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SleepNet Electric Dreams The Quantative Study of Dreams Association for the Study of Dreams Lucid Dreaming Saybrook Institute: Dr Stanley Krippner University of Pennsylvania

THERE I sat, amid the ancient Egyptian splendour of the newly rebuilt Los Angeles Public Library. I'd come across a book called The Encyclopaedia of Sleep and Dreaming. There was an entry entitled "Psychic Dreams". One passage, in particular, caught my eye: "A woman who described herself as having frequent out-of-body experiences spent several nights being monitored in a sleep laboratory. One night she awakened from sleep and correctly reported a five-digit number that had been placed out of sight on a high shelf above her bed. She reported that she saw it while floating above her body."

I was in Los Angeles researching for a series of films on sleep. The idea was to make what television professionals call a "popular science" series, explaining what the experts do and do not know about the subject - all pretty worthy. And yet here I was, reading about a woman who had floated above her body and identified a five-digit number on a shelf up near the ceiling. It was hardly what I had expected and if it was true why wasn't the experiment more famous? Surely this was in the Crick and Watson league - a scientific breakthrough with astonishing implications.

What I didn't know then was that even in North America where the study of sleep is respectable (the academic British, surprise, surprise, are not big on sleep science), scientists who come up with results that challenge conventional beliefs are ostracised by the academic establishment. The more I researched the subject, the more I found myself propelled into a twilight zone of work which had been conducted in the Sixties and Seventies but is now forgotten. This work, I discovered, did indeed have revolutionary implications for mainstream science. And, precisely because of this, it had been all but ignored.

The encyclopedia entry which had talked about the "out-of-body experience" had not named the experimenter or the journal in which the work had been published. So, as I travelled across America from sleep lab to sleep lab, I asked about it. No one had any idea what I was talking about. Then, just as I was concluding that there had probably never been such an experiment, one of my colleagues unearthed an obscure academic journal which contained a similar-sounding report. Its author was Dr Charles C Tart.

It took us six months to track Dr Tart down. He seemed less than anxious to talk to us. I got the feeling that over the years he'd grown tired of television people trivialising his work. But I wasn't going to give up. I finally ran him to ground at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, where he is Professor of Consciousness Studies.

What Tart told us was this: "In the late Sixties, in the course of a conversation with our babysitter, we discovered that she had had out-of-body experiences ever since she was a child. She thought they were normal. She thought everyone went to sleep, woke up in the night, floated up near the ceiling for a while, then went back to sleep."

At the time, Tart was the director of a sleep lab at the University of California in Davis, near San Francisco. He decided that the woman was too good an opportunity to miss. So he devised an experiment. In the lab he installed a shelf, high above the bed, close to the ceiling. On the first night of the experiment, the woman (whom Tart called "Miss Z") arrived an hour before bedtime. She was "wired up" with electrodes, attached to an EEG machine, which would measure her brain-wave patterns. Meanwhile, in another part of the lab, Tart selected a five-digit number from a random numbers table, wrote it on a piece of paper, and put it in an envelope. He carried the envelope to the room in which Miss Z was to sleep, climbed up a stepladder, took the paper out of the envelope, and placed it on the shelf. "I know this sounds ridiculous, but I sent her off to bed saying: 'Well, if you do leave your body, take a look at the number on the shelf.' "

On the first three mornings, Miss Z told Tart that she hadn't seen the number. She said she'd left her body in the night, but hadn't climbed to the top of the room. Each evening, Tart would randomly select a new number and put it on the shelf. But then, on the fourth morning, Miss Z said she had again left her body during the night. "She said she'd floated to the top of the room and looked down at the shelf. She said the number was 25132. That was correct. That was the number on the shelf that night. I was quite surprised." Tart's experiment caused something of a stir. Sceptics scrutinised it to see whether they could find a way to discredit it. Perhaps, they argued, it was a conjuring trick. But there was no obvious explanation.

