Throughout history it has been believed that certain individuals have precognitive abilities, or that certain practices can induce such experiences, and these visions have sometimes been associated with important historical events. A poll in 2005 showed 73% of Americans believe in at least one type of paranormal experience, with 41% believing in
extrasensory perception.
Antiquity Since ancient times precognition has been associated with
dreams and
trance states as well as waking premonitions, giving rise to acts of prophecy and fortune telling.
Oracles, originally seen as sources of wisdom, became progressively associated with previsions of the future. Such claims of seeing the future have never been without their sceptical critics.
Aristotle carried out an inquiry into allegedly prophetic dreams in his
On Divination in Sleep. He accepted that "it is quite conceivable that some dreams may be tokens and causes [of future events]" but also believed that "most [so-called prophetic] dreams are, however, to be classed as mere
coincidences...". Where
Democritus had suggested that emanations from future events could be sent back to the dreamer, Aristotle proposed that it was, rather, the dreamer's sense impressions which reached forward to the event.
17th–19th centuries The term "precognition" first appeared in the 17th century but did not come into common use among investigators until much later. Dunne concluded that precognitive elements in dreams are common and that many people unknowingly have them. He suggested also that dream precognition did not reference future events of all kinds, but specifically the future experiences of the dreamer. He was led to this idea when he found that a dream of a volcanic eruption appeared to foresee not the disaster itself but his subsequent misreading of an inaccurate account in a newspaper. In 1932 he helped the SPR to conduct a more formal experiment, but he and the Society's lead researcher
Theodore Besterman failed to agree on the significance of the results. Nevertheless, the Philosopher
C. D. Broad remarked that, "The only theory known to me which seems worth consideration is that proposed by Mr. Dunne in his Experiment with Time."
An Experiment with Time was widely read and "undoubtedly helped to form something of the imaginative climate of [the interwar] years", influencing many writers of both fact and fiction both then and since. According to Flieger, "Dunne's theory was so current and popular a topic that not to understand it was a mark of singularity." Major writers whose work was significantly influenced by his ideas on precognition in dreams and visions include
H. G. Wells,
J. B. Priestley and
Olaf Stapledon.
Vladimir Nabokov was also later influenced by Dunne. In 1932
Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped, murdered and buried among trees. Psychologists
Henry Murray and D. R. Wheeler used the event to test for dream precognition, by inviting the public to report any dreams of the child. A total of 1,300 dreams were reported. Only five per cent envisioned the child dead and only 4 of the 1,300 envisioned the location of the grave as amongst trees. The first ongoing and organised research program on precognition was instituted by husband-and-wife team
Joseph Banks Rhine and
Louisa E. Rhine in the 1930s at
Duke University's
Parapsychology Laboratory. J. B. Rhine used a method of forced-choice matching in which participants guessed the order of a deck of 25 cards, each five of which bore one of five geometrical symbols. Although his results were positive and gained some academic acceptance, his methods were later shown to be badly flawed and subsequent researchers using more rigorous procedures were unable to reproduce his results. His mathematics was sometimes flawed, the experiments were not double-blinded or even necessarily single-blinded and some of the cards to be guessed were so thin that the symbol could be seen through the backing.
Samuel G. Soal, another leading member of the SPR, was described by Rhine as one of his harshest critics, running many similar experiments with wholly negative results. However, from around 1940 he ran forced-choice ESP experiments in which a subject attempted to identify which of five animal pictures a subject in another room was looking at. Their performance on this task was at chance, but when the scores were matched with the card that came
after the target card, three of the thirteen subjects showed a very high hit rate; Rhine now described Soal's work as "a milestone in the field". However analyses of Soal's findings, conducted several years later, concluded that the positive results were more likely the result of deliberate fraud. The controversy continued for many years more.
Late 20th century As more modern technology became available, more automated techniques of experimentation were developed that did not rely on hand-scoring of equivalence between targets and guesses, and in which the targets could be more reliably and readily tested at random. In 1969
Helmut Schmidt introduced the use of high-speed random event generators (REG) for precognition testing, and experiments were also conducted at the
Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab. Once again, flaws were found in all of Schmidt's experiments, when the psychologist
C. E. M. Hansel found that several necessary precautions were not taken. Science fiction writer
Philip K Dick believed that he had precognitive experiences and used the idea in some of his novels, especially as a central plot element in his 1956 science fiction short story "
The Minority Report" and in his 1956 novel
The World Jones Made. In 1963 the
BBC television programme
Monitor broadcast an appeal by the writer
J.B. Priestley for experiences which challenged our understanding of Time. He received hundreds of letters in reply and believed that many of them described genuine precognitive dreams. In 2014 the BBC Radio 4 broadcaster
Francis Spufford revisited Priestley's work and its relation to the ideas of J.W. Dunne. In 1965 G. W. Lambert, a former Council member of the SPR, proposed five criteria that needed to be met before an account of a precognitive dream could be regarded as credible: • The dream should be reported to a credible witness before the event. • The time interval between the dream and the event should be short. • The event should be unexpected at the time of the dream. • The description should be of an event destined literally, and not symbolically, to happen. • The details of dream and event should tally. David Ryback, a psychologist in
Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students during the 1980s. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 per cent reported some form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these reports, but claimed that 8.8 per cent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.
21st century In 2011 the psychologist
Daryl Bem, a Professor Emeritus at
Cornell University, published findings showing statistical evidence for precognition in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper was heavily criticised, and the criticism widened to include the journal itself and the validity of the
peer-review process. In 2012, an independent attempt to reproduce Bem's results was published, but it failed to do so. The widespread controversy led to calls for improvements in practice and for more research. ==Scientific reception==