Welcome to the Nightwalks…

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ESP consists of precognition (or retrocausality, where future events affect the present), clairvoyance, and telepathy, though some psychical researchers claim that psychokinesis (the ability to move objects using only the thoughts) is also a form of ESP. Others believe that ESP and PK are just related to one another, with PK being separate from ESP.

Inspired by a 1922 lecture on Spiritualism by the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the late 1920s – early 1930s Joseph Banks Rhine and Louisa Rhine came up with a research programme which became the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Before 1935, it was called the Institute for Experimental Religion. Whilst at Duke University, the Rhines popularised the term ESP or extrasensory perception and conducted studies of the phenomenon.

(J.B and Louisa initially trained as botanists and statisticians, and their mutual interest in metaphysical matters contributed to their forming a bond in their teenage years.)

The Rhines set out to rigorously test and document evidence for anomalous communication or conveyance of information that didn’t involve usage of the physical senses. J.B. created a series of card-guessing tests involving a deck of cards which were designed by the psychologist Karl E. Zener. Zener cards are a five-suit deck of 25 cards with simple symbols on them, e.g. a circle, a square, wavy lines, etc.

A typical test consisted of someone guessing the order of the cards after they had been shuffled and concealed from their eyes or placed in sealed envelopes. The experimenter took note of the subject’s guesses as they made them and then checked by the experimenter against the cards after the test, with the subject still there. There was a 1/5 or 20% chance of guessing the right answers.

Later involved a “telepathy procedure” where a “sender” looked at the cards one by one behind a screen or in another room. Results showed the clairvoyance procedure had as much success as the telepathy one, which led Rhine to test clairvoyance with the Zener / ESP cards more.

Early group testing of Duke University students in a classroom gave little more than chance results.

Then something odd happened. One of the class members, A.J. Linzmayer, scored strangely highly in an individual test. In further testing, Linzmayer carried on guessing the cards at a rate significantly above the 20% chance rate. By the end of the last two weeks of the school year, he estimated 404 of 1,500 cards correctly (if he was guessing only by chance, he would have guessed 300 of them).

Rhine and his team of two graduate students continued testing people one by one, and discovered other high-scoring test subjects, the most notable of which was divinity student Hubert Pearce, who got even higher scores than Linzmayer and kept them without decline for a longer amount of time.

By 1932, Rhine thought they had obtained good evidence of the existence of psychic phenomena or ESP. They also found ESP seemed to have natural relationships similar to ordinary psychological phenomena.

For example, both Linzmayer and Pearce temporarily lost their abilities when given the drug sodium amytal. Their performances also appeared to follow predictable patterns found in conventional psychology, e.g. the temporary decrease of scores under intense testing.

In three years, Rhine’s team found eight high scorers, about 1 in every 5 students tested. These college students scored, on average, more than 50% greater than the chance amount. As the experiments carried on, lab conditions were increasingly tightened to exclude the chances of the subjects being able to cheat.

An important finding of the early tests was that distance didn’t seem to have an effect on the results. This was shown in the Pearce-Pratt Series of 1933–1934, which was a clairvoyance test involving Hubert Pearce as the subject and Rhine’s research assistant J Gaither Pratt as the experimenter. The subject and the cards were put in two different buildings on the university’s West Campus. For three series, Pratt was placed with the cards in the Physics Building, a hundred yards from Pearce, who stayed in a Duke Library cubicle. In a fourth series, Pratt was 250 yards distant from Pearce, in the Duke Medical School.

The method was as follows: Pratt would pick up a card once a minute from a pre-cut and pre-shuffled pack, and put the card face-down onto a book without peeking at it. At that minute Pearce, who had a synchronized watch in the Library, would guess the face of the far-off card. After the test, both men would take the sealed records of their cards and guesses and bring them to Rhine so he could check them at the lab (while keeping copies of their own records).

Pearce’s total score for the four tests was 558 correct answers out of 1,850 (370 would be expected by chance). His accuracy in guessing the order of the unseen cards was 30%, compared to the 20% chance rate.

All data was reported and nothing was withheld. (In those days, social scientists would sometimes hide results that didn’t match logical expectations under the assumption that their methods were flawed – J. B. Rhine didn’t do this.)

In the years following the publication of their findings, other researchers attempted to replicate the experiments. About 60 articles on it were written by 40 different authors, mostly in American psychological journals. Fifty other experiments into ESP were done, and 61% of these were statistically significant. If the results were down to only chance, then that figure would be 5%.

