Between October 2010 and December 2014, Dr Caroline Watt held the position of Perrott-Warrick Senior Researcher. This fellowship supported Dr Watt and her PhD student Milan Valasek as they conducted research into the psychology and parapsychology of precognitive dream experiences. Several different strands have been followed: controlled studies testing the hypothesis that individuals genuinely can dream about unpredictable future events; investigations of psychological factors that may contribute to people having precognitive dream experiences; the development of an inventory designed to evaluate what precognitive dream experiences mean to the individuals who have them; and the Perrott-Warrick Dream Registry which evaluates the characteristics of prospectively reported precognitive dreams. This page provides links to further information about this research programme.
We have conducted three studies investigating whether individuals' dreams can predict randomly-occurring future events (video clips or short films).
The first was an online study (with Milan Valasek) in which participants slept at home and submitted dream reports. Later they were shown a randomly selected video clip. Independent judges blind-rated the target and decoy clips against the dream reports. This study found significant results supporting the psi hypothesis, however a closer inspection of the data does not support a communication model of psi. For a detailed discussion of these issues, please see the full paper. This study was presented at the 2012 Convention of the Society for Psychical Research, and was published in the Journal of Parapsychology in July 2014. The abstract is here.
The second study was conducted in a sleep laboratory (with Richard Wiseman and Laurene Vuillaume). Each participant slept for two nights in the sleep laboratory. On the first night, we tested the claim that seemingly precognitive dreaming may be attributable to the incorporation into dreams of weak sensory information. Our results suggested this claim is worthy of further more systematic investigation. The second night tested the precognition hypothesis. Participants were awoken for dream reports during the night, and in the morning they viewed a randomly-selected video. An independent judge blind-rated the dreams against the target and decoy videos. No evidence was found for dream precognition. The study was presented at the 2013 Convention of the Society for Psychical Research, and has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. The abstract is here.
The third study (with Emma Mark), completed in March 2014, involved participants sleeping at home but then receiving target feedback in the lab in Edinburgh. This is being written up for publication.
This work explores the role that our everyday psychological processes may play in precognitive dream experiences. To date we have published four such studies, one into memory processes, one into propensity to find correspondences, and two into implicit processing. The memory study found that individuals have a tendency to be better able to remember matches between dreams and subsequent events, compared to mis-matches. This would tend to lead to people having greater numbers of precognitive dream experiences. The correspondences study found that people who reported that they believed in the paranormal, and that they believed in precognitive dreaming, were better able to find correspondences between randomly-paired dream reports and reports of world news events, compared to disbelievers. However, this effect was not found for more neutral correspondences tasks, so it appeared to be context-specific. These two studies were presented at the 2013 Convention of the Parapsychological Association and in April 2014 were published in the International Journal of Dream Research. The abstract is here, and the full paper is here.
We continued this line of work by investigating (with Milan Valasek) how sensitivity to implicit information may be associated with precognitive dream beliefs and experiences. We conducted two studies on this topic but did not find evidence that those who believe or experience precognitive dreaming perform better at implicit tasks. These studies were presented at the 2013 Parapsychological Association Convention and were published in August 2014 in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. The abstract is here.
This work, led by Milan Valasek, focused on developing an instrument to help understand precognitive dream experiences. Considering the prevalence of paranormal belief and experience in the general population, there has been little rigorous investigation into their phenomenological nature. Currently used measures do not provide a means to ascertain attitudes towards paranormal experiences. We have written a paper describing the development and validation of the Attitude towards Paranormal Experiences Scale focusing in particular on the subjective experience of precognitive (prophetic) dreams. A summary of this paper is here, and we are currently submitting this work for journal publication.
This study (with Milan Valasek) ran from April 2012 to October 2013. It collected reports of dreams considered to be precognitive, as soon as possible after awakening. Later, if an event occurred that seemed to have been predicted by the dream, a description of that event was recorded. Our goal was to find out more about the characteristics of dreams that are judged in advance ('prospectively') to be precognitive, and to compare these with regular dreams and with retrospectively reported precognitive dreams. The registry closed in October 2013, and the first report of this work was presented at the 2014 Convention of the Society for Psychical Research.
This study found that the interpretation of a dream as precognitive is a personal and idiosyncratic matter. Previous reviews of retrospectively reported precognitive dreams claimed that precognitive dreams are characteristically vivid and refer to emotionally negative events. These claims were not supported by our findings. Since our study focused on prospectively reported precognitive dreams, our results suggest that the pattern observed in previous studies may be influenced by a reporting bias (since vivid and emotionally negative precognitive dreams are more likely to be reported with hindsight). We also found that those participants reporting vivid precognitive dreams also tended to report vivid non-precognitive dreams, again suggesting a reporting bias in the previous literature. A link to the study abstract is here, and the full report has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, for early 2015.
Milan Valasek is currently completing his PhD dissertation, for examination in early 2015. Finally, we'd like to thank the Perrott-Warrick Fund for supporting this research, and especially our volunteer participants for helping us to learn more about precognitive dreams.
