The Maimonides Dream Telepathy Studies

The Brooklyn work took advantage of an instrument that had only recently become available. Electroencephalography could identify rapid eye movement sleep as it happened, which meant a subject could be woken during a dream rather than asked about one at breakfast. The protocol used that directly. A subject slept wired to the monitor in one room. A sender in another, awake, concentrated for the night on a single art print chosen at random from a sealed pool, usually a reproduction with strong and unusual imagery. Whenever the monitor showed the subject entering dreaming sleep, an experimenter woke them over an intercom and recorded a description of the dream.

In the morning the subject added associations. The transcripts and the pool of candidate prints then went to judges who had not been present, who ranked how well each transcript matched each print. Above-chance ranking of the correct print was the reported result across several series, and Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Charles Honorton presented it to a general readership in 1973. The sender stayed awake through the night with the print and a set of related objects, on the theory that sustained engagement with the image mattered more than passive viewing. Whether that made any difference was never tested, since no version of the protocol omitted it.

The weakness of the design is the same one that afflicts every free-response protocol and is worse here than in the ganzfeld. A dream report is long, associative and full of imagery; a painting is dense with content; and a judge asked how well one matches the other is making a global similarity judgement with very little constraint on it. Two independent judges will often disagree, and a judge who scores several transcripts against several prints has considerable latitude.

The forced-choice card task Rhine used has the opposite profile, tight scoring and thin content, and neither format has solved the other's problem. Independent laboratories that attempted the dream protocol did not reproduce the effect, and the programme ended when the laboratory's funding did. In 1985 Irvin Child published a paper in American Psychologist arguing that mainstream psychology had misrepresented the Maimonides work in textbooks, describing it inaccurately and dismissing it without engagement. That charge is about the conduct of the discipline rather than about whether the effect is real, and the two are frequently conflated when the paper is cited. Nobody has run the series again at scale with modern sleep-laboratory methods.