There are few investigators of anomalous phenomena who have contributed more to the field than Dr Stanley Krippner. From dream telepathy experiments, through anthropological investigation of psychic claimants in cultures around the world, to researching links between LSD and psi experiences, the 82-year-old psychologist’s work has gained the respect of nearly all who have studied his work, even skeptics such as James Randi.
For those who’d like to learn more about one of Krippner’s most influential pieces of work, a new short documentary by film-maker Ronni Thomas, titled “Transmitting Thought: The Maimonides Dream Lab” (embedded below), provides a fantastic introduction:
It is easy to subscribe to a set of rules when those rules are set by science rather than religion. But science lives with a bias — that in order for an idea to be explored it must be observable, measurable and repeatable. Yet the irrational is part of our world, especially when it comes to the subject of human consciousness. Current scientific thinking brings an almost religious devotion to debunking anything that appears “irrational” or outside the rules and norms of core science.
But such an approach leaves tremendous gaps in our understanding — especially in questions of ESP, precognition, and other queries into non-physical intelligence. But this was not always the case. For a brief time, from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, the field of academic parapsychology flourished in the United States. And at the forefront of the field was the American psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner. In this film, Krippner discusses his research at the Maimonides Dream Lab in Brooklyn, NY in the 1960s. There, he and his colleagues conducted studies that explored the use of telepathy within the altered state of dreaming.
Through numerous experiments, including one with the rock band The Grateful Dead, the Maimonides team produced substantial scientific research on the topic of ‘dream telepathy,’ until the demise of the lab’s funding. Learn what we know — and what we lost — in Transmitting Thought : the Maimonides Dream Lab.
(h/t David Pescovitz at Boing Boing)
You might also like:
