Testing home dream precognition and exploring links to psychological factors

Abstract

Precognition refers to the idea that an individual may be able to obtain information about a future event via a non-usual route, prior to the event occurring. Over time various paradigms have been developed to elicit and test for such effects. Here, we focused on dream precognition as dreaming represents a naturally occurring altered state of consciousness that may facilitate such anomalous experiences. Using a home-dream paradigm we examined whether participants would be able to dream about and rate a future target image as more similar to their dreams compared to decoy images. We also examined the potential relationship between dream precognition and sensory processing sensitivity, transliminality, boundary thinness and anomalous experiences and belief. One hundred and one participants completed an initial practice trial, to familiarise themselves with the procedure, followed by the main trial. In each trial participants were required to dream of a future target image that they would later be shown. During each trial, after they had completed their dreaming, participants were randomly presented with a set of four images and required to rate them in terms of how much similarity there was between each image and their dream on a scale from 1 to 100. Results of the main trial showed that ratings for the target image were significantly higher than the decoy images. However, no clear relationships were found between precognitive target ratings and sensory processing sensitivity, transliminality, boundary thinness or anomalous experiences and belief. We conclude that the result is not due to any methodological artifacts and as such represents suggestive evidence for dream precognition. Given the logistical simplicity of the home-dream paradigm we would encourage other researchers to replicate our findings and explore what may be a fruitful avenue of research.