Dream of Death – 1

It’s not what he expected, this dying. It’s taking longer than he thought, for one thing. He’s more familiar with faster ways to die: like the abrupt heart attack that felled his father like a tree; or the fever that took his mother within a week; or the rogue bullet that claimed a classmate’s future one hunting season. But this. They saved him from a massive coronary death, yes–but just so he could go down slow, taking months. Not that he is complaining about the extra time. It’s just not what he expected.

And something else he didn’t expect, since after all it’s his heart giving out, is how his mind is unraveling. It started with the forgetting. He’d be chugging along a thought, maybe trying to say something, and then, where a word used to be, there’d be a blank, a hole, and his thoughts would just slide right down into that hole, and for a few frozen seconds his mind would be vacant, like a room after the occupant has moved out.

The problems with his memory are annoying, but what bothers him more, what scares him, is that sometimes he can’t tell if his memories are real. He’s sure he worked on a Lake Huron freighter that last summer in high school. But was he on the ship when the fire started? Did he actually witness the burning man come screaming from the hold? Or maybe he’s just remembering how he imagined that horrible death after hearing the story. And another time. He knows for sure he’d wounded a buck when he was hunting by himself that one fall in the Wasatch Mountains. He remembers it was just after a light snow, a “tracking snow”, and he must have followed the animal to finish it, but the memories of the final kill are a hodge-podge of images: running after the deer, sleeping by the carcass, shooting a coyote. All that seems unlikely, unreal, and choppy, like a dream, not a real memory. It’s as if he’s sitting helpless at his own picture show while some indifferent, wigged-out stranger in the projection booth is showing frames of truth and illusion all jumbled together. He wonders, in his lowest times, if he will lose all his memories–his story, his life, even before this slow dying is over.

Well. Enough of that.

He glances around the hospital room. The walls are painted white, decorated with one inoffensive picture of a garden scene. A small recliner covered in brown vinyl is pushed up alongside his bed. A few orange molded plastic chairs complete the décor. The rest is medical: monitors, oxygen tanks, IV stands, and tubes snaking over the floor. His wife Margie sleeps to the right of his bed in the brown recliner.

He looks down at the open book in his lap. His son had recently given him this book about the military aircraft of the 1950’s. The print is too small, too dense for his eyes to resolve, but the pictures! His hands rest on either side of the glossy, black and white photo of the C-124 Globemaster, the huge military transport plane. His memories are clear, now. In 1953, he was the navigator on the eight-man C-124 crew, flying secret Cold War missions out of Fairbanks, Alaska. “Old Shaky” was notorious for icing up, fuel tank leaks and engine fires, but he was twenty-five years old and had survived combat missions in Korea, and sure as hell didn’t see himself going down in the Arctic.

He knows there are also pictures of the B-29s, his first plane, the one he flew in the Korean War in 1951, but instead of fumbling with the slick, heavy pages to find the photos, he leans his head back on the pillow and closes his eyes.

He pictures the cramped navigator’s station of the B-29, how he’d fold his six- foot frame onto the thinly padded jump seat, click on the gooseneck lamp, and angle a focused pool of light onto the flat workspace over his knees. He’d lay out his tools: the celestial map, the astral manual, various slide-rule calculators, protractors. He’d check his logs, where he’d write precise numbers: celestial sightings, wind speeds, compass directions, and altitudes.

He wants to remember more, to fill in the details, to nail down that place, his time on earth, at least in his own mind. He imagines zipping open the pockets of his flight jacket and taking inventory. He handles each item in turn: the Camels, the picture of Margie, the Juicy Fruit chewing gum, the butterscotch Life Savers, and then, without a sign but for the flicker of his eyelid, the wet circuitry of his brain misfires, a door to another realm slams open

and he’s breathing the gas and machine oil stink of a B-29. He takes a huge gulp of air and grins, glad to breathe free of the oxygen mask now that they’re over the ocean. The heavy vibration from the props sets his bones buzzing, warming his body. The drone of the engines pulses in an easy, rocking rhythm. God, he loves to fly! The frigid air outside is viscous at this airspeed, and the props cut through it unevenly–a little jarring on the butt, but nothing serious. He folds a fresh stick of gum into his mouth and a squirt of saliva meets the sweet fruity taste. He’s content. The mission over Korea went off without a hitch. The night is clear; the stars in place.

