I once shared a dream with someone. Currently I’m confident that there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, though I don’t really know what it could be, but at the time I was overwhelmed by the supernatural implications of it.
Now my memory of events is coloured by what I thought was happening, so I can’t really come to a conclusion that fits the facts as I remember them.
Skeptical Inquirer reported on such a study in their March/April 2000 issue, and a follow up in the September/October 2000. You can read those articles here:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-03/stare.html
http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-09/staring.html
but the upshot is that they found nobody who seemed to be aware they were being stared at.
The articles spawned a rebuttal a few months later from Rupert Sheldrake, one of the people who has claimed that the effect is real (in fact, the second of the two articles linked above is a specific test of Sheldrake’s claims). You can read Sheldrake’s article here:
http://www.csicop.org/si/2001-03/stare.html
I see his objections as grasping at straws, but YMMV. To me, the most telling part is that repeating Sheldrake’s experiment virtually exactly but using a proper random sequence eliminates all trace of the effect.
Lastly, the author of the original article responded to Sheldrake’s objections here:
The first time I met my now fiance I had the weirdest thought enter my head - “Well, here comes my husband”. Kinda like you might think - “Oh, here comes Steve” or some such.
It was really bizarre and happened just as he walked over toward me for the very first time.
Thanks for the links.
I have never felt that detecting a stare was a psi effect or anything like that. I think I said as much in my post. I expected that the person being stared at was picking up on some environmental cue or something else entirely natural. Exactly what that cue is is what I was saying is unexplained. “Unexplained” does not equal paranormal.
Since I didn’t make the claim for any psi powers, there is no way I would expect someone to “feel” a stranger staring at them on a video link, or even through a wall. As such, I think that the only trial that was realistic from my point of view was the relatively informal one that Baker performed in a non-laboratory setting. That still seems to invalidate my observations, but at least it’s a realistic design, so I can accept his conclusions.
Any of the artificial settings used in lab trails are totally bizarre situations that would never be encountered in normal life. If the stare effect were some kind of atavistic warning system, there’s no reason we would ever have developed the ability to feel people staring at us through a wall. If they’re on the other side of the wall, they’re not a threat, and if they’re not a threat there’s no need for a warning system. I would set up such an experiment expecting a negative result for the stare effect. Any finding greater than chance in lab situations would would make me look for flaws in my experiment setup right away.
My mother died many years ago. One day driving past what was her home which I always glanced at, I’m 100% certain my departed mum was standing at the garden gate, she waved at me as I drove past.
A few days after this, and again I’m 100% certain, she was stood at the bus stop bottom of her road at more or less the exact time I used to pick her up to take her into town shopping.
You’re very welcome.
This is very true, and something I’m always after my brothers about. Also, unexplained doesn’t mean unexplainable. Just because we can’t explain something now doesn’t preclude a perfectly “normal” explanation being found in the future.
However, what I’m seeing from the tests done is not that there may be a prosaic explanation for the phenomenon, but rather that the phenomenon doesn’t really exist.
When records are kept and an attempt is made to minimize variables, it seems that people don’t really know they being stared at unless they can see the “starer”.
Without that, sometimes people get the feeling they are being stared at, and sometimes they are, but sometimes they’re not, and the proportions seems to be about what we’d expect from chance.
Probably the same as with dreams that predict events or dreams that coincide with the dreamed-about-event: coincidence. Dreams last an average of 90 seconds, you’re in REM sleep for four or more hours each night. Over a lifetime, that’s 4,204,800 dreams. How many of those you remember varies, but let’s assume that given a trigger like “the event in my dream (or something like it) happens,” that maybe a quarter of them are recallable in a waking state.
So that’s a million potentially recallable dreams in a lifetime. After that, we’re down to just the most powerful of all phenomenon for explaining “psychic” events: confirmation bias. That’s the overwhelming human tendancy to count hits and ignore misses. No one comments on the fifty eight thousand dreams a year they had that don’t have some coincidental property, only the one that does.
My grandmother moved away from Poland after the holocaust, to marry my grandfather in the US, leaving a lot of family behind. One of these family members was an aunt who was, apparently, like a mother to her when she was a child- very, very close. They exchanged a few letters, I believe, but slowly lost touch as the years wore on (the mail system to Poland, she says, was very unreliable, as well, for a long time).
One night my grandmother woke, randomly, in the middle of the night, and saw an apparition of her aunt standing at the foot of her bed. She said she wasn’t scared, just tired, half-asleep. She then leaned down and fell back asleep. In the morning, she remembered it and wrote it off as a dream.
About 2 weeks later, she received a letter from relatives informing her that her aunt had passed away THAT very night. Right up to the day she died, she believed that it was her aunt coming to say goodbye to her.
As a kid, I always found this story very creepy.
About the staring effect.
I have had thoughts about this similar to yours Sleel.
I don’t like the experiments so much.
Experiment 1 is obviously flawed. You cant just ask people if they felt something afterwars.
I would like the other experiment to have been performed without the 1-way mirror
My friend’s mom has an almost identical story…
My friend was staying at her grandmother’s for the night, and my friend’s dad was a miner and always had to get up insanely early. So, the mom stayed in my friend’s room so as not to be awakened when the dad left for work.
A vision of her aunt, with whom she was close, at the end of the bed, awakened her. She wasn’t afraid, she felt calmed, like it was nice to see her aunt and fell back to sleep instantly.
The next day, a phone call comes - the aunt had died at about the same time she’d awakened and seen her.
I love threads like this, they’re my favourites! 
Nothing has ever happened to me, though. The life I lead is fairly easy to explain.
Sorry but that one is kind of easy. You obviously didn’t throw it straight up. It appeared to be straight up from your view point, but it wasn’t.
Twice, I’ve had ‘shared hallucinations’. Both in childhood.
One I had with my brother. We were riding bikes around and the sun was setting. We were looking east and we both saw a myriad of galaxies in the sky. It wasn’t cloudy, but there were a dozen or so galaxies clearly visible. We both saw this and we dashed home in hopes of finding film in a camera. It wasn’t visible by the time we got home a few minutes later.
The other was with the same brother and our next door neighbor kid who was the same age of my brother. We were outside in the backyard at night. We spotted a speck of light moving across the night sky. This was not strange. We had seen Skylab many times. However, this time, the point of light suddenly stopped, another point of light left it and moved to a different point of light. We all saw it and we all swore up and down to the grown ups and none of them believed us.
Once, after I had moved to NYC, I bought a ‘bag’ or a man purse if you will. One day, I found in the bag, a piece of paper from my life back in OKC. It was just a receipt, but, how the heck did it get in the bag?
I have a personal story that feels like it’s related to this. It’s an ANTI-paranormal experience. Often when I’m driving, I get a little shiver up my spine, and I automatically think “There’s a cop near.” and start watching my speed. To this day, I have never seen a cop anywhere within miles of this feeling occuring to me. So I must say, just b/c you feel something doesn’t make it so, even if it happens all the time. Or maybe I actually have an “absence of cop detector”.
I also see tall, dark people with blank faces pointed at me standing by the side of the road when I’m driving at night. Happens several times a month, but when it starts happening, I see numerous people the whole night long. Creepy, but it’s just tired eyes.
-Tokio
Freaked out by quantum physics but still skeptical about most things.
Where does 1 begin
If anyone does want to share their story without fear of ridicule, I have a message board…
I’ve given up trying to tell people my stories, everyone insists I must’ve been drunk - yeah right, I’m Teetotal…