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Can Our Dreams Solve Problems While We Sleep?
Remarkable new evidence of the power of ‘dream telepathy
It appears possible that people can intentionally dream details about the personal problems of an unknown individual, simply by examining a picture of the target and then “incubating” or planning to dream about that individual’s problems.
Distinguished cognitive scientist Carlyle Smith, a very careful and rigorist experimentalist who is a Lifetime Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Trent University in Canada, presented the data in a recent paper (Smith, 2013; “Can healthy, young adults uncover personal details of unknown target individuals in their dreams?”1). Smith was and is a driving force in the revolutionary transformation in our understanding of how sleep can facilitate memory consolidation. The design of his experiments on dream “telepathy” were similarly well designed, and so need to be taken seriously.
Experiment 1 was a pilot study focused on the development of experimental materials, procedures and dream coding techniques. I will focus here on experiment 2, in which 66 students were asked to dream about the life problems of a target individual whom none knew. (Neither did Smith himself.) Participants simply viewed the photo and then attempted to dream about the problems of that individual. They were told that the person’s problems could be health-related, emotional, financial, or any number of other concerns. (Another 56 students followed the same procedure, but the photo that they examined was of a fictitious face generated by a computer.)