He’s rolling his eyes at a raunchy limerick the flight engineer is garbling over the headset when he hears a curse from the cockpit and static blisters the ‘phones. He’s abruptly jerked to the left. What the hell? He realizes the plane is banking hard, like some panic maneuver to avoid flak, and that she keeps going, trying to stand on her left wing. Christ, we’re gonna roll! He jams the oxygen mask on his face and yanks the safety straps tight over his chest. But just before gravity hauls the plane out of the sky, the great aircraft steadies, yaws drunkenly, and rocks back to level. My God! He knows they’re hundreds of miles from Korea, out over the Pacific, but still: Did we take a hit?

There’s no more communication from the pilots or anyone else. Heart pounding double time to the engines’ pulse, he leans out to look up the short aisle into the cockpit. What’s lighting up the sky? Flak? Flares? The whining drone of the engines changes pitch, stuttering down the scale to a low grumble. Jesus, we’re losing power! The engines shut down. His ears pop in the silence. The blood siphons away from his face. He eases off his jump seat and crouching, creeps forward. The cockpit is empty. He slides into the pilot’s seat, thighs shaking, sets his cold hands on the yoke, and only then, raises his face to the spectacular black night writhing with color.

There, outside the paned glass of the cockpit, so close he believes he could touch them, the magnificent Northern Lights crackle and hum. Overhead, across the sky, huge standing sine waves of red and yellow hang shimmering. Lower in the sky, electric blue shafts of light pulse downward to the earth against a purple so deep it buzzes the back of his eyes. And in the midst of this flaring death of the sun’s rays, globes of luminescent green and orange explode like fireworks, only to reluctantly fade. He is exalted, but then confused, because he knows no aircraft has ever flown through the Lights. This can’t be. We’re too high. He squints at the altimeter. The needle is flat at zero.

Then, faint but unmistakable, he hears the long-range navigational radio signals, the two staccato beeps moving closer and closer in phase as the great plane begins to nose upward into the swirling magnetic night, guided silently up toward the stars. He tries to yell, but his tongue is thick in his mouth. He tries to stand, but his hips are trapped in the seatbelt. He struggles, but a hand pushes down on his shoulder. Frantic,

           he opens his eyes. The lights flatten out into a panel of white fluorescent lighting along the ceiling, and the navigational signals, phasing into one, announce the rhythm of his heart on the monitor.

His stepdaughter, Tess, straightens and takes her hand from his shoulder. She backs up a few feet along the side of the hospital bed where he lies, trailing her hand on the sheet, and regards him gravely. “You were dreaming.”

“Mmmm.” He eyes the room. Yeah, this is real, not a dream. Tess still stands in front of him. He remembers she arrived from Wisconsin just this morning. His other two children, Anna and Robert were–where? “Where’d they go?” he mumbles.

“Rob and Annie? They went to get some lunch. You need anything, Dad?”

“Ice.” He is always thirsty, but water is rationed. With his heart slowly failing, fluids pool in his body, his feet, his lungs. The less he drinks, the longer he lives.

“Here you go.” She gives him a paper cup of ice chips from the nightstand. He holds the cup up and shakes some of the ice chips into his mouth, but then it’s all too much, and his head falls back and his eyes droop shut. He feels her slip the cold cup from his fingers and hears her soles scuffing the linoleum floor and then the scrape of a chair.

The weariness, the exhaustion, has been sitting on him for so long now that he has no energy for reacting, for feeling anymore. Just a few months ago, he could work up quite a rage at the nurses when they fumbled a stick, or when food was not to his liking. And he remembers–maybe last month?–feeling despair and even some satisfying self-pity when he couldn’t push out the foul, dried-up shit that clogged his colon. And it was only a couple weeks ago when he lay on the bed next to Margie and his struggling effort to breathe, to force oxygen through his spongy, wet lungs terrified him so much that he cried out, over and over, until she woke in alarm. But now, existence is muted, weighted down by the sullen fatigue, weighted down like his useless feet swollen with edema.

