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How, then, would this research come to the at- tention of psychologists, so that its findings or its errors might in time be evaluated for their significance to the body of systematic observations upon which psy- chology has been and will be built? The experiments at Maimonides were published between about 1966 and 1972. In the years since—now over a decade— five books have been published by academic psy- chologists that purport to offer a scholarly review and evaluation of parapsychological research. They vary in the extent to which they seem addressed to psy- chologists themselves or to their students, but they seem to be the principal route by which either present or future psychologists, unless they have an already established interest strong enough to lead them to search out the original publications, might become acquainted with the experiments on ESP in dreams. I propose to review how these five books have pre- sented knowledge about the experiments. First, how- ever, I must offer a summary of the experiments; without that, my review would make sense only to ‘readers already well acquainted with them. The experiments at Maimonides grew out of Montague Uliman’s observations, in his psychiatric practice, of apparent telepathy underlying the content - of some dreams reported by his patients—observa- tions parallel to those reported by many other psy- chiatrists. He sought to determine whether this ap- parent phenomenon would appear in a sleep labora- tory under controlled conditions that would seem to exclude interpretations other than that of ESP. He was joined in this research by psychologist Stanley Krippner, now at the Saybrook Institute in San Fran- cisco, and a little later by Charles Honorton, now head of the Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. Encouraged by early findings but seeking to improve experimental controls and identify optimal conditions, these researchers, assisted by numerous helpers and consultants, tned out var- ious modifications of procedure. No one simple de- scription of procedure, therefore, can be accurate for all of the experiments. But the brief description that follows is not, I believe, misleading as an account of what was generally done. The Experimental Procedure A subject would come to the laboratory to spend the night there as would-be percipient in a study of pos- sible telepathic influence on dreams. He or she met and talked with the person who was going to serve as agent (that is, the person who would try to send a telepathic message), as well as with the two experi- menters taking part that night, and procedures were Requests for reprints should be sent to Irvin L. Child at the De- partment of Psychology, Yale University, P.O. Box 114, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-7447. the percipient was a repeater not necessary. When ready explained in detail unl for whom that step ; , to go to bed, the percipient was wired up in the usual way for monitoring of] brain waves and eye move- ments, and he or she had no further contact with the agent or agent's experimenter until afier the session was completed. The experimenter in the next room monitored the percipient’s sleep and at the beginning of each period of rapid eye movements (REM), when it was reasonably certain the sleeper would be dream- ing, notified the agent by pressing a buzzer. _ The agent was in airemote room in the building, provided with a target picture (and someumes acces- sory material echoing the theme of the picture) ran- domly chosen from a ! of potential targets as the message to be concentrated on. The procedure for random choice of a target from the pool was designed to prevent anyone else from knowing the idenuty of the target. The agent djd not open the packet con- taining the target until isolated for the night (except for the one-way buzzer'communication). Whenever signaled that the percipient had entered a REM pe- riod, the agent was to cdncentrate on the target, with the aim of communicating it telepathically to the per- cipient and thus influenging the dream the percipient was having. The percipient was oriented toward trying to receive this message. But of course if clairvoyance and telepathy are both ible, the percipient might ° have used the former—that is, might have been pick- ing up information directly from the target picture, without the mediation df the agent’s thoughts or ef- forts. For this reason, the term general extrasensor’ perception (GESP) would be used today, though the researchers more often the term telepathy. Toward the approximate end of each REM pe- nod, the percipient wasjawakened (by intercom) by the monitoring experimenter and described any dream just experienced ( ing, if necessary, though in advance what to do end of the night's sleep, ith prodding and question- the percipient of course knew mn each awakening). At the ¢ percipient was interviewed and was asked for impressions about what the target might have been. (The interview was of course double- blind; neither percipien{ nor interviewer knew the identity of the tarpet.) ¢ dream descripuons and morning impressions and associations were recorded and later transcribed. The original research reports and the popular book both present a nurber of very striking simiar- ites between passages in the dream transcripts and the picture that happened to be the night's target. These similarities merit attention, yet they should in themselves yield no sense of conviction. Perhaps any transcript of a night's dr striking similarity to any ming contains passages of icture to which they might be compared. The Maliponides research, however, consisted of carefully pla ned experiments designed ar 1220 approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDPSBS007896031 00140 0ErFhz!0e%s!