Hypnopompic And Hypnogogic Imagery

[bravox]

Sheldrake as a fan base of a sort, but his ideas are generally considered bad pseudoscience.

I'm not a fan and I think some of his ideas are right up there with intelligent design. But he does propose some interesting scientific experiments.

 

There’s no legitimate scientific evidence that Sheldrake’s proposed “morphic fields” exist

The problem is not whether morphic fields exist or not. For all we know, all fields are just products of our imagination and can only be observed through the effects they supposedly produce. The problem with the concept of morphic fields is that it is useless.

 

or that people have a sense of being stared at for any other reason than that they notice other people reacting to seeing someone staring at them.

Now here I'm not so sure. It doesn't seem our vision is accurate enough to detect when someone else's pupils are in perfect alignment with our own. This is something that can be empirically verified but I have never heard about it being done.

[CraigD]

or that people have a sense of being stared at for any other reason than that they notice other people reacting to seeing someone staring at them.

Now here I'm not so sure. It doesn't seem our vision is accurate enough to detect when someone else's pupils are in perfect alignment with our own. This is something that can be empirically verified but I have never heard about it being done.

I made an awkward mess of it trying to make my description brief. :( Let me try again.

 

Here’s how a typical “sense of being stared at” experiment, from Sherdrake’s “Seven Experiments That Could Change the World”, is done:

• The to-be-stared-at people (targets) go about normal, non-vigorous activities (in the one I participated in in the mid 90s, studying in a library) at regular intervals, say every 10 min, they note on paper for that interval (everybody has a synchronized timekeeping device of some kind) yes or no if they feel a sense of being stared at.
  
• The stare-ers are given randomly generated schedules of who to stare at, and when. Being careful that their targets can’t see them, they follow these schedules.
  
• The targets’ logs and the schedules are compared.
  

I noticed, when I was a stare-er, that although my targets couldn’t see me, people passing by occasionally did, and reacted visibly, typically looking first at me, then at my target, then around to see if anyone else was staring at anybody, then going about their business. Sometimes, these bystanders were visible to my target.

 

My hypothesis is that, without being consciously aware of it, targets sometimes noticed bystanders’ reactions, correctly interpreting it as a sense of being stared at. This seemed intuitively sensible to me, as it happens often in situations such as where two people are talking, and a third, invisible to one, approaches, and the other looks at him. It’s how a kind of “eye fake” is done, looking at a nonexistent other out of an opponent’s field of view to fool them into looking that way in order to distract them.

 

The experiment I was in was one of those that actually showed a small, statistically insignificant negative correlation between staring and a sense of being stared at – that is, the targets were wrong more often than chance predicted – so wasn’t a good candidate to repeat, removing bystanders, to see if the effect persisted or not. I wrote a couple of letters to periodicals (websites and emails were less than ubiquitous in the mid 1990s) where I though folk who might see significant positive correlations might see them suggesting running the experiment with and without bystanders, but neither heard from no read anywhere of such being done.

[belovelife]

i had a dream one time, where there was this female astronaught, we took a shuttle into space

 

next we were at a desserted motel

 

we went for a walk outside and walked on a path to a mountin

the mountin had all sorts of crystals jutting out of the side