Abstract

Consensus vote within a group setting appears to be a viable method of increasing the success of dream GESP studies. The present study is a replication of the dream GESP studies conducted by Dalton, et al., (1996), and Sherwood, et al., (1998). Four participants took part in a 16 trial dream-psi study using the same target stimuli as the original study by Dalton, et al., 1996, a target pool of 100 short video clips. Participants dreamed at home while the target was played between 3am and 4am in a remote location. Judging occurred the following day at a college dormitory room where the participants judged four video clips, consisting of 3 decoys and the target. Participants assigned ranks (1 - 4) and ratings (1 - 99) to each target individually and a group rank was calculated from the combined individual ranks. A binomial hit rate measure was prespecified as the outcome for this study, with a rank of 1 or 2 to the actual target considered a 'hit' (MCE = .50), and ranks of 3 or 4 considered a 'miss'.

Study hypotheses were: H1) the hit rate (rank of 1 or 2) for the group consensus judging method would be significantly higher than mean chance expectation; H2) the direct hit rate (rank of 1 only) for the negative emotion targets would be significantly higher than mean chance expectation. Overall group hitting was significant with 13 hits in 16 trials, p = .01, ES(h)= .46, representing a hit rate of 81% for the group. The direct hit rate (3 first place ranks out of 5 trials) for the negative emotion targets was 60%, ES(h) = .73, but was not significant (p = .098) because of the small number of trials.

Exploratory hypotheses investigated whether the two female participants would score significantly better than MCE. This hypothesis was partially confirmed in that one of the two female participants exceeded chance, with 14 hits (rank of 1 or 2) in 16 trials, which is significant at p = .002, and a hit rate of 87%. The other female scored the same as the two male participants in the study, with 10 hits in 16 trials (p = .227, ns). The second exploratory hypothesis - that the direct hit rate for the negative emotion targets would be significantly higher than MCE for individuals - was not confirmed. While the direct hit rate for negative emotion targets was suggestively higher than the mean chance expectation for two of the individuals (p = .098, ES(h) = .73), only three of the four participants evidenced most of their individual hits (rank of 1 only) on the negative dreams, wiih the remaining participant obtaining most of their hits on positive targets.