Thread: A.E.P Experiment (Accuracy of Ethereal Projections)

I enjoy tests like these. There are lots of experiments along these lines; they require thousands of trials (comparable to using thousands of dice!) in order to notice an effect, but the effect is statistically significant (which means the chances of getting as much accuracy as was gotten is abysmal). One of the better summaries of this I've encountered is in the book The Field by Lynne McTaggart. (Just bear in mind that McTaggart is a writer, not a researcher, and some of what she says or how she presents the information comes across as a little flaky.)

I think one core problem you're going to run into with this experiment is that what you're observing has too much symbolic linear meaning to it. I'm pretty sure the part of the brain that recognizes and appreciates abstract symbols is partially or entirely offline when the body is in a dreaming state (which I think holds just as true for OBEs based on LaBerge's assertion that they're just semi-lucid dreams). I think that's why reading is so difficult in dreams. But that's the very part of the brain you're trying to use in this experiment when you're going to a box and trying to count dots. The counting process - at least for numbers greater than three - is part of how our brains learned to develop higher-order linear structuring in the first place.

I therefore suggest that you make one of two adjustments.

One adjustment is to use some system that doesn't require you to count above three. Three is a magic number for human neurology; it's the largest quantity we can subitize from birth. Using something like large coins with a big dot on one side (for "one") and a big 'X' on the other (for "two") would make it so that your perceptions don't have to filter through the very part of your brain that's off during these excursions.

Of course, this means you'll have to change the math a little bit. What you're looking for is called a binomial distribution. It's actually much easier to compute the probability of getting the result you got (or something more extreme) after you get your results; otherwise you'll have to compute the entire distribution, which can be obnoxious. I can help you figure the math out if you like. (I used to teach binomial distributions in statistics classes.) The way using coins instead of dice will change the math is that you'll need more trials (i.e. some combination of more observations and more coins per observation) in order to get the same degree of certainty in your conclusion as you would get for dice. It's been a while, but I think it might work linearly: since dice have three times as many possibilities as coins, I think you might have to have three times as many trials.

The other option is to do something that matters to the part of the brain that is active. This basically means attending to something emotionally charged. For instance, you might try printing out several emotionally charged (for you) pictures, handing them to a friend, and asking him to choose by some random method (e.g. rolling a die) which one he'll tape up in some spot you think you can get to in your OBE. Since you'll have seen the pictures beforehand, you'll have a 1/n chance of guessing the right one where n is the number of pictures you've printed. (If you pick n=6, your math will be identical for these as for rolling dice.)

Another, more compelling option (which, incidentally, is an awful lot like the approaches done in the Maimonides dream telepathy experiments in the 1960s) is to find some way of not knowing what pictures are possible. That's harder to manage and it's close to impossible to compute realistic statistics on the probability of success, but success with an approach like that tends to be a lot more personally compelling.

Let us know how it goes! Good luck!