Chris A. Roe (1), Simon J. Sherwood (1), Louise Farrell (1), Louie Savva (1), & Ian Baker (2)
(1) Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes, The University of Northampton
(2) Koestler Parapsychology Unit, The University of Edinburgh
The aim of this study was to explore the role of the sender in a dream ESP task; more specifically it was a conceptual replication of an earlier ganzfeld study (Roe, Sherwood & Holt, 2004) that manipulated the presence of a sender (sender, no sender) and considered the receiver's expectation concerning the sender's presence. Forty participants each completed a sender and a no sender trial on consecutive nights by sleeping at home as normal but keeping a dream diary to record all mentation that they could remember when they awoke. The order of completing sender and no sender trials was determined randomly and participant and experimenter were blind as to the order until after they had completed their judgments. On no-sender nights a video clip was randomly selected as target and played repeatedly from 2:00 until 6:30 a.m. On sender nights this was repeated except that a sender (SS or CR) would watch the clip between 6:00 and 6:30 and attempt to communicate its content to the receiver. The sender had no contact with the receiver at any stage. The primary outcome measure was specified in advance as the z score based upon similarity ratings of the target relative to those for three decoy video-clips. Although both sender and no sender conditions produced above chance hit rates (30% and 35% respectively), performance in neither condition deviated significantly from chance by our primary measure (sender night: t(39) = 0.92, p=0.18; no sender night: t(39) = 1.11, p= 0.14) and there was no difference between conditions (z=-0.22, p=0.41, one-tailed). Contrary to expectations, there was a nonsignificant tendency for z-score ratings to be greater for trials when the participants did not expect a sender than when they did expect a sender (z =-0.18, p=0.46, one-tailed). These data do not therefore support the proposal that senders play an active role in dream ESP success. An intriguing interaction between sender status (present vs absent) and sender identity (CR vs SS) is discussed, along with possible improvements in the manipulation of participant expectancy.