Page 58 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - Vol 24 No 2 - February 24 2015

Ghostly Census
Ghostly Census
When the British Society for Psychical
Research carried out its “Census of
Hallucinations” in the 19th century, it
was revealed that the majority of the
“ghosts” reported were of people who
were still alive.
Founded in London, England in 1882 by a
group of distinguished academics, the British
Society for Psychical Research set itself a
primary goal of investigating apparitions.
Members wrote letters to friends, colleagues,
and journals, asking them for ghost related
information. They were deluged with material,
and after doing their best to reject stories that
lacked supporting evidence, they were left with
an impressive number of what may be called
“authenticated” cases.
Major survey
In 1886, 1,400-page survey was published by
the British Society for Psychical Research.
Called Phantasms of the Living, it was
compiled by Cambridge classicist Edmund
Gurney, poet, critic, and essayist Frederic
Myers (also from Cambridge), and researcher
Frank Podmore. They said that they were trying
with this collection of 702 cases to indicate that
apparitions might be real, and to lay the
foundation of a thorough study of such ghostly
encounters.
Myers, who had invented the word
“telepathy” in order to describe the transfer of
thoughts, without vocalization, from one
person’s mind to another suggested that the
witness of the apparition might simply be
receiving a telepathic signal from the person
represented by the apparition, who was not
present in any real sense. “Instead of describing
a ghost as a dead person permitted to
communicate with the living,” he explained,
“let us define it as a manifestation of persistent
personal energy.” In a further definition of
psychical terms, Myers and his colleagues
called the person who claimed to see the
apparition “the percipient,” and the person
reportedly sending out the image of the
apparition “the agent.” More than half of the
702 cases reported in the book had occurred
near to a moment of death or other serious
crisis. The frequency of the sighting of
apparitions at a time of crisis seemed to suggest
that such circumstances might, in theory at
least, provoke or permit telepathic
communication.
Henry Sidgwick, professor of moral
philosophy at Cambridge University, was the
first president of the British Society for
Psychical Research. He spent five years trying
to find out what proportion of the general
population had seen ghosts, and what sort of
ghosts they had seen. He had census forms
printed that displayed in effect a single
question: “Have you seen a ghost? If so, please
write your name and address below.” When he
received the name and address, he sent out more
forms for further details of the alleged sightings. money on a similar-sounding horse, Tuberose,
Sidgwick found more than 400 people to
distribute the census forms, and received an
amazing 17,000 replies from Italy, Austria,
France, Germany, and Brazil, as well as Britain. about the last race. He dreamt that the clerk told
Among these replies, 1,684 – almost 10 percent
– claimed to have encountered a ghost! About
1,000 said they had seen one, 500 that they had
heard one, and 2 claimed to have been touched.
Surprisingly enough, 129 of the phantoms had
reportedly been perceived by more than one
person.
This disproved many commonly held
notions about ghosts. Not only did one person in him on June 18, 1947. He later joined the
ten claim to have seen one, but the majority
were ghosts of people who were still alive, even subsequent dreams were successful, however.
if many were near death. []
Dreams of the Future
Continued From Page 45
Once in a lifetime
Such dreams are usually once in a life-time
experiences, which leads skeptics to dismiss
them as chance occurrences. After all, we have
dream periods on average between three and
five tiems a night, amounting to a total of 90
minutes. Because one dream often merges into
another, it si estimated that we may each have
ten dreams a night, whether we remember them
or not. Small wonder, then, that every now and
then one of those dreams will bear a
resemblance to a future event.
Picking winners
A really useful premonitory dream was reported
by the journalist John Godley - later Lord
Kilbracker - in the Journal of the Society for
Psychical Research in June-July 1947. Godley
dreamed in March of that year that he was
looking at the next day’s evening newspaper
open at the racing results. On waking, however,
he could remember just two winners: Bindal
and Juladin. He put money on the two horses
and won. He decided to keep a pencil and paper
by his bed to record other dreams but they all
proved rather ordinary until, on April 4, he
again dreamed of seeing the winners in a
newspaper. This time he only remembered one:
Tubermore. No such horse existed so he put his
which romped home.
In one dream he found himself in a
telephone booth talking to his bookie’s agent
him that the winner was Monumentor at 5-4.
The horse nearest to his name in the final race
was Mentores. He placed the bet and won at 6-
4.
Similar dreams followed and Godley
even gave two tips to an English national
newspaper, the Daily Mirror. They both won
and the Mirror carried a two-page story about
newspaper as a racing journalist. Not all his
Godley registered with the Society for
Psychical Research his predicted winner of the
1972 Grand National - Neat Turn - but no horse
of that name was entered. Godley suggested that
his growing knowledge of racing had interfered
with the dream process.
Dream machine
To prove that dreams might open doors to the
future, there needs to be some way of
controlling them to produce a repeatable
experiment. Dr. Keith Hearne is an English
psychologist who has researched lucid
dreaming. This most commonly occurs in the
semi-conscious state just before a sleeper wakes
up, when he or she feels able to control events
in the dream. Dr. Hearne invented
A “dream machine” to help people recall their
dreams. It works by monitoring the sleeper’s
breathing rate, which often increases during
dreaming, triggering an alarm to awaken the
sleeper after a variable delay. Dr. Hearne
conducted a survey of 88 people who had
reported dream premonitions. His research
revealed a sexual bias - nine out of ten were
female - and a third of all his respondents had
experienced between ten and fifty premonitions.
A fifth estimated their total to be over 50!
‘Clearly, premonitions are not isolated
phenomena occurring randomly in the
population,” he concludes. “They seem to
concentrate in certain people. []
The Only Differene Between
A Dream And Reality
Is Making It Happen.
Rob McConnell (2001)