In J. B. Rhine’s Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, in 1940, he made one of the first “meta-analyses” of several different experiments.

Later on, there was a general consensus that Rhine’s experiments were somehow flawed or fraudulent, and that the results couldn’t be replicated. However, even today skeptics are still trying to explain just how the fraud could have been done. One skeptic went so far as to suggest that one of the test subjects kept crawling through a ceiling-space to sneak a glimpse at the cards through a trapdoor over the lab!

From 1934 until 1941 (after which many lab members were called to fight in the war), Rhine’s lab at Duke University performed experiments into psychokinesis, in which people were encouraged to try to influence the outcome of random dice throws. Devices were soon used to throw the dice to make sure it was genuinely random and the experiment was done tens of thousands of times. A similar statistical result to that of the Zener card experiments was found, with some individuals showing a deviation of several percentage points in their success rate.

For a more detailed history of J. B. Rhine, read this: https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/jb-rhine/

Ganzfeld

Aged 13, the self-taught psychical researcher Charles (or Chuck) Honorton began exchanging letters with J. B. Rhine after he read all the parapsychology books in his local library. Aged 15, he did an internship with the Parapsychology Laboratory in Durham, and eventually started working with Rhine. Honorton was interested in studying psychic phenomena under hypnosis. In the 1960s and 70s, he conducted research into dreams and ESP and designed the ganzfeld experiment.

You’ll probably be familiar with the concept of ganzfeld if you’ve watched Stranger Things. Ganzfeld means “whole / open field” and it involves entering into a state of relaxed sensory deprivation with a view to telepathic communication or remote viewing. Honorton believed that every human being might be capable of ESP if placed in the right conditions.

People were seated in a recliner in a soundproofed, dimly-lit room and wore eyeshades and headphones that emitted white noise. This set-up induces the state of hypnagogia, the phase we all get shortly before falling asleep at night which often involves snatches of hallucinatory images and sounds. This state can be used for waking hypnosis or auto-suggestion.

While one person was in this sensory-deprivation room, a second person would sit outside it and attempt to “transmit” a pre-selected image into their mind. Once the person in sensory deprivation emerged, they had to try to choose which image the other person had tried to send them, out of a total four images.

There was a one in four or 25% chance of guessing the right image. However, the test subjects surpassed the 25% guessing rate on average. In a 1994 meta-analysis of experiments, it was found that there was an overall hit rate of 32 – 35%. Since the mid-1970s, this data has been replicated by different labs in different nations. Honorton teamed up with a well-known sceptic named Hyman to look at these experiments and Hyman stated that Honorton’s methods were sound and that the data held significance.

Resonance and Psi

Rupert Sheldrake, a Cambridge biochemist and parapsychology researcher who was named one of the top 100 Global Thought Leaders by Switzerland’s Duttweiler Institute in 2013, has theories about biological resonance and psychic ability. He has been described as a New Age author.

Sheldrake’s theory on morphic / biological resonance is that memory is “inherent in nature” and that “natural systems… inherit a collective memory from previous things of their kind.” (This reminds me of Carl Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious). Sheldrake goes on to suggest that this inherited memory is responsible for telepathic connections between organisms.

He first had this idea while at Cambridge, then went on a trip to India where he later developed the theory, noticing a similarity between morphic resonance and the “akashic records” in Hinduism. He took the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s concept of memories not being physically in the brain and ran with it, as the saying goes.

He wrote about this theory in a book, A New Science of Life. After it was published, New Scientist magazine sponsored a competition to invent scientific tests for morphic resonance. The winning concept involved learning Turkish nursery rhymes, and the psychologist Sue Blackmore came second with an idea involving the behaviour of babies. (Blackmore’s test results didn’t support the theory of morphic resonance, if you were wondering.)

Sheldrake believes that DNA doesn’t include a “recipe” for morphological development. He and the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert have a scientific bet going on. Wolpert bet Sheldrake a case of fine port that by May the 1st 2029, given the genome of a fertilised animal egg or a plant, humanity will be able to predict in at least one case all the details of the organism that grows from it, including any unusual features. The Royal Society will be asked to determine the winner if the winner isn’t obvious!

