A New Approach to Veridicality in Dream Psi Studies

Abstract

A problem in spontaneous dream psi studies is validation of purported psi elements. Dreams rarely have enough specificity to satisfy critics that they point to paranormal knowledge of a specific event. This creates evidential hurdles to overcome when evaluating whether a dream contains psi-derived information such as scenes of future events or physically distant locations. In this study, the goal is to arrive at a reasonable method to establish that information derived from spontaneous dream experiences can be established as veridical. To accomplish this, a method for finding the equivalent of a target within a spontaneous experience is used to fix a specific locale and time for comparison. Adverse scoring criteria are used to address complaints about confirmation bias. The result is a psi-adverse method for scoring spontaneous experiences that are anchored to a specific locale and time. This method regularly produced significant p-values when used to assess 20 consecutive dream records, comprising 598 individual line items. These records were taken as a sample from a group of 3,305 dream records made over the past 22 years by the author. Keywords: dream—veridicality—out-of-body—precognition—psi—presentiment—spontaneous psi