Except for the dreams. He wonders about the dreams. They possess him, so vivid with emotion, and call back the time when the world slapped up against his eyes and fogged his nose and tunneled into his ears, and when he could walk–walk! But the dreams trouble him, too, because they barge into his waking reality without warning, like just now with his dream about the runaway B-29 and the northern lights. The dreams are telling him, along with the forgetting and the confusion about his memories, that he’s dying. The reason his mind is slipping, the gears not meshing, is simple: his heart is falling down on the job. There’s just not enough O-2 to the ol’ brain . . . Hunh. They say “your life passes before you” just before you die. Maybe all these crazy memories and dreams and visions are my life passing before me, but sloowwww. Maybe because I’m dying so slow? Ha! “My life is inching before me.” Heh-heh . . . Guess I’m still sharp enough to make a joke.

Twenty-six year-old Jude has had strange and deeply disturbing experiences since childhood: talking raccoons, prescient crows, and visions predicting the deaths of people he knows. Only an undemanding job, rock climbing, and a new girlfriend every few months can keep the weirdness at bay.

He meets Sara, a grad student in counseling who has an intense interest in studying ESP, especially telepathy. They are drawn to each other, but Jude is afraid to reveal his premonitions, and Sara, who’s been unlucky in love, is wary of his evasiveness. They go their separate ways, though each harbors a secret longing for the other.

Life takes them on different paths until they reconnect in their fifties. Jude now teaches shamanic workshops and Sara has built a career around her unusual knack for understanding the canine mind. Is this a second chance for them to explore the truth about their uncanny experiences and to rekindle their love affair?

Cover photo by Jessica Kelley  Evergreenendurance.com

Telepathy: “The supposed communication of thoughts or ideas between minds by means other than the known senses.” (Stevenson, A. & Lindberg, C.A. (Eds.), (2010). New Oxford American Dictionary, 3^rd Edition). New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press, Inc.)

Almost all dog owners believe that dogs have minds, and are not just machines  driven by instinct. During the last century, academic psychologists have caught up with that conventional wisdom. The strict behaviorist theories of the 1920s-1960s ignored the mental determinants of animal behavior, but have been supplanted by cognitive theories. These cognitive theories include mental constructs such as expectancies, values, intentions and the like to best explain why animals do what they do. (Zentall, T.R. (2002). A Cognitive Behaviorist Approach to the Study of Animal Behavior. Journal of General Psychology 129 (4), 328-363. Complete article at www.uky.edu/~zentall/pdfs/1.pdf )

But telepathy? Even if dogs do have minds remotely like our own, could we “read” Pepper’s mind, or “send” our thoughts to Toby? Some answer “yes!” Rupert Sheldrake, noted biologist and author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (Sheldrake, R. (1999). New York: Three Rivers Press.), is especially sympathetic to the idea of animals sensing human thoughts, and presents compelling testimonials from dog owners. But he rightly cautions that subtle sensory cues—cues of which humans are often blithely unaware—can create the appearance of telepathy. For example, you decide to take Mocha for a walk. Seemingly at the moment of your decision, she leaps to her feet and trots to where her leash hangs on a peg.

Did Mocha sense your intention? Of course! But most likely she watched you shut down your computer, glance outside the window to check for rain, and observed your big smile directed at her. These are all cues that have heralded walks in the past, so Mocha drew the sensible conclusion.

Sheldrake offers a series of thoughtful scientific experiments studying the ability of dogs to sense their owners’ intentions. One such study, “A Dog That Seems To Know When His Owner is Coming Home: Videotaped Experiments and Observations,” presents compelling evidence for this type of telepathy, at least for one dog-owner pair. Visit Sheldrake’s website and look under the “research” button for this study and others. (www.sheldrake.org)

Sheldrake’s work has been resoundingly dismissed by skeptics, some of whom are even scientists. I will address these criticisms in a later blog, but for now, I believe his experiments seem to control for important extraneous variables and are carefully executed. His results, at the very least, support efforts to continue research into the area of dogs sensing the human mind.

But what about the reverse? Can humans telepathically sense a dog’s mind?