Sheldrake has also done experiments regarding the “telepathic” sense of knowing who is calling you shortly before picking up the phone, and the sense of being stared at by someone. For more information go here: https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introduction

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Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/J-B-Rhine

https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/jb-rhine/

https://occult-world.com/extrasensory-perception/

https://open.substack.com/pub/mitchhorowitz/p/the-unseen-legacy-of-parapsychologist?r=91pib&utm_medium=ios

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introduction

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From meditation and martial arts to inventing methods of scanning the body for inflammation, studying electrical skin resistance, and hypnosis to teaching people to train their brainwaves, (all while dealing with two broken necks, diabetes, and a stroke) Maxwell Cade was quite the character.

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In 1969, a biophysicist and psychologist named Maxwell Cade arrived at the thing he wanted to spend his life studying: the altered states of consciousness capable of being experienced – or even induced – in the human brain.

In collaboration with Dr Ann Woolley-Hart at St Bartholomew’s Research Hospital in London, Maxwell Cade started off using an ESR (an electrical skin resistance monitor) to try to detect disease in patients before the symptoms of disease appeared. However, the two scientists realised the ESR was better at detecting temporary changes in emotions.

The ESR was used by the psychologist Carl Jung during some of his experiments into the unconscious mind, and the device passed from him to Dr Morton Whitby, who then passed it to Dr Woolley-Hart.

Cade and Woolley-Hart published a few papers on hypnosis and psychic phenomena in the 1960s (and some work on Transcendental Meditation in the 1970s, some practitioners of which had claimed to have lost touch with the physical plane, but were, in fact, catnapping).

Maxwell decided to use the ESR monitor in some of his experimental hypnosis studies, and found that gently guided hypnosis was similar in mental state to meditation. Woolley-Hart and Cade discovered that different readings on the ESR corresponded to different depths of relaxation. They claimed that there had to be a 50% relative change on the ESR before the subject could feel the first noticeable effects of a different state of consciousness, as the effect of the subject’s mental stress on his / her immune system had to be minimised.

By the early 1970s, Cade was working with people one-on-one, guiding them into states of deep relaxation and giving them empowering suggestions with a view to helping them heal themselves. It so happened that in 1973, Woolley-Hart was diagnosed with cancer, but she refused to undergo radiotherapy and instead got Cade to hypnotise her. Eventually, she said the cancer had disappeared. (She died 20 years later, from something that wasn’t cancer.)

Cade became a teacher of this ESR-hypnosis method, after using friends as relaxation subjects during trials. The meditation and “spiritual training” was improved by the usage of ESR, and further improved when combined with other technology like temperature sensors (ideally kept above 30 degrees centigrade).

At the end of 1973, Cade got hold of a single-channel EEG (electroencephalogram) machine, that could be switched to measure between either alpha, beta, or theta brainwaves. He found that alpha waves appeared during meditation, and gradually discovered the importance of alpha waves in certain Eastern mental techniques he had been familiar with since a young age. He thought that alpha waves weren’t the only requisite for meditation, as alpha waves appear during other states such as daydreaming and detachment from reality.

Cade’s Background

Cade was born on December 3rd, 1918 in Kensington, London, to a well-known actor mother and a postage-stamp-designer father. Before age ten, Maxwell was introduced to mind-training skills by his father, who would play memory games with him. During long walks together, his father taught him yoga and breathing exercises.

By age 12, Maxwell was practicing judo, kendo, and Zen at a Japanese martial arts centre in London. He studied meditation, yoga, and aikido while there, and earned a judo Black Belt in his twenties.

Maxwell had a calm, quiet demeanour, almost taciturn, and became a dedicated competitive swimmer. One day someone swam under him as he was diving and this caused him to break his neck. He spent a year in hospital, but once he got out he went back to competing and came close to swimming the English Channel.

One of Maxwell’s swimming friends introduced him to Sufi teachings.

He initially trained as a physicist and became a student at Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London, but seeing as medicine dismissed Eastern ideas and practices, he studied clinical psychology instead, then joined the RAF volunteer reserve in World War II and served as an air cadet navigator. He then transferred to the Royal Naval Scientific Service, working with radar, which was a new discovery at the time.

After the war, he wrote about infrared radiation physics and astronavigation and won national awards. He did some secret scientific stuff for the British government in the Cold War.

In the 1960s, he made a whole-body scanner that could find inflammation in body tissues using infrared heat radiation. The scanner went to market and Max co-authored a book about thermography. However, before he could finish that research, a hit-and-run driver drove into him in front of his office building, breaking his neck for a second time!

