In connection with my recent posts on NDEs, Andrew Paquette sent me a PDF of an article he published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (Vol. 26, No, 4). The article is also available online. Titled "NDE Implications from a Group of Spontaneous Long-Distance Veridical OBEs," it recounts Andrew's experiments in dream journaling, in which he recorded numerous OBEs (or at least OBE-like dreams) with verifiable content. Though initially skeptical of psi, he soon became convinced that he was obtaining accurate information non-locally. He even wrote a book about it.
In his article, Andrew notes that the veridical OBEs in some near-death experiences are often used to show that NDEs are not mere hallucinations. Skeptics counter that the verifiable elements might have been perceived normally (usually via the sense of hearing, with visual content supplied by the mind to match the auditory input). They also complain that many of these cases suffer from a lack of contemporaneous documentation. Andrew argues that his dream journal experiments can help counter these objections, since the dreams were written down immediately upon waking and (in veridical cases) were usually verified within a few hours or, at most, a day. Moreover, the more evidential OBEs involved events that took place miles from his home and therefore well outside the range of his normal senses.
Andrew found three characteristics that distinguished an OBE from his other dreams:
1. It featured a person who ignored my presence,
2. I could identify at least one person in the dream, and
3. The dream contained unusual details that could be used for verification.
He adds:
The first criterion may seem unusual, but it was my way of knowing that I was not a literal participant in the activity. In a typical OBE, I try to interact by talking to people, but they ignore me. Not infrequently, I assume they can hear me, but are purposely ignoring me. This causes me to become increasingly agitated as I make successively more aggressive attempts to force the people in the dream to acknowledge my presence. I learned over time that my observations from dreams like this could usually be confirmed by the subject of the dream.
It is interesting to note that this same detail - trying to make contact with the people around oneself, and failing - has been reported in some NDEs. It's also interesting that in a smaller number of cases, Andrew reports making telepathic contact with the person he's observing, even though that person does not consciously notice him.
An example of this is provided by a veridical OBE where I saw a person I knew, Dr. David Ryback of Atlanta, Georgia, talking to a tenant in the building they both worked in. Dr. Ryback’s acquaintance was telling him how two cars he owned had been severely damaged on two separate occasions in the same week in the same way, by having tree branches fall on and crush their roofs. While continuing his conversation with this man, Dr. Ryback had a brief telepathic conversation with me on a different topic, the gist of which was that he provided a quick answer to a question I had and then told me he was occupied and could not communicate any further.
Some NDErs likewise say that in their out-of-body state, they were privy to the thoughts of the medical personnel attending them, though these reports are uncommon.
It could, of course, be objected that even if there were verifiable details, Andrew's dream OBEs might not have involved "leaving the body," but instead were instances of telepathy or clairvoyance. Certain cases, however, argue against that interpretation. In these cases, the person whom Andrew was observing in his OBE became aware of his presence, or at least aware of a presence of some sort. Here are two examples.
In the first case, a friend in California named Lisa Moore called Andrew and asked if he had dreamed of her recently. He checked his journal and found a dream from two weeks earlier that did seem to involve Moore.
Moore said it was a fair description of recent events in her life connected with the death of her cat during veterinary surgery after it was run over by a car. Impressively, the unusual detail of decapitation was included in my notes. As I learned after I had read the dream to Lisa, this is the first of three cases I know of where the person I dreamed about during an OBE actually saw me at their location. Because of this, Lisa had expected me to call and tell her of the dream.
When Andrew didn't call, Moore eventually called him. She had waited two weeks, meaning that the time frame in which the OBE/dream took place matched the event she remembered.
Here's another case in which Andrew's presence seems to have been detected by the person he was observing.
I will at some point within the OBE begin to feel exceedingly tired. This leads to a gradual collapse into “unconsciousness” within the dream followed by waking in my bed. In one veridical example from April 22, 1990, I observed my mother in her apartment, which was about 2,800 miles from where I was sleeping. I saw that she was on a date with someone and that they were listening to Schubert while she cooked something in her kitchen. While watching this, I suddenly became very tired and leaned into a wall opposite my mother’s position in the kitchen. I then sank to the floor along it, making a kind of scraping noise against the wall. My mother suddenly turned to look directly at me as if alarmed, and then I woke. I called my mother later in the day and verified various elements of the dream. To my surprise, she said that she had been surprised while cooking that night by a strange sound coming from the wall opposite her. She said it sounded like a paper bag being scraped against the wall as it fell to the floor, followed by a thud, but she saw no source for the noise.