In my book, A Second Chance Life, Sara the skeptic dismisses her apparent ability to telepathically feel a dog’s distress as her own. For example, she could notice pain in her hand when she’s with a dog who has a thorn in its paw. But, she explains away her experience as paying close attention to canine behavior:

Sara stared at Jude. “Well, believe it or not, it’s like I can feel what the dog is feeling. No, that’s not exactly right. It’s more like I have a sense of what the dog is experiencing, like sensory images, like I’m in the dog’s head.”

“Sara, that’s remarkable. Just to have those feelings is remarkable, even if your diagnoses are just guesses.”

“Yes, but I don’t get something from every dog. Whatever it is I’m feeling, it’s not dependable, so I don’t want to make a big deal about it. The vet might find my opinions useful, but I don’t see myself as one of those animal communicators. I’m skeptical of those people anyway.”

“Amazing, Sara.” Jude’s tone carried more than a whiff of irony. “You’re the trained scientist. You’re the one who wanted to study ESP back when you were a grad student and now you’re refusing to take a hard look at what could be your own telepathic talent.”

Sara snorted. “Don’t even go there. First of all, ESP means extra-sensory perception: Knowledge without input from the senses. In my case, I think I’m getting subtle visual and auditory cues from the dogs. I’m not even aware I’m picking up on them.”

Jude raised his voice. “Yes, but you feel what the dog feels.” He wanted her to admit how amazing her experiences were.

“Okay, for some screwy reason, my unconscious turns the cues into personal feelings.” Sara waved a hand dismissively. “But it doesn’t happen all that often and not with every dog. And besides, I don’t even know how often I’m right.”

Sara points to her keen awareness of dog behaviors as the reason for her unusual experiences, but telepathy could be explained in other ways, as well. My short story, The Mission, explores the boundary of telepathic experiences and psychosis. Keep in mind that two possible symptoms of psychosis, such as schizophrenia, are thought insertion and thought broadcasting. Thought insertion is “the delusion that certain of one’s thoughts are not one’s own, but rather inserted into one’s mind.” This could be just a short hop to the belief that one is receiving another’s thoughts. Thought broadcasting is “the delusion that one’s thoughts are being broadcast out loud so that they can be perceived by others.” Perhaps not that far from a belief that one is sending thoughts to another? (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4^th Edition, Text Revision (2000). Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association.)

In my story The Mission, Joseph Mallory is a skilled dog trainer for the Army. He struggles to understand his vivid dreams of being dog-like and his compelling hunches about his dogs having ESP. But does he truly have a telepathic communication with his animals, or is he over the edge into crazy delusions?

(Photograph from www.humanK9bond.com)

Army K-9 kennel, Monterey,California: 1957

Joe crept past the pen where Lady was kept, signaling her to keep silent. Since his retirement a week before, he had no authorization to be on the premises of the Army kennel, certainly not at 0245 hours. He could smell the faint, acrid scent of his own fear along with the stronger, almost skunky odor of dog urine. But he knew, in spite of the churning cramps in his stomach, what he had to do.

Without a doubt, Lady was telepathic. The ESP experiments were proof. It made sense that some of the pups in her litter had the ability, too. He knew the Army suspected as much, and he knew how they operated They could go to any lengths. A puppy could be brutally injured to find out if it would mentally “call” another dog for help. Or a pup could have its skull studded with shock electrodes in trial and error attempts to map the “telepathy center.” As an Officer and handler in the K-9 Unit, Joe had a deep connection to his dogs. He felt a sick fear thinking about what could happen to them, and then a rage so strong his world washed red.

The puppies had already been slated for preliminary ESP testing. He had no choice but to steal them and go into hiding. He wanted to steal Lady herself, but she was too highly trained, too valuable, and her disappearance would be suspect. He hated to leave her behind, but hoped she’d be spared further experimentation and used for breeding. Her puppies were a different matter.

Joe padded in his crepe-soled shoes to the room where Lady’s litter, four twelve-week old German shepherd pups, were kept in separate pens. An emergency light above the door was adequate for his dark-adapted vision. He heard the rustling of dog bedding and a soft snort.

As he stepped past each cage, the pups were sleeping except for one. Moka, a black and tan female, sat with her head cocked, eyeing him. He studied her appealing face and got that same weird hunch feeling he’d had during the ESP experiments. He suddenly knew, without knowing how, that she was the only one of the pups who had any telepathic ability. He was relieved. Stealing one dog was going to be much easier than stealing four.

