App Records Dreams, 'Tests' ESP
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Many people believe that their dreams hold important significance, from providing insight into personal problems buried in the subconscious to predicting the future.
Though there’s no good scientific evidence for ESP or precognition, countless people have claimed, after the fact, to have had prophetic dreams about important events such as a loved one’s death, the September 11, 2001 attacks, and so on. The problem is that because people’s memory is faulty (and the fleeting nature of dreams) it’s difficult to accurately and consistently record dreams to tease out their significance.
A new dream-themed app called Shadow hopes to change that. The creator of the app, Hunter Lee Soik, designed the program to allow people greater insight into their subconscious through dream interpretation. Another possible application, according to an article last weekby Roc Morin at Vice.com, is turning the app into “the world’s largest clairvoyance experiment” in which dream descriptions are entered “into a massive database, allowing thousands of the time-stamped transcripts to be searched by keyword. Clairvoyance could be identified through specific keyword spikes before major events.”
The website for the appdescribes how it works: “The problem,” according to Shadow, is that “95 percent of dreams are forgotten if not recorded shortly after waking up.” The app works by “Escalating alarms gradually transition you through your hypnopompic state from sleeping to waking. Type, speak or answer questions to record your dream the moment you wake up…. Over time, patterns emerge. The longer you use the app, the more accurate and rewarding the experience becomes.”
The site lists a dozen or so consulting experts ranging from dream researchers and authors to a “taste tester” and a chancellor at a graduate institute being sued by current and former studentsclaiming they were misled into thinking the institution was accredited by the American Psychological Association.
The idea is that if hundreds or thousands of people have similar, prophetic dreams about the same event that might be evidence of some sort of collective Jungian precognitive power. Or, at the very least, a person who records and archives their dreams could find previously unseen patterns. It’s an interesting idea, though there remain questions about how the data would be collected and analyzed.
Scientific Validity
If the Shadow app does indeed have pretensions of being a sort of experiment based in science (and not just a fun tool for dream interpretation enthusiasts), it will need to overcome some challenges in the area of research design.
Consistency is one problem: Some people almost never remember their dreams, while others report having a half-dozen or so vivid dreams each night. The data pool will of course be limited to those who have the app. Those who buy or use any app are inherently a self-selecting group that may or may not be representative of the general population. Those who buy and use Shadow are people 1) with disposable income and 2) smartphones who 3) are interested in dream significance and 4) who accurately remember enough of their dreams on a regular basis and 5) who take the time to record the dreams and 6) do this enough times to get a large enough data set to reveal patterns.
That’s going to be a pretty small slice of the public.
There’s also the practical matter of actually reporting and recording dreams. When most people wake up in the morning they have things to do: getting the kids ready for school, making breakfast, working out, starting their commute, and so on. If it’s important to a person he or she might spend a few minutes trying to recall and coherently explain their dreams, but this raises another problem: data quality.
Descriptions of dreams that are too short could mean anything; if a person just notes that he dreamed of a car accident death, for example, there’s no way to know what that means without specifying who it involved and what the circumstances were. Thousand of people are injured and killed in vehicle accidentseach day across the country, but presumably anyone who dreams about an accident the previous night is not predicting any of them.
On the other hand explaining a dream’s context and significance in enough detail to make it a useful data point in the Shadow archive might easily take 10 or 20 minutes — a luxury most of us don’t have immediately upon awakening. As a result the vast majority of the entries in Shadow are likely to be ambiguous, along the lines of “dreamt about cats” or “tightrope walking in the Arctic naked — again.”
Could Shadow Test ESP?
Vice’s Morin and others have suggested that the app could provide insight into a collective, clairvoyant unconscious. Yet what is needed — and what is conspicuously missing from the Shadow app — is a way to distinguish the content of precognitive (or presumably predictive) dreams from those that reflect a past experience. Much of what we dream about are things that are already on our minds — things we saw in the news the previous day, significant events in our personal lives, and so on.
If there is a spike in dreams about airplanes in the days following a high-profile airplane crash, it would merely reflect what’s on people’s minds or what they have seen on the news. Noting “I had a lot of dreams about divorce during my divorce” is not particularly noteworthy or helpful to anyone.
In order to determine whether there is any evidence for ESP in aggregate dream content reports, Shadow would need a way to correlate news events (as well as personally important non-news events such as a family member’s injury or a stressful emergency home repair) with dreams about those events soon afterwards and filter those out. If you are going to suggest that a dream about a loved one dying suddenly might be prophetic, you must determine with certainty whether that dream occurred before or after the dreamer knew about it.
In other words simply recording dreams is not enough; if they are claimed to correlate with (or predict) events in the outside world, then you must also record events in the outside world. You would also need to establish a threshold for determining whether the results are statistically significant: Given a large enough sample size some people’s dreams will inevitably contain themes or events shared by other people; it’s not psychic power but simply random chance.
In the end the Shadow app, fun and interesting as it may be, is unlikely to prove psychic powers or provide psychological breakthroughs; it is little more than a high-tech version of the ordinary dream journal, a notebook kept by the bedside for those who want to record, track, and interpret their dreams.
The lack of Shadow’s scientific validity is not the fault of the app or its creator; dreams are by their nature ephemeral, elusive, and ambiguous — and always will be, regardless of what gadgets we use to help us interpret them.
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