Book Report: Dream Telepathy by Ullman, Krippner and Vaughan -- Research Methodology

Dream Telepathy, Scientific Experiments in the Supernatural, (c) 1973 Macmillan Publishing

Despite the enticingly spooky title, this book is based on scientific research form the Dream Research Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center Psychology department. If you're looking for an exploration of this exotic phenomena from researchers firmly grounded in psychological sciences and the scientific method, this is the book for you.

Telepathy may not be something discussed today in many scientific circles, but until the 1980s, no topic was unworthy of being eyed through the lens of science. In fact, in those days ESP and psychic abilities were big both in popular culture and in serious research circles, thanks to research initiated in the Soviet Union, and the possibility of psychic spying was beginning to be considered seriously in political circles, So the time was certainly ripe to explore what could be explored. Moreover, many of the pioneering figures of psychiatry discussed psychic phenomena, including Freud, Jung, Ehrenwald and others. Some therapists even complained about having psychic dream-communications involving their patients!

In the opening of the book, the authors related a number of historical and literary cases of telepathic and prophetic dreams, as well as the type of psychological patients that seem to experience dream telepathy, (emotionally detached patients often do, but schizophrenics never do). 

The central portion of the book describes the experiments (mostly conducted between 1948-1954) in great detail, and analyses their results and the shortcomings, which were often addressed in subsequent experiments. In the course of their research, they also learned about various sleep states (ie: REM sleep was unknown until 1950). A fairly small pool of researchers participated in the experiments, so that the data was able to examine the effect of their character traits on the outcomes, as well as the effect of the relationships between the senders and receivers of the psychic messages. 

The third part of the book, Theoretical Implications, examines the data for conclusions and useful information (science, after all, is about findings that are verifiable and repeatable). The most obvious are that positive rapport between participants and things with strong emotional charges were most likely to be successfully transmitted. They also discovered that men tended to make better psychic receivers ("percipients") than women, despite accepted wisdom. Interestingly, telepathic messages were not necessarily bound by time, and may not be received at the same time they were sent.