In the kennel office, lit by moonlight through a high window, he pulled Moka’s file. Dating a last entry, he wrote 0400: Found dead. Acute bloat. Body incinerated. He scribbled an unreadable signature. Would the ruse be believed? Joe thought so. Since his official retirement and leaving the kennel a week ago, his position as Officer In Charge had not been filled. He remembered the urine smell in the cage room. The place was short-staffed, probably disorganized.

With Moka and a slip leash tucked in his jacket, he left the kennels and snuck back the same way he’d come, keeping to the shadows of the deserted maintenance buildings. At the chain link fence surrounding the base, he leashed Moka. He crawled under first, then encouraged her with gentle tugs to squirm through on her belly. She made no noise, seeming to understand the need for stealth.

In my novel, A Second Chance Life, Sara is telling Jude about a dream she’d recently had:

“I dreamt about the summer I drove across the desert from California to Utah, to my first job. In my dream I was me, now—well, maybe (in my forties), because Casey was with me. We were driving on a two-lane highway across the Nevada desert when we saw a young woman walking on the shoulder. We stopped to see if we could help her and it was me. Me, as a young woman, walking on the road.”

Jude nodded, looking thoughtful.

“But Jude, the really weird part is that the whole thing really happened twenty-seven years ago. As I remember it, a couple picked me up when I ran out of gas on my way to Salt Lake. The woman had on a big sunhat tied with a scarf under her chin, but I remember she was just my height and had green eyes and a gap between her front teeth like mine. After they’d taken me to get gas and I was driving off, she took her hat off and her hair was like mine is now.” Sara shook her head in wonderment, the image of Madge on that hot desert highway branded on her memory.

“You think your dream-self went back in time to see your younger self?” There was no hint of mockery in Jude’s tone.

Sara raised her eyebrows and pressed her lips together, the weight of doubt tugging at her hopes. “Wouldn’t it be amazing, “she said, “if a dream-self could travel along the skein of time? If a dream-self, free of physical constraints, could somehow manifest in a different place and time?”

“Is that what you think happened?”

Sara slipped into her default position of rational skepticism. “No, I think the more likely explanation is that, for whatever reason, I simply had a dream about meeting up with my younger self.” But as she spoke, she felt as if a fragile rainbow bubble popped, leaving a dull residue of fact and reality.

“Was there a message in the dream?”

“That I gave my younger self?”

Jude smiled. “That’s usually the direction advice flows.”

“In my dream, as in the reality of twenty-seven years ago, the older woman gave the younger woman a book about experiments in telepathy and encouraged her interest in paranormal experiences.”

Sara looked away, across the Sound to the clouds shrouding the Olympic range. “My memory isn’t real clear, but wasn’t that the summer of 1973? You moved out to Colorado that year.”

“Yes,” Jude said. “That was in 1973.”

“Well, this morning I dug through some cartons to find that book. You know what? I couldn’t believe it, but it was first published in 1974.”

“1974? How do you explain that?” Jude sounded baffled.

“I’m not sure.”

They ambled up the beach in silence, Sara taking long, slow strides. It could be evidence for time travel, she thought, if a book had been given to me before it had actually been published. But my memory could be faulty, no matter how real it seems.

“I could have been given that book by someone else later on. Maybe an older woman, maybe Mom? And confused the memories.”

Although I know of no scientific evidence for people traveling backward through time, there is plenty of evidence (anecdotal and scientific) for false and/or confused memories. An example from my own life is embedded in my creative nonfiction piece, Going Down Slow. In that story I tell about how my sister, brother, and I leave our critically ill Dad alone in his hospital room to go with our Mom to check out a Hospice. When my sister read the story, she exclaimed, “No, don’t you remember? I stayed back at the hospital so Dad wouldn’t be alone.” My memory of the three of us standing with Mom while talking to the Hospice nurse, although vivid and detailed, was simply wrong. Fabricated. (Interestingly, since being corrected by my sister, that memory has actually faded.)

