to find that Hall attempted to evaluate the likelihood of the prize fighting dream by resorting to some effort to quantify what the odds might be for such a dream to be experienced by a particular dreamer.

“In our investigation, we were able to determine the probability that a dreamer would have a dream in which the stimulus material was represented. The determination was made in the following manner.

First,

We collected a number of dreams from the subject which were dreamed during nights other than when the particular topic had been transmitted.

We then

Examined each of these dreams to see whether there was any mention of the stimulus material in it. For example, we obtained 97 dreams from the subject who had dreamed of a prize fight when that topic was sent.

There were no mention of a boxing match in any of the 97 dreams, so that the chances of this having such a dream was absolutely nil for this sample of dreams.

This is actually not a fair test because if he had dreamed of any kind of fighting and not just boxing, it would have been counted as a congruence. So we went through the 97 dreams again and noted every dream in which any kind of fighting appeared. There were four such dreams. The chances are four out of 97, or about one out of 25, that on any specific night, the subject would dream of a fight.

This does not rule out coincidence…probabilities never do… but it lends support to the existence of a causal relationship between the subliminal stimulation and the dream” (p. 153)

In commenting about the boxing dream, Hall stated:

"Several things will be noted about the incorporationinto the dream of the topic.

First,

it was a very direct reproduction of what the experimenter was thinking about and pantomiming.

Second,

the boxing episode was inserted into the dream and appeared to have no connection with what went before it and what followed it.

This inserted quality is also what one finds when a sleeping person is stimulated by a sound, a light, or drops of water. It appears that the subject recieved the message in the middle of a dream which was interupted in order to incorporate the subliminal stimulus and then returned to the main dream again.

Third,

the subjects personal involvement in the action by standing up and throwing a few imaginary punches may have reflected the experimenter's rather spirited but silent pantomiming in the next room ." (that's paragragh 8).

DebraJane,

If you're copying that by hand, there are programs for converting pdf to text:

pdftotext - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thanks for posting this DebraJane. I'll look into this more this week when I have more time.

Paragragh 9

These experiments were then conducted with 5 other subjects on whom a total of 121 presentations of stimilus material were made

In 56 of these presentations, some corrospondence was noted between the material that was sent and the contents of the dream that were subsequently reported.

These corrospondences were not usually as close as those observed in the prizefight dream (p. 144-146).

Some examples of the correspondences found with these 5 dreamers is reported in my book, Our Dreaming Mind (p. 148) and also in a German publication, "Experiments on Telepathy Influenced Dreams" (Hall 1967b).

Paragraph 10

In addition to the main findings of the experiments, a number of interesting observations were made.

On one subject we varied the procedure by placing a sealed envelope containing a typed description of a topic under the mattress of the bed in which the subject slept.

The envelope was selected at random from a bunch of envelopes so that neither the experimenter nor anyone else knew what the topic was.

Nor did the subject know the envelope was there.

A new envelope containing a different topic was used every night for 17 nights.

In four of the 17 dreams that were reported (the subject was awakened only once a night), the experimenter found evidence that the stimulus material was represented in the dream.

Independent judges correctly matched three of the dreams with the topics.

The probability of the topic appearing in a dream by chance was computed by examining the other dreams reported by the subject.

The probabilities were 16 in a 100, 2 in a 100, and less than 1 in a 100.

These results suggest that another form of subliminal stimulation (in parapsychology it would be called clairvoyance) may have been responsible for the incorporations.

With only one subject, the findings cannot be more than suggestive, however (p. 157).

Calvin Hall's (1909 - 1985)

Career

*After receiving his Ph.D., Hall then taught for three years at the University of Oregon as an assistant professor. Because of his growing research reputation, he was appointed departmental chair and professor in psychology in 1937 at Western Reserve University. He held these positions for the next 20 years.

During this time he began the process of switching his research emphasis to dream content, the area for which he is best known. Other universities he taught at were Syracuse University (1957–59), the University of Miami (1959–60), and Catholic University in Nigmegen, Netherlands (as a*Fulbright scholar in 1960-61).

From 1961 to 1965, Hall studied at his Institute of Dream Research in Miami and established the similarity in dream content throughout the night by studying dreams collected in the dream laboratory. He and*Robert Van de Castle, during this time, developed a comprehensive coding system that revolutionized the objective study of dream content.[2]

*In his empirical work, he showed that dreams between people across the world are more similar than they are different.*[3]

Calvin S. Hall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paragraph 11

Hall also extended his explorations in another direction that produced interesting results.