Other cases do not include this element, but are notable for their unusual content.
In a dream from August 12, 2003, the spirit of a recently deceased young woman gave me an urgent and disturbing warning for a relative of hers named James. James was a clerk who worked at an art supply store I shopped at occasionally. I had spoken to James on a handful of occasions while purchasing art supplies, but did not know him well. Though hesitant to pass on the warning to James, I did do it. James confirmed that his sister-in-law, with whom he was close, died within the last two weeks when her car was rammed by a police car during a high-speed car chase. He stated that she had appeared to him earlier that week in a dream and given him the same warning she had given me in my dream ...
One dramatic OBE involved a friend and colleague of my wife’s, named Joseph Fazecas, who lived in Manhattan. At the time, we lived in Weehawken [New Jersey]. I dreamed that I visited Fazecas at the hospital. During the OBE, I was sure he had died. After describing this to my wife, she became alarmed and called her office, where they both worked, to check on him. He wasn’t at work because a little earlier he’d had a serious heart attack and had been taken to the hospital for coronary bypass surgery. He survived the crisis, but—as an aside—I wonder if he had an NDE and if that is why I thought he was dead.
Some of Andrew's OBEs involved much greater distances. In two cases, he saw events in the life of a friend named Richard Breedon, a physicist working in Japan. In the first such episode, he observed Breedon "doing something to these little wafers, or tiles. They have letters written on them and are a little bigger than scrabble pieces. He tosses them into the box when he is done with them."
Breedon, who is skeptical of psi, confirmed that he had been labeling small pre-amplifier cards with lettering that resembled the letters on Scrabble game pieces, and that he had placed them into a box when finished.
The second episode is more ambiguous, since it includes misses as well as hits. Still, it appears that Andrew did observe a Japanese woman assisting Breedon in carrying a large electronic keyboard from his car to his office. Andrew did not identify it as a keyboard, but he described its general size and appearance accurately. Some other details of the OBE were wrong (Andrew placed Breedon's office on the wrong floor, depicted extra doorways in the floor plan, and incorrectly said the woman was wearing an unusual hat), but the hits are still specific enough to be of interest.
In another case involving Breedon (who had moved to California by then), Andrew
dreamed that I visited Breedon and his wife Pat as she gave birth to twins in California. At the time I lived about 3,000 miles away, in Maine. I immediately sent an email to congratulate him. He responded with the following message:
Right you are! Born just hours before the time your message arrived here. How do you do it? I showed your message to two professors I work with. One said you had had to get it off the Internet (although I made absolutely no postings), the other simply said, “very good!”
It should be noted that Pat gave birth six weeks prematurely and that I was not tracking her pregnancy ... Breedon read the message at his office on his way home from the hospital at about 5:00 a.m., prior to his having notified anyone that his children had been born.
Finally, Andrew offers a particularly detailed example in which he saw his uncle and aunt discussing a painting his uncle had just done. Andrew's sketch of the painting, made in his journal, matches the size, dimensions, and general appearance of the actual painting quite closely, and his description of the color scheme is correct. This is especially impressive given that the shape of the painting was unusual, and the subject, a landscape, is depicted in a stylized manner. Moreover, the uncle had never before shown an interest in painting, and Andrew was unaware that he had recently taken it up. (This was, in fact, his very first painting.) The distance again was considerable - Andrew was in New Jersey, and his relatives were in Minnesota.
These examples were culled from 92 veridical OBEs recorded in Andrew's journals. Even one such case, if it is genuine, is sufficient to cast doubt on physicalist theories of the mind's unbreakable dependency on the brain. More to the point, they pose a problem for the skeptical view that veridical NDEs can be explained by normal sensory perception or mistaken memories. In these OBEs, memory problems are not an issue, since the episodes were recorded and verified immediately. And sensory leakage cannot be a factor in observing events that took place a thousand miles away (or more). Even "ordinary" psi does not seem to explain those cases in which the discarnate Andrew was seen or heard by the people he was observing.