After that, Maxwell published about 150 scientific papers on navigation, radiation physics, and clinical psychology in journals, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine & Royal Society of Health, a Member of the Institute of Biology & the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, and an honorary member of the British Society of Medical and Dental Hypnosis.

Maxwell’s interests were extremely varied. In the 1960s, he wrote a book on exobiology (possible life on other planets) titled Other Worlds Than Ours, and he co-authored a book about ball lightning.

Investigating Healers

Soon after Cade got hold of an EEG in the 70s, a healer named Jose Pogson joined his meditation classes, and Cade was pleasantly surprised to find the healer’s brain was simultaneously producing alpha, beta, and theta waves! This began many years of studying brain rhythms and the relationships between healers and their clients. Cade found that certain other people had multiple brain rhythms.

An electrical engineer named Geoffrey Blundell joined the classes and developed a “Mind Mirror EEG” device with Cade – a machine that showed EEGs from both the left and right hemispheres of the brain using sixteen light-emitting diodes (or LEDs), in real-time. The class was excited to see the patterns of a combination of different brainwaves, as the device could track multiple frequency bands at once, and found that meditation was actually a mixture of alpha and theta waves.

Cade’s findings validated ancient practices like meditation and energy healing by showing these neurological changes.

Cade also investigated phenomena such as telepathy, remote viewing, clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, and psychic healing. He found that in certain meditative states, two people could have oddly similar brainwave patterns, even if they were separated by distance. This supported theories of non-local consciousness, an idea often used in quantum physics and parapsychology.

During his investigations into OBEs and NDEs, Maxwell found that many people who had these experiences (seeing their bodies externally, entering a state of peace / unity with the universe, gaining knowledge or visions beyond normal understanding) had an “Evolved Mind State.”

Skeptics often attributed OBE and NDE experiences to brain chemistry and oxygen deprivation. However, Cade’s research suggested a neurological signature which was different to normal dream states or hallucinations.

Cade discovered that remote viewers (people able to “see” distant places or events without physically being there) displayed high levels of Theta wave activity, similar to states of meditation / trance. This aligned with research done by the American government’s “Stargate Project” which looked at the possible military applications of remote viewing.

Over time, Cade and his colleagues (including Blundell and Cade’s wife Isabel) correlated the Mind Mirror patterns with ESR readings, meditative states, and temperature readings. They invented a map of consciousness from this and began the Awakened Mind movement.

Cade named the combination of alpha, beta and theta waves the “State 5 pattern” or the pattern of an awakened mind. He split this into 5a, a temporary awakening or “Sabikalpa Samahdi” the Sanskrit for lucid awareness, and 5b, permanent awakening during daily life or “Nirbikalpa Samadhi” in Sanskrit. The Awakened Mind pattern 5a was present in people who were very competent and interested in what they were doing – artists, creative people, TV and radio producers – but 5b was uncommon.

Even less common was state 6 or Creativity / the Evolved Mind, which Cade claimed could be present in psychics, healers, and yoga practitioners.

The states of consciousness are:

Waking Consciousness – Mostly Beta waves (13–30 Hz), associated with logical thinking and problem-solving.

Meditative States – Increased Alpha waves (8–13 Hz), which are to do with relaxation and creativity.

Creative and Intuitive States – A combination of Alpha and Theta waves (4–8 Hz), often seen in artists, mystics, and those with psychic abilities.

The Awakened Mind State – An unusual balance of Beta, Alpha, Theta, and Delta waves (0.5–4 Hz), observed in experienced meditators, healers, and individuals who claimed psychic or paranormal abilities.

The Evolved Mind State – A state of deep transcendence where all brainwave frequencies synchronize, often associated with mystic experiences and peak states of consciousness.

Cade then went on to use the Mind Mirror to study psychic healers’ brainwaves and the brainwaves of their patients, both whilst in the same room and also whilst they were being healed remotely. The healers claimed to use chi, bioenergy, or prana, and according to the Mind Mirror these healers’ brains were producing Beta waves (conscious focus), Alpha waves (relaxation), Theta waves (intuition), and Delta waves (deep unconscious states). It was also revealed that the patients’ brainwaves synced up to match those of the healers’.

Most healers, including some Indian swamis, showed consistent “awakened mind” states, though one healer showed stage 6, which looked like an egg shape on the Mind Mirror with a little bit of beta and delta brainwaves thrown in.

