Spontaneous cases
The ASPR continues to collect spontaneous cases and has received many thousands of reports.
Have you had an ESP experience? Please send it to us. Your experience might involve telepathy; a dream connected to the future or to an event you could not have known about; a sense that something had happened to a relative or friend, later confirmed; a near-death experience involving unusual feelings and experiences; a feeling of leaving your body and traveling elsewhere; sensing that someone was injured or had died before receiving the news; seeing an apparition; or experiencing something unusual around the time of someone’s death, whether you were nearby or far away. You may also have felt visited by someone as they were dying.
Why spontaneous cases matter
Spontaneous cases are important for research. Some of them are often very similar to what people experience when they are in an ESP experiment that collects free-response reports. When people are isolated in a laboratory experiment but aware that there is a hidden target that they know is their goal, the fleeting ideas and imagery and feelings they report often resemble the experiences that are reported in spontaneous cases.
One difference between free-response reports in laboratory experiments and spontaneous cases is that there is no specific target for the real-life experiences. Some spontaneous cases seem to gather information from a distance or the future but are often not recognized as psychic experiences immediately but only in retrospect, after learning later about a matching real-life event. And there are other types of spontaneous experiences that have no laboratory counterpart, such as those involving death, near-death, feelings of leaving the body, or sensing other unusual things that not everyone is seeing.
The questions they help answer
When and why do ESP experiences happen? What makes ESP more likely and what suppresses it? How is ESP related to the future? Spontaneous reports contribute to searching for answers to these questions.
ESP occurs spontaneously in real life and in free-response ESP tasks in the laboratory. At the ASPR we search for variables that can shed light on when and why ESP manifests, when it is directed at a goal and when it is suppressed or misdirected.
ESP can be observed during an altered state of consciousness induced in a Ganzfeld experiment. ESP can be also observed by just relaxing and letting thoughts drift with the goal of allowing information about a hidden ESP target to come into consciousness. We search for variables that can separate groups into those who succeed and those who fail.
Survival, and experiences around death
The ASPR has collected reports bearing on the survival hypothesis that are about near-death experiences, apparitions, awareness of death at a distance, and unusual experiences in the presence of the dying. More reports on these topics continue to come in as people send in spontaneous cases for the ASPR’s files.
Precognition
After the Twin Towers fell, the ASPR collected more than 400 reports of dreams and premonitions that people had experienced before 9/11 that related to the future disaster. Analysis found that the number of precognitive experiences declined as the interval between the experience and the future event grew longer.
Dreams recorded in a dream telepathy group at the ASPR were also found to match future events after the dreams. The precognitive dreams from the dream telepathy group again showed the same pattern of fall-off as time increased between dream and future event. Ongoing spontaneous cases sent to the ASPR of premonitions of the future continue to expand the precognition data. A branching-futures theory appears to fit these findings. Studying ESP in both free-response experiments and spontaneous experiences from real-life may help identify the variables and states of consciousness that support or inhibit it, while also offering insight into the nature of time.