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The agent then opened his envelope and began to "send"
the target picture it contained. The same target picture was used
for the entire evening. Agents were free to use whatever techniques
they felt would best get the message through. Whenever a dream period
began for the percipient, the monitor signaled the agent to renew
his transmitting activities. Another buzzer signal from the monitor
indicated that the percipient had finished his dream report and
the agent could return to sleep if he wished.
The primary task for the monitor was to "baby-sit" the EEG machine during the night and make sure that all was going well with it. Whenever the EEG indicated that the percipient was beginning a REM period, the monitor buzzed the agent to renew his sending activities. After the percipient's REM period had continued for 10 or 15 minutes, the monitor started the tape recorder and then awakened the percipient by using the intercom and asked him to describe his dream imagery. If any parts of the dream reports were unclear, the monitor asked additional questions to clarify obscure details or vague points in the dream narrative. The monitor, of course, didn't know the content of the target picture and could therefore carry out his questioning in an impartial fashion. The following morning, the percipient would be presented a set of 8 different art prints and asked to examine them for correspondences to his dreams of the preceding night. Ranks were assigned by the percipient so that a rank of 1 represented the closest degree of correspondence between a picture and his dreams. One of the 8 pictures was a duplicate of the target picture transmitted by the agent. If the target picture received a rank of 1 through 4, it was considered a "hit"; if the target picture received a rank of 5 through 8, it was considered a "miss." Independent rankings were also obtained by providing sets of the 8 pictures and complete typescripts of the percipient's dream reports to outside judges. So far, 13 major—and a large number of minor—studies have been carried out by the Maimonides group along the lines just described. In 9 of the 13 major studies, statistically significant results were obtained in favor of dream telepathy. In several of these studies, the odds were several thousand to one against chance factors or coincidence providing a reasonable explanation for the large number of correspondences found between percipients' dreams and agents' target pictures. The story of the Maimonides work is described in their book, Dream Telepathy (9). When I was working at the Institute of Dream Research in Miami with Calvin Hall, we had a visit from Monte Ullman. 93
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