What, then, do skeptics have to say? Richard Breedon wrote to James Randi for his input. Randi reportedly replied:
When I was a kid, I successfully predicted the outcomes of hockey games by having some 30 different letters notarized, each different from the others, and merely produced the correct one after the game.
Andrew writes:
By this he meant to insinuate that I could have intentionally hoaxed Breedon. By extension, Randi’s suggestion implied that even if I had notarized every page of the journal, a very expensive proposition for my limited means at the time, a critic could simply make the false claim that alternate notarized pages existed to demonstrate that notarization or any other form of proof can be manipulated into meaninglessness by a determined individual. The very same criticism can be leveled at any document created by any person for any purpose. In other words, at this level, the criticism is worthless because it can be suggested of anything.
Michael, as you know, Andrew's book is called Dreamer, and it's one of the best available on precognitive dreams. Andrew has been one of the key participants at Skeptiko over the years, and despite the extraordinary nature of some of his claims, his countless contributions at Skeptiko make it hard for me to doubt his intelligence or integrity.
(Though I do wish he would be more open-minded about psychedelics. :) )
David Ryback, by the way, whom you referred to in your post, wrote "Dreams that Come True," which was one of the very first books on parapsychology I ever read. It had an enormous influence on me 20 years ago, leading me to discovering my own precognitive dreams, which, in turn, became my essential first-hand proof of psi.
Posted by: Bruce Siegel | August 01, 2014 at 05:19 AM
Not so strange: skeptics' brains are not open enough to accept anything that doesn't match with their inner beliefs!
Posted by: Claudio from Italy | August 01, 2014 at 10:26 AM
Real interesting, and I believe him too. Randi's comments reveal more about him than anything. I have had two lucid dream incidents similar to Andrew's. Mine, however, both involved deceased individuals. In one (I posted about this one here before) my brother, who died several years earlier, visited me in a lucid dream and provided some almost irrefutable verifiable evidence that the experience was real. My second experience occurred while I was staying in Florida a few years ago. I had a lucid dream and found myself in a small grassy area near a highway. I was talking to a somewhat tired looking black man. He told me he was just killed in an accident on MacArthur Causeway. I looked towards the highway and saw a destroyed vehicle. He asked me to tell his family that he was ok. I awoke. I did some internet searching and found that an actual fatal accident had indeed occurred on MacArthur Causeway near Miami (I was in Daytona Beach at the time). The man who was killed was not “black”, but his last name contained the word "black" in Spanish. Maybe his being black in my dream was a play on his last name. I never did make an attempt to contact his family as I did not want to be taken for a lunatic. I, like Paquette, tried to run some statistical analysis on these incidents. Trying to be conservative I estimated the probability of each of these dreams to have been chance occurrences at 1 in 4000 and 1 in 350 respectively.
Michael, thanks for continuing to find these nuggets that you do. They are helping to validate many of your readers own experiences, although, I still remain a skeptic. I guess I just can’t get rid of the materialist brainwashing that goes with living in a western society.
Posted by: GregL | August 01, 2014 at 02:22 PM
Fascinating. Andrew's experience is very similar to my own (it's always nice to be confirmed, even if you pretend you don't need that).
As an aside, my wife and I have been using hemisync CDs - these are the actual Monroe Institute ones. For me, they just help relax and center my too often scattered mind. My wife, OTOH, has begun have some OBE(-ish?) experiences. Last night she "went to China" and was observing various transactions in a market place there. In these trips she has been making she has some level of access to what the people in the scene are thinking. Per Andrew's criteria, the people don't notice her or interact with her in any way. Around 5:00 am this morning she woke up and very excitedly told me about her having gone to China. What is coincidental in an interesting way is that later this morning, out of the blue as far as I know, my son posted on his facebook page that he is planning a trip to China and is looking for any old Army buddies that might want to go with him.
OBEs are, to my mind, the most fascinating aspect of the paranormal and, IMO, they can really end up challenging all preconceived notions of, well, just about everything.
