Excerpt from Experimental Parapsychology by Richard Broughton
The 1960s have been characterized as a period of ferment and experimentation. The ‘new generation’ of scientists that were attracted to parapsychology as a research problem were not content to follow Rhine’s path. New developments in psychology and neuroscience suggested other ways in which ESP could be investigated.
Dreams has always been one of the most common states in which people experience ESP. Kleitman’s discovery that rapid eye movements (REM) were a reliable indicator of dreaming-periods opened up the dream state for ESP research. In the mid-1960s at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, a team of researchers led by Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman developed a new methodology to investigate ESP in dreams. Subjects spent the night in the hospital’s sleep laboratory wired up for REM monitoring. In a room located elsewhere in the hospital a staff member served as the agent, equipped with a set of targets in sealed envelopes, usually four in number. When the investigator in the sleep lab noticed that the sleeping subject was entering a REM period he signalled the agent by means of a one-way intercom. The agent then used a randomizing process to select one of the envelopes, take out the content and begin trying to communicate the target material to the sleeping subject. When the REM record showed signs of ending, the investigator woke the sleeper and asked for a description of the dream that he or she had just been having. These details were recorded. Throughout the night the process was repeated (except that the target remained the same) for each dreaming period.
To take advantage of the rich imagery of dreams the researchers used art prints as targets initially, but later turned to more elaborate immersive experiences. They adapted the ‘free-response’ method used in the early days of psychical research, in which the subject responds freely, reporting whatever images, memories and feelings, come to mind. In the case of dreams, the subject simply reported whatever he or she was dreaming about, no matter how strange or bizarre. To ensure that the other elements essential for ESP testing were present, once the target was randomly selected there could be no communication or sensory leakage of the target back to the sleep lab. To assess whether there was any evidence of ESP in the subject’s dreams, outside judges – usually psychologists familiar with dream interpretation, but who of course had no knowledge about which picture of the four that had been used in the session was the actual target – ranked each dream transcript according to its similarity to each of the target pictures. These rankings were then subjected to statistical analyses.
The Maimonides Dream Lab closed in 1978 when funding expired. Over a dozen formal studies had been completed, many with strikingly successful results. A latter assessment of the whole program, including pilot and screening data – in which a hit was defined as a ranking in the upper half of the possible range of rankings – found that there were 233 hits in 379 trials, an accuracy rate of 83.5 percent where chance would predict 50 percent. The odds against chance for that result were better than a quarter of a million-to-one.6
Because dream-lab studies were inherently very expensive to conduct, they were not continued in parapsychology, and there has been only a single, small independent replication effort; this differed markedly from the original studies and failed to find evidence of ESP.
More common in recent years have been ESP dream studies in which participants sleep at home and record their dreams at the bedside or in the morning. The dream reports are later brought to the laboratory where they are compared with the target or targets that had been randomly allocated for their session using appropriate blind judging techniques. While such studies cannot offer the same degree of precision and control as sleep labs, results continue to demonstrate that dreams are a valuable source of ESP evidence.78
“The concept of precognitive dreams—dreams about events or experiences that haven’t yet occurred, but later take place in reality—goes against our most basic understanding of time and relativity. If time is linear, and if we learn, see and feel through experience, then precognitive dreams simply can’t be legit. Yet we generally place a lot of importance on our dreams and often treat the content and messages in our dreams as more credible than similar waking thoughts.”
Open Hand Magick (OHM) is the exercise of parapsychical abilities without the use of physical tools or paraphernalia apart from the body and mind. Anomalous psycho-physical states and processes explored to this end may include but are not limited to: ideomotor phenomena, glossolalia, assumptive imagination, trance, flow, samadhi, hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, astral projection, thoughtforms, and mediumship. OHM theory draws heavily from contemporary western occultism and the field of parapsychology, while generally resting upon the speculations that: [1] Reality is fundamentally nonlocal, [2] parapsychical abilities are innate in all human beings, and [3] parapsychical abilities may be cultivated and enhanced. Fundamentals are developed primarily through yogic meditative disciplines.
