In June 2013, Dr Caroline Watt was delighted to be awarded a further extension of support for her research from the Perrott-Warrick Fund, to run until December 2014. This work began in October 2010 when The Perrott-Warrick Fund appointed Dr Watt as their Senior Researcher, for a three-year programme of research into the psychology and parapsychology of precognitive dream experiences. This research programme investigates psychological factors that may contribute to people having precognitive dream experiences. The work also includes: the development of an inventory designed to evaluate what precognitive dream experiences mean to the individuals who have them; the Perrott-Warrick Dream Registry; and controlled studies testing the hypothesis that individuals genuinely can dream about unpredictable future events. This page provides links to further information about this research programme. If you believe that you experience dreams of future events, or are just interested in your dreams, and would like to part in this research, please contact Dr Watt.
This study 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 is to find out more about the characteristics of dreams that are judged to be precognitive, and to compare these with regular dreams. The registry closed in October 2013, and we will present the first report of this work at the 2014 Convention of the Society for Psychical Research. We also aim to provide a selection of the dream and event reports on this website, with permission of the study participants.
This work explores the role that our everyday psychological processes may play in precognitive dream experiences. To date we have conducted two studies, one into memory processes and one into propensity to find correspondences. 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 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 are 'in press' with the journal Consciousness and Cognition. The abstract is here.
We have conducted three studies investigating whether individuals' dreams can be specifically associated with randomly-selected future events (video clips or short films). The first was an online study. It was presented at the 2012 Convention of the Society for Psychical Research, and it has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Parapsychology. The abstract is here. The second study was conducted in Edinburgh Sleep Centre. It was presented at the 2013 Convention of the Society for Psychical Research, and is being written up for publication. The third study, completed in March 2014, involved participants sleeping at home but then receiving target feedback in the lab in Edinburgh. This is also being written up for publication.
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.