Thanks to Andrew Paquette for sharing with Michael and then thanks Michael for sharing with us. Also, thanks Michael for the hemisync suggestion on the psychedelics thread. It appears to be doing good things for my wife, and, I have to admit, for me as well.
Posted by: no one | August 01, 2014 at 03:44 PM
I have no reason to doubt Andrew Paquette, he seems a perfectly rational, normal guy. As you said, Michael if even just one of these OBE's is real that's enough to prove the point.
I already accept that the OBE during cardiac arrest is real, is this the same type of phenomena or is it more akin to remote viewing ?
Very interesting.
Posted by: Duck soup | August 02, 2014 at 07:24 AM
Great post, Michael!
I had never thought about the detail of people not noticing the NDEr before. I have had a couple dreams like that, but I believe I was in the Afterlife dimension and not 3D. I have had only a few 3D OBEs.
More or less on topic, I had an interesting dream a night or two ago in which I was reading text. Now one way to tell if you are in a dream (i.e., a lucid dream) is to try to read something. I have done this on purpose several times in a dream, and the effects can be quite interesting. You can get crystal-clear text, but it will not be stable on the page. It will change to something else.
But in this latest dream, the text did not seem to behave in this way. I was not fully lucid, so I could not test it completely, but I was reading some material about a woman who owned a business back in the 20s or so. (I think this was "just" a dream-dream and not an OBE with veridical content. But I wonder if this represents something new, perhaps 5D dreaming as opposed to unstable Astral 4D dreaming. My guides have been talking to me about dreaming in 5D, and the quality of my dreams has indeed changed a lot.)
Does Andrew have anything to say about reading in his book? It is a topic of great interest to me.
Posted by: Matt Rouge | August 02, 2014 at 12:45 PM
I find It baffling people doubt OBE Astral projection. If you do have a real fully conscious astral projection, there is no doubt you are not in your body and in a higher phased dimension. Same with NDEs really. People just don't accept it as their knowledge is extemely limited and brain washed their whole lives. We are multi dimensional beings that Merely inhabit a human body for a short while. It's really obvious basic spiritually 101 really, if you are experienced in spiritual matters. Science is stupid really everything is focussed on getting evidence in this physical earthly dimension. They are barely grasping the multi-dimensional nature of the universe and reality. If you put the effort in and achieve OBE you won't need any proof. I learnt to do it after tonne of research and real effort. The only way for the average person is to happen to have a NDE which is a bit drastic, or psychedelics. In my opinion if you think it's bullshit, it's doubtful you'll get there by OBE or lucid dreaming, so psychedelics is then only way to learn this and prove it to yourself. You don't look for proof, like just reading a book on how to swim and never swimming. Just fucking swim, you'll have the real experience and then understand. Just learn to OBE or take some real psychedelics! There will never be proof on this earthly dimension, as you concious soul does not exist on this physical dimension in the fist place, you are just fooled into thinking that your whole life, that's the whole point of earth, it's the perfect illusion and playground for body physical experience. Higher dimensions are where the real knowledge lies.
Posted by: plus.google.com/106397052897341312013 | August 02, 2014 at 06:14 PM
This is Random but I came across a paper linking Jung's synchronicity with QM theory, thought you'd appreciate it
http://www.academia.edu/1248055/Carl_G._Jungs_Synchronicity_and_Quantum_Entanglement_Schrodingers_Cat_Wanders_Between_Chromosomes
Posted by: Ingrid | August 03, 2014 at 10:41 AM
I suspect people doubt phenomena sometimes because they are simply beyond their 'boggle threshold'. I guess some things just have to be seen/experienced to be believed.
Posted by: Paul | August 03, 2014 at 11:36 AM
An experienced OBE'r can doubt it purely by experience.
I can only take from this that spiritual aspects/phenomena could be blended easier when in an unconsious state(sleep)
I assure you having had over 10 OBE's from mastering advanced lucid dream and sleep OBE techniques that you will be convinced of being out of your body at the start,but after time and experience there are too many inconsistencies with the real world too accept it at face value.
That aside,veridical OBE's from a sleep state are different from NDE Obe's though I could accept based on previous mentioned different perspective.Why does nature complicate things so much !