"Sometimes, the sleep of two subjects was monitered on the same night. The subjects slept in separate rooms which were located on either side of the room in which the EEG was kept. Occasionally, the two subjects would have REM periods close together in time, and in two instances a striking congruence between the dreams reported by the subjects from these REM periods was was noted".

(...)

Subject A dreamed of receiving a special delivery letter and subject B dreamed that his sister was writting a letter which was to be sent at a special rate.

On another occasion,

Subject B dreamed of going into a store to buy something.

(...)

Subject C reported a dream in which he went to a store to buy something (p. 157 - 158).

[This finding of dream of dream to dream correspondence was also investigated in a sleep laboratory by A. Rechtschaffen and will be described later in this paper.

Extensive non-laboratory studies on mutual dreaming have been studied by Linda Magallon (1997) and on Group Dreaming by Jean Campbell (2006)].

Paragragh 12

As a consequence of my results as a "successful" telepathic dreamer with Calvin Hall, I was invited to participate as a subject at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn where M. Ullman and S. Krippner were conducting their systematic program of investigating telepathic dreaming in a laboratory setting.

I was studied for 8 nights during a 44 week period and worked with 3 different senders

On each experimental morning, I had to choose and rank order which of 8 potential target pictures I thought had been sent by the agent.

If I gave a ranking of 1-4 to the correct target picture, it was considered to be a "hit".

If I gave a ranking of 5-8 to the correct target picture, it was considered a "miss".

I scored a total of 8 "hits" for the 8 nights of my participation.

(Reader, scroll-up to first and second post of this thread to find the link to where you can print-out all 8 pages, {42 paragraghs} of this report.)

Originally Posted by debrajane

Paragraph 11

Hall also extended his explorations in another direction that produced interesting results.

"Sometimes, the sleep of two subjects was monitered on the same night. The subjects slept in separate rooms which were located on either side of the room in which the EEG was kept. Occasionally, the two subjects would have REM periods close together in time, and in two instances a striking congruence between the dreams reported by the subjects from these REM periods was was noted".

(...)

Subject A dreamed of receiving a special delivery letter and subject B dreamed that his sister was writting a letter which was to be sent at a special rate.

On another occasion,

Subject B dreamed of going into a store to buy something.

(...)

Subject C reported a dream in which he went to a store to buy something (p. 157 - 158).

[This finding of dream of dream to dream correspondence was also investigated in a sleep laboratory by A. Rechtschaffen and will be described later in this paper.

Extensive non-laboratory studies on mutual dreaming have been studied by Linda Magallon (1997) and on Group Dreaming by Jean Campbell (2006)].

This is interesting but I'm too hyper to read any of it, could you give us a quick interpretation/synopsis and your opinion about the topic?

I am only interested in the "Doing" of Bob Vandercastle's life work.

Originally Posted by Phion

This is interesting but I'm too hyper to read any of it, could you give us a quick interpretation/synopsis and your opinion about the topic?

(1:14) What will the future be?

Suppose you had access to the information in every persons brain and they had access to your's. What would happen? Has it happened? Can it happen? And what would it mean for the future of human society?

(Answer: No more secrets)

From Youtube titled:

Michael Persinger on No More Secrets

(54:43) 37,936 views

Uploaded by tvochannel on March 30, 2011.

More later. ...

Originally Posted by Phion

This is interesting but I'm too hyper to read any of it, could you give us a quick interpretation/synopsis and your opinion about the topic?

(1:39) Are we all connected? The answer's "yes". We are all immersed in the Earth's magnetic field. The human species is about 7 billion conductive brains all sharing this field.

(3:20) Calculations suggest that the time required for an event in one human brain to diffuse into all other brains on this planet would be about ten minutes.

And it would occure primarily during, "DREAMS" or during altered states.

From Youtube titled:

Michael Persinger on No More Secrets

(54:43) 37,936 views

Uploaded by tvochannel on March 30, 2011.

More later. ...

Originally Posted by Phion

This is interesting but I'm too hyper to read any of it, could you give us a quick interpretation/synopsis and your opinion about the topic?

(5:42) Usually is takes place when the geo-magnetic activity is less intense.

(6:10) When it's geo-magnetically quiet, the connections between all 7 billion brains have greater possibility.