Another example, in the recent news, concerned NBC Anchor Brian Williams. According to USA Today (2/6/2015), Williams claimed he’d been under fire in Iraq, but after challenges to his story, said he’d “misremembered” being hit by enemy fire in Iraq in a helicopter, when in fact, the helicopter had not been hit. His false memory created a stir in the media and cast doubt on his credibility.

No doubt you, too, have an anecdote about a false memory in your own life, though perhaps not as public as Williams’! But what about scientific evidence?

Arguably, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus is the most prolific and well-known researcher in the area of false memories. (Go to You Tube to watch Loftus’ TED talk–a must-view! https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=elizabeth+loftus+ted+talk ) The scientific evidence she presents strongly supports the idea that misinformation (and the world is full of it), can cause memory distortion, and that false memories can actually be intentionally implanted into one’s mind. Loftus warns us that just because a person believes their own memory and relates it in detail with confidence and emotion doesn’t mean it really happened.

Considering the recent stir about Brian Williams, Loftus, whose research has apparently made her more forgiving about memory lapses, is quoted by USA Today: “Let’s give Williams a break.” (USA Today, 2/6/2015)

Photo from www.public-republic.net

I had to put Hank down today. He was a rescued German shepherd. When I got him, the shelter said he was probably about 10 years old. I’d had him for two years.

This morning, he couldn’t walk at all, not even drag himself with his front legs, the culmination of a slow loss of function in his hind end. He also refused to eat or drink, which was the sign for me to call the vet.

The vet showed up at 1:00 this afternoon. She was sympathetic and efficient. I wore my Alpha Bitch tee shirt to call up the courage to be the one who makes these decisions. The whole thing took about 20 minutes, which I appreciated. I had already done much of my grieving for this uncomplaining, easy-going old dog and didn’t want something drawn-out.

I clipped a bit of Hank’s fur. Spoke to him, and let him go.

Right now, I can’t believe he’s gone. One of my two remaining dogs searched for him in the back yard, even though those two had watched the whole procedure, including deceased Hank being taken out on a stretcher.

Is he really gone? I think Hank’s spirit, the Life Force, has returned to the universe. What will happen to him next? Dog Heaven? Reincarnation? Joining me on my spaceship adventures when I die? Hard to tell.

I am no stranger to dogs dying. My story “That Nice Girl with the Dogs,” posted on this site, is a creative nonfiction piece which describes some of these experiences.

The story is also about the death of my mother, lost to dementia.

Some deaths are quick, some slow. Sometimes love is straightforward, sometimes intensely complicated. Whatever the circumstances, we still grieve.

“The steroid medication I’ve prescribed will delay the progress of the cancer, but there’s no cure. Most likely, she’ll be active and happy for another four, maybe six, weeks. Right up until the end.”

As I had been taught, I didn’t cry or protest, but fought for calm, clutching the fur of her scruff as the white room ballooned, then shrank. The rest of the vet’s words were almost lost to me under the terrible shushing of blood in my ears.

“When the end comes, it’ll be fast, within a day, most likely.”

I called her Sirocco because she was the color of sand and swept along the earth like the wind. Sirocco was my go-anywhere, best-behaved dog. She slept with her whole long body against me every night and calmed me with her meditative gaze.

I had two other dogs, both German Shepherds like Sirocco. These other two were fine dogs, but Sirocco was my favorite. Now, with her illness and so little time left, I dropped any pretense of fairness.  Sirocco got the meatiest bones and special treats, the longest play-time, the most affection. But most important, she got the dog park every morning just before dawn, every morning until the last one.

The park is 80 acres, in the countryside away from town, and just over a ridge so that the town lights cannot be seen. Bark-chipped trails wind through the central part of the park, through tall prairie grass, an occasional towering oak or hickory, and elderly apple trees still bearing. But Sirocco and I preferred to patrol the narrow, stony dirt path that follows all around the edges of the park up on the ridge where the jack pines grow and where meadows of cow parsnips space the woods. We liked that high view of the prairie below, and to circle all around the known and loved.

It was quiet, cold and dark on the ridge those early mornings. The park was often empty of other people or dogs. I rarely used a flashlight, trusting my eyes to adapt. Sirocco would disappear into the grey and black shadows of the woods to hunt. Mostly, I let her be, but if the darkness crept up my back too much, I liked to call her to me in a whisper, huffing through the silence.