The sigilization technique described below is a variation of the procedure illustrated by Adam Blackthorne in The Master Works of Chaos Magick: Practical Techniques For Directing Your Reality. It is a method that I have used extensively with much success and I consider it to be one of the most intuitive, expedient, and versatile magico-psychical techniques available. It is primarily employed for operations of enchantment as demonstrated below, but may be adapted for divinatory purposes as well. The procedure is as follows:
Place the tip of a writing utensil on a piece of paper, mentally clarify your “statement of intent”, and vividly imagine the event you desire to occur from the first person perspective, arousing the feeling of satisfaction or excitement that you would experience following the actual fulfillment of that desire.
Once you have semi-lost yourself in the visualization, allow the writing utensil to move in a spontaneous, quick, and explosive manner. This automatically produced mark is the sigil.
Now, place the sigil in front of you and either [1] visually focus on it until you experience anoesis, or [2] visually focus on it while chanting a mantra until anoesis ensues.
Conclude the operation and take a few moments to clear your mind.
To later avoid ‘lust of result’ (which is theorized to undermine your intended manifestation), re-arouse the retrospective feeling of fulfillment each time you recall having performed the operation.
Connatural Magick should be understood as an experimental field of magico-psychic development — rather than a specific discipline of occult practice — wherein the innate abilities and agency of the psychist are trained to the extent that they may be exerted without the aid of physical tools and paraphernalia external to her own body and mind. Achieving repeatable and communicable results with whatever techniques the psychist adopts or discovers should remain a primary aspiration alongside the attainment of insight into the ontological nature of reality.
Connatural Magick is the exercise of parapsychic abilities without the use of physical tools or paraphernalia apart from the body and mind. Anomalous experiences explored to this end may include but are not limited to: ideomotor phenomena, glossolalia, assumptive imagination, flow, samadhi, hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, astral projection, thoughtforms, and mediumship. Connatural Magick theory draws heavily from those of contemporary western occultism and the field of parapsychology, while generally resting upon the speculations that: [1] Reality is nonlocal, [2] parapsychic abilities are innate in all human beings, and [3] parapsychic abilities may be cultivated and enhanced. Fundamentals are developed primarily through yogic meditative disciplines.
Arbitrary Transference A method of materializing desire that was set forth by occultist Austin Osman Spare in The Zoëtic Grimoire of Zos. The technique was eclipsed by his more fully developed system of monographic sigilization.
Assumptive Visualization Neveille Goddard’s seminal breakthrough utilizing the hypnagogic state and sense-immersive imagination.
Mergence A unique approach to direct manifestation currently being developed by @ouroboricflow and others, characterized by the suffusion of the senses and desire into and throughout one’s immediate environment.
If you can develop the ability to enter and remain in a state of relaxed, free-flowing awareness before or after sleep, images will come. You can simply observe them as they rise and fall, or engage with one of these images or scenes and enter into what may be a full-fledged lucid dream journey.
Experiences in this twilight zone are very similar to those of psychics when they “open up” and let impressions come, and of creative people when they enter a flow state. Indeed, both psychic discoveries and creative breakthroughs come almost effortlessly in the half-dream state if you are willing to let them come – and (of course) to catch them and use them.
Remote viewing is based on the theory that remote viewing impressions bubble up from the subconscious. When trying to move subconscious impressions into waking consciousness, “mental noise” often results. This mental noise arises from all the guessing, speculation, remembering, confusion, and so on that seems to regularly a part of every human’s mental life. ERV was developed with the idea that deliberately trying to come as close to an unconscious state as one can while still maintaining just enough awareness to respond to the monitor should make it easier to detect subtle remote viewing impressions with less mental noise. Some people feel the ERV approach is helpful, while others report that the noise does not seem any less in ERV than it is in other remote viewing methods.
Occult Aspects 