Woolley-Hart wanted to try studying cancer patients using the Mind Mirror to see if certain mental states would help cure the disease, but her hospital colleagues declined on the basis that the device needed thorough evaluation. A computer programme was constructed to simulate a Mind Mirror, but there was no difference found between it and the hospital’s own EEG.

What Happened Next?

During the last 15 years of his existence, Maxwell Cade wrote many papers on such things as Zen, yoga, mystical states, and things to do with healing and consciousness. With the help of a student, he wrote The Awakened Mind: Biofeedback and the Development of Higher States of Awareness, co-written by Nona Coxhead. This influenced trusts and healing centres in England and got attention from the BBC, which filmed Maxwell Cade teaching with people hooked up to the Mind Mirror.

Cade not only had his neck broken twice, but he was diagnosed diabetic at 38 and exposure to radar beams during his work with the Navy caused his sight to fail. In the early 1970s, he suffered a stroke but forced himself to try to keep teaching, but his speech was too incomprehensible for the class to understand him. A healer visited him at his home the next morning and “laid hands on him” and 18 hours later, his speech had cleared, though he still had issues typing that persisted for a bit longer.

In March 1985, Cade went to hospital for a prostate operation and died of shock a few hours later.

Maxwell’s only regret was not being able to convince the public that brainwave changes represented alterations in consciousness. Decades later, other researchers cottoned on to the idea.

Cade’s work influenced many different fields, including neuroscience and the development of biofeedback (which is now used for anxiety and stress reduction and performance enhancement), meditation / the mindfulness movement being more accepted in the West, parapsychology, energy healing, and holistic medicine.

The Maxwell Cade Foundation was established in the UK after Maxwell died in 1985. The foundation organised information on the Mind Mirror EEG and consciousness, and handed out his papers to people interested in his work.

Papers written by Cade on a variety of subjects are available to download and read here: https://institutefortheawakenedmind.com/books-cds-and-videos/ if you scroll down to the bottom of the page.

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Sources:

https://www.mindmirrorportal.com/biography-of-max-cade/

https://occult-world.com/maxwell-cade/

https://themindmirror.com/pages/resources

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/feb/11/guardianobituaries

Last week we delved into the causes of sleep paralysis, what it is, its influence on literature and folklore, and how it was viewed in history. But how has it been portrayed visually?

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Welcome to the last part of “The Sleep Demon” trilogy of posts. You can find parts 1 and 2 here:

Throughout history, artists of different cultures and traditions have created works depicting their experiences with nightmares. There are medieval European paintings of incubi and sucubi and Japanese ukiyo-e prints of evil spirits, though sleep paralysis began to really be explored in Western art in the late 18th century, when more scientific interest in the human mind and sleep disorders started.

The hallucinations involved in sleep paralysis are fairly consistent across cultures and individual people, often consisting of shadowy figures or forms looming over the bed, a feeling of crushing or suffocation, or the sense of a malevolent entity in the room.

Some people report seeing demonic beings while others say they saw alien-like figures or ghosts. These hallucinations — along with the inability to move or cry out — have lead to the sort of terror that has inspired many works of art.

The most well-known painting is Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1781), which portrays an unconscious woman sprawled over a bed, an incubus perching on her chest while a spectral horse’s head peers through the curtains in the background.

There is also Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (1797-1799).

More recently, Nicolas Bruno, an artist who has had sleep paralysis since he was 15, makes photographic works that bring his nightly terrors to life. His art often depicts surreal landscapes peopled by faceless figures, symbolic objects, and bizarre juxtapositions.

https://www.nicolasbrunophotography.com/portfolio

The artist Shawn Coss made some work titled “Sleep Paralysis” here, using ink, copic markers, and watercolour:

http://www.shawncossart.com/sleepparalysis/

There is also Dariusz Zawadzki’s “Sleep Paralysis” series, which have contorted figures trapped in unsettling landscapes.

https://morpheusgallery.com/Dariusz+Zawadzki/#cnt

For more surreal nightmare art, go here: https://morpheusgallery.com/

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Sources:

https://neurolaunch.com/sleep-paralysis-painting/

https://morpheusgallery.com/Dariusz+Zawadzki/

https://morpheusgallery.com

http://www.shawncossart.com/sleepparalysis

http://www.nicolasbrunophotography.com/portfolio