“Sirocco, come!”

I’ve decided to describe Daryl Bem’s Experiment 2 from his (2011) publication, Feeling the Future (see reference below). Dr. Bem, a respected research psychologist, magician, and debunker of ESP (psi) demonstrations, seems to me an ideal person to conduct research on hunches. Also, the procedure of the experiment is relatively simple, and the results are statistically quite unlikely to be due to chance.

PARTICIPANTS: 150 Cornell undergraduates. 107 women, 43 men.

METHOD:

Procedure:

There were three steps in this experiment, all fully automated on a computer in order to reduce unintended influence by human experimenters.

1. The participant saw two side-by-side neutral pictures on a computer screen and indicated which picture he/she preferred. (The pictures are described in the Materials section below.)

2. AFTER the participant indicated which picture was preferred, the computer randomly selected one of those two pictures as the “target.”

3a. IF the participant had, in step 1, already selected the target picture as preferred, the computer flashed a positive picture three times for 33 milliseconds each time.

3b. IF the participant had, in step 1, already selected the nontarget picture as preferred, the computer flashed a negative picture three times for 33 ms each time.

(When pictures or other stimuli are presented for such tiny time periods, the stimuli are called subliminal. The participant is generally not consciously aware of subliminal stimuli.)

Materials: All of the pictures used in this experiment were taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). (See reference below.)These pictures have been rated by various groups of people as to their emotional “pull.”

Some pictures are rated as neutral, for example, a chair against a blank wall. Some are rated as negative, for example, a spider or an angry human face. Some are positive, for example, children laughing or puppies snuggling.

In summary, participants indicated a preference for one of two pictures. If the preferred picture was then randomly selected as “target,” participants were subliminally rewarded with a positive picture. But if that preferred picture was the (randomly selected) “nontarget,” participants were subliminally punished with a negative picture.

HYPOTHESIS:

The idea is that if participants can somehow “feel” the future, can somehow access the emotional pull of the future subliminal picture, then, over many trials, they will tend to prefer the positive target picture and avoid choosing the negative nontarget picture.

If participants cannot feel the future, then, over many trials, they will indicate a preference for the target picture 50% of the time.

RESULTS:

If you’re not familiar with parapsychological (psi) research, you may be disappointed by the results of this study.

As with many psi experiments of this type, the results support psi, but the effects are very small. In this study, participants showed a “hit rate” (preferring target pictures) of 51.7%, not much above the chance rate of 50%. This might suggest that feelings about the future are rather weak and somewhat hit-or-miss. Certainly, for an individual person, these “hunches” are only occasionally better than chance. Nevertheless, these results are statistically significant. In other words, the feelings about the future are weak, but very likely “real” – not due to chance.

But wait. Are you feeling doubts rise up like a wall? Wondering about the experimental design- was it truly solid? Wondering if the particular statistical analyses used were appropriate? Wondering if these results can be reproduced in other laboratories by other experimenters?

You’re not alone. If you google criticisms about Bem’s Feeling the Future, you’ll see many people have weighed in with critiques, and supportive comments as well.

My personal position, after reading Bem’s paper and several of the critical articles, is that the experiments are solid designs with careful controls for extraneous variables. But yes, it would be useful to use a variety of statistical approaches with the data.  And the most crucial question remains: can these results be replicated?

Experiments have been, and are being, conducted all over the world in attempts to replicate Bem’s findings. We’ll take up these results in a future blog. Any hunches about the outcomes?

(Featured image from designstacks.net)

REFERENCES

Bem, D. (2011). Feeling the Future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100: 407-425. (caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf)

Lang, P.J., Bradley, M.M., & Cuthbert, B.N. (2008) International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Affective ratings of pictures and instruction manual. Technical Report A-8 University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.

But Dr. Bem was not only a professional magician. He also debunked demonstrations of ESP (ExtraSensory Perception- today called “psi.”) For example, he appeared in an Introductory Psychology video series in which he revealed how a magician “sets up” card and mind-reading tricks. (See the Annenberg Learning website for the series produced by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo called “Discovering Psychology, updated edition, Unit Two).