From Youtube titled:

Michael Persinger on No More Secrets

(54:43) 37,936 views

Uploaded by tvochannel on March 30, 2011.

More later. ...

Originally Posted by Phion

This is interesting but I'm too hyper to read any of it, could you give us a quick interpretation/synopsis and your opinion about the topic?

I also participated as a telepathic dreamer at David Foulkes' laboratory at the university of Wyoming to investigate whether my previously successfull results in Brooklyn could be replicated there.

Although in his article for this synposium, Domhoff claims that Foulkes is the best laboratory dream researcher of the 20th century (p. 55), I would take exception to that laudatory evaluation.

For starters, rather than a 44 week period as had been involved at Maimonides, Foulkes' study was completed within a 2 week period during a chilly mid-winter semester break.

The social climate that I experienced there was equally chilly in comparison to the 'red carpet' reception I received on every occasion at Maimonides.

There were several other experimental designe factors that I felt played a significant inhibitory role in my not achieving statistically significant positive results at Wyoming.

My detailed critique of Foulkes' study is presented in my chapter entitled "ESP in Dreams: Comments on a Replication "Failure" by the failling Subject", which appeared in the 2nd edition of

Dream Telepethy: Explorations in Nocturnal ESP by [b] Ullman, Krippner andVaughn (1989).

In the original version of this book entitled, Dream Telapathy: Scientific Experiments in the Supernatural, by these same authors (1973), there was a chapter entitled, "Sleep, Psyche, and Science" in which Foulkes commented upon his study involving me:

"In retrospect we may have shared too much on the side of "scientism" to the exclusion of creating conditions in which telepathy might reasonably (if it exists at all) be expected to flourish.

It proved hard to escape the role of protector of scientific purity or guardian of the scientific morals.

Were we sympathetic and encouraging observers (?)

or

scientific detectives out to prevent the crime from being committed before our very eyes?...

Particularly revealingpersonally, was a brief moment in intrapsychic panic when it seemed as though some telepathic influence might be "comming through"

--how could that be?

Where had I failed to prevent a sensory leakage?

Our subject (Van de Castle) clearly felt himself on trail before a not entirely sympathetic jury,

and

we also could not totally avoid the feeling that we too were on trial,

with a favorable verdict for the subject raising doubts as to the scrupulosity effort judgment process...

There is no place for sloppy dream research whether on telepathy or anything else.

But

Being rigorous is a different matter from insecurely flaunting one's rigor as we may have done in our first study" (p 236).

A few sentences later Foulkes reported:

"I have experienced a personally impressive instance of apparent (Dream) telepathy in another laboratory study ostensibly unrelated to ESP.

While working one night on our continuing study of children's dreams, I was watching for the appearance of a REM period in the sleep of an preadolescent girl ...

I picked up and began editing a review of an article on the effects of thirst on the sleep cycle.....

The reviewer's second point was that:

"The cheese and crackers bedtime snack added a new and seemingly unnecessary aspect to the deprivation condition"....

The subject was now in a REM period and I initiated an awakening (p. 237):

She reported a dream in which a man came to her house and had a snack and someone asked the dreamers father if he wanted a beer. Her father decided he wanted one, even though he was a strict teetotaler. Then there were "these three boxes of crackers ...

one box of crackers had two white pieces, white crackers, and then a little piece of cheese between, a whole pack like that, and then the other box of crackers was white and the other packages were brown, and each of the three kids got one, and we kept trading around with them" (p. 237).

Foulkes noted that this girl had no dreams of thirst-cheese-crackers in any of the other 25 nights they had observed her dreams, nor had

"this particular combination of elements ever occurred in hundreds of dreams we have collected from other children in the same study in which the subject was serving" (p. 237).

Foulkes admitted;

"an experience such as this keeps alive one's spark of interest in telepathic dreams , whatever the outcome of his own more formal experiments... The atmosphere was quite in contrast to the highly self-conscious "we're-all-on-trial" environment in our first formal replication study" (p. 238).

The Maimonides program was a very labor-intensive project and it took 7 years to complete 379 spi sessions.

In order to 'streamline' the process, a new technique was devised by British psychologist Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe from the University of Northhampton, England.

In this experiment,

a computer is programmed to automatically select a picture from a random pool of pictures

and

display the target image
repeatedly
through the night
on a computer monitor
in an empty room.