Posted by: Bryan.A | August 03, 2014 at 01:49 PM
I find this interesting, but remain skeptical. Maybe it's possible. One thing to remember is that millions of people are having millions of dreams all of the time. Sooner or later, one of those dreams will prove "true" - it's like hitting the lottery. I've had a few myself, but all of trivial account. Even today, at church, for some reason, near the end of the service, I was thinking of that song, "Joyful, Joyful." A few minutes later, of all the songs the choir could have chosen, they played this song. But I think it's due to the law of averages.
On the other hand, at one time, the Soviet Union and U.S. government were both involved in remote viewing, which seems similar to OBEs. It's hard to find out what happened with the Soviet program, but from I've read, the U.S. program had some success, but it was basically laughed out of existence, no one could just take it seriously.
Posted by: Kathleen | August 03, 2014 at 02:50 PM
@kathleen
I guess the question is 'what is the difference between precognition, guessing and random occurrence?'.
Whilst I agree that some events may be down to sheer coincidence, I'm not sure that is the case for all situations eg people who have complex apparent precognitions or people who regularly experience precognition.
Posted by: Paul | August 03, 2014 at 06:04 PM
@Kathleen: Your "millions of people having millions of dreams" comment is easy to say but not easy to check. That said, I made a stab at checking it in my most recent paper. It is still in review, so I won't say too much here. However, though there are billions of people who can have dreams, and trillions (or more) if you include animals, on an individual level you are not talking about "millions" of dreams but thousands. When you look at the thousands as I have done, one thing that comes across very strongly is that very few of the thousands involved can be checked. That is to say, even if they were completely accurate in some objective way, there is no way to check their veridicality due to various factors such as unknown dream characters or lack of access to anyone who could verify the dream. Once you remove these from the group, you are left with hundreds--not thousands or millions.
You can contend that you still have your billions of individuals having dreams (the trillions of animals are excluded due to a lack of common language), so the number of potentially veridical dreams any individual might experience is irrelevant. No matter how small that number is, multiplied by the number of individuals it is still a big number. However, on examination dreams sort themselves into different types of content categories. This limits the "millions and millions" argument more because only certain categories are of interest to the field of parapsychology.
Then you need to look at how frequent veridicality occurs in any one person's dreams over a lifetime of record-keeping. If it happens quite often, the statistical edge no longer favors chance, but connection of some kind between dream content and objectively real events. Very few people have ever collected enough of their own dreams to make such comparisons. I have done this and can say that on a statistical level, randomness as an explanation does not match the data. Put another way, predictions by skeptics on this subject are exactly the opposite of what I find in my data. We are not talking about correlations in numbers that tend toward non-significance as the number of dreams increases, but the opposite.
I'll give one fast example, then refer to the paper later when it is out: In dreams of people who have died, though their death was unknown to me at the time I started the study, in most of the interesting cases they are people who either appeared exactly once in the journal (out of over 11,000 entries). or the first dream that mentions them and the subject of their death is meaningfully close to the actual date of their death (and usually is only one of two or three dreams that mention them). People who appear often, and there are people who appear in hundreds of dreams, have no dreams of death connected to them. In other words, the less often a person appears, usually once or twice, the more likely the death dream will be meaningfully near to their actual death date. The more dreams there are, in contradiction of skeptical pronouncements on this exact subject, the less likely any such correlation will be found.
AP
Posted by: Paqdream | August 03, 2014 at 06:05 PM
Randi's claim to have had his childhood sports predictions notarised is obviously a lie, the sort of casual lie you might expect of an inveterate BS-er.
Posted by: ChrisB | August 04, 2014 at 12:18 AM
Starting in 15 minutes from NOW:
Posted by: Roger Knights | August 04, 2014 at 01:01 AM
PS: That's on the Coast to Coast AM radio talk show.
Posted by: Roger Knights | August 04, 2014 at 01:02 AM
Great comment, Paqdream. Now you might be getting closer to convincing someone like me if we're looking at an individual person and their dreams' rate of proving true.
I still wonder why this would occur, the only explanation would seem to be that everything is completely connected to everything.
Posted by: Kathleen | August 04, 2014 at 01:05 PM