During my career as a psychologist, I didn’t bother following psi research. Like many of my colleagues, I assumed the scientific “evidence” demonstrating the existence of psi was probably flawed, marred by inadequate design and over-enthusiastic interpretation of data. Not that I had actually seen any of the studies. After all, they were generally not published in the mainstream psychology journals I read.

But in 2011, a headline in the New York Times grabbed my attention: “Top Journal Plans to Publish a Paper on ESP . . .” The journal was the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), perhaps the most respected journal in its field regarding rigor of peer review and importance of research topics.

The author of the paper was Daryl Bem, and his laboratory studies to be published in JPSP claimed to support the idea that future events could causally influence current emotions and behaviors even when these future events were random and unknown to anyone. In other words, the studies were touted to support presentiment (emotions based on the future) and precognition (cognition based on the future).

In the NYT article, some critics of Bem’s work thought his paper might be “an elaborate joke,” or “an embarrassment to the field,” or “should undergo special scrutiny,” or that the study used improper statistics. (The New York Times, 1/6/2011)

But to my mind, this was Professor Bem, a renowned and respected scientist who had, in the latter part of his career, turned his attention to psi research. And who better to conduct these studies than the great debunker himself? Who better to know how to design an experiment that controlled for (eliminated) extraneous factors—factors that could offer an alternative explanation for apparent psi results?

I’m going to offer a somewhat simplified description of one of Bem’s studies in my next blog. But for now, if you wish, you can read his entire article at JPSP’s online publication of “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” 100, 407-425. (caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf)

(Featured image from amazingkidsparties.com.au)

A prophesying power animal plays a role in my novel, “A Second Chance Life.” In the following scene, Jude tells his friend Sara about a raccoon who he believes is quite extraordinary:

In the hush of the closed-up car, Jude said, “Well, I guess it all began when I was seven. See, I wanted a puppy real bad. A little puppy I could play with, and tell him everything . . .

“So did you get a puppy?” (Sara asked.)

. . . “No. When I asked my mom, she said, ‘No dog, because your little sister has bad allergies. How about a turtle?’ You can imagine, I was bummed . . .

“But then, that very same night, after everyone had gone to bed, I heard this scratching outside my window. I stood on my bed and looked down into the vegetable garden that ran along the side of the house. There was this raccoon, balanced on her haunches, looking up at me with that dark mask they have. She had her paws folded across her pouched belly, like she was waiting. Two little fuzzy mounds—her babies—dug around in the dirt next to her. She kept looking at me, like I was supposed to say something, so I started talking to her. I told her about wanting a puppy. I told her about my dad. I told her how hard it was in school. Then she rounded up her babies and waddled away. I fell asleep feeling a whole lot better, almost like making up for not having a puppy.

“Did she ever come back?”

“Yep. Pretty soon I’d hear her rummaging outside the window almost every night. She’d sit back on her hind legs and shine her eyes up at me. I’d ask her things, like, how will I do on the spelling test? Will I get that basketball for Christmas? Will I get to pitch for the baseball team? After awhile, she started to answer me. She had a high, whistly voice and she was always right, like she knew what was going to happen. She’d say, ‘you’ll get seventy percent on the test’ and I would. ‘You’ll get a basketball,’ and I did. And she told me ‘No, you’re not that good at pitching,’ and I wasn’t.”

. . . “What did your parents think about the raccoon?”

“My parents? I never told my dad. I told my mom about the whole thing . . . She made me promise not to tell anyone—not my friends, and especially not my dad. She said I had a creative mind and an excellent imagination, and I was to tell her about the animals helping me if they kept on. I think she put my experiences in the category of “imaginary playmates” and assumed I’d outgrow it.”

Jude’s mother interpreted his experiences as imagination, and one could assume that Jude already suspected the answers to his questions, and simply imagined he’d heard them from a raccoon. After all, he was a little boy in need of someone to confide in.

The idea of prophecies, power animals or not, is a fascinating one. But is it possible to truly “see” into the future?

In a partial answer to this question, there are some intriguing current scientific studies about glimpsing the future, studies that are published in respected, peer-reviewed journals. Since I promised science as well as psi and psychology at this site, the next blog will take a look at some of this science.