"Tart's experiment posed a serious problem for the debunkers," says Dr Stanley Krippner, a sleep researcher based in California, who examined Tart's methods closely at the time. "How was that woman able to read those numbers? The only theory that I have heard that makes any kind of sense is that she had a collapsible mirror hidden in her nightdress, and that, in the dark, she was able to unfold the mirror up above the number, and then, by pointing a flashlight up to the mirror, read the number."

I put this possibility to Tart: "Well, as long as we are going to go along those lines, we might as well say I made the whole thing up. In fact, when people say that perhaps I have lied about this, I take it as a great compliment. When your critics are reduced to that sort of extreme. . . "

Tart struck me as a dedicated and honest scientist, who had more to lose than to gain from publishing such results. Still, this wasn't what I had expected. I had set out to make a series about sleep research, and somehow I had strayed into X Files territory.

Then I remembered a strange postscript to Tart's story. "At the start of the experiment, I told the woman that if she was going to have an 'OBE' she should look at the clock on the wall, and make a mental note of the time." By this method, he was able to examine her brain-wave patterns for the time she claimed she had the OBE. "They were unlike anything anyone had seen before," says Tart. "The brainwave recordings on the EEG appeared to show that when she saw the five-digit number, her brain was both awake and asleep at the same time."

What the brainwave recordings indicated was that there was a physiological basis for the OBE, raising the astonishing possibility that the woman's consciousness was not restricted to her physical body. There was no scientific term for it back then, but Miss Z had entered what scientists now call "a mixed state of consciousness". Wakefulness and sleep had overlapped. It was not until I returned to England that the full story of these "mixed states" began to unfold. It was once thought that throughout a night's sleep the brain was dormant, inactive. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we fall asleep, our brainwaves change. Wakefulness begins to slip away, and we become drowsy. This is Stage One sleep. Gradually, we descend into deeper levels of unconsciousness - Stages Two and Three sleep. Then, after about 20 minutes, we reach Stage Four - the deepest form of sleep, in which the brain is almost completely dormant. Scientists call it "slow-wave sleep" because of the slow, undulating brainwave recordings it produces.

Exactly 90 minutes after falling asleep, however, the brainwaves suddenly change. Frenetic, jerky movements appear on the graph, indicating a burst of mental activity. "It is an awesome experience," says Dr Harvey Moldofsky, director of the Sleep Centre at Toronto Western Hospital. "The slow, rhythmic patterns disappear. Suddenly it looks as though the person is awake. Yet the person is sound asleep. The only thing you see is the jerking muscle movements of the eye. And that is why it is called rapid eye movements sleep." It is not known why the eyes suddenly dance around under the eyelids of the sleeper - but rapid eye movements (REM) appear, with clockwork precision, at 90-minute intervals throughout the night. Astonish-ingly, EEG readings show that during REM the brain is at least as active as when we are awake.

After REM was discovered in the Fifties, sleep researchers came up with the idea of rousing people from the different stages of sleep in order to identify the reason for these sudden surges in brain activity. The responses were instructive. When they woke people up from deep sleep and asked, "What was going through your mind?" the sleeper would usually reply, "Nothing." But if they woke someone up during REM sleep, the person would almost always describe a series of elaborate, complex and often bizarre thoughts: a dream.

The early sleep researchers also found that dreaming went hand in hand with another, very curious aspect of REM sleep. In deep sleep, though our brains are inactive, it's nevertheless possible for us to move. Those who sleepwalk do so in deep sleep. But in REM we are paralysed. The only muscles we can move are those in our chest - which enable us to breathe - and the muscles in our eyes. It is called sleep paralysis and we all experience it every time we enter REM. Most researchers believe that sleep paralysis is a protective mechanism, nature's way of ensuring that we come to no harm while we dream. However, for the victims of a bizarre sleep disorder, this protective mechanism can malfunction.

Tony Simmonds, one of the many sleepers interviewed for the series, told us this story: "I woke up. I was wide awake, but it was like I was paralysed. There was something at the bottom of the bed, a dark figure. Suddenly, it seemed to jump on to my chest. It had control of me and there was nothing I could do. I thought: 'This is it. This is death.' It wasn't a dream, it was too real for a dream. If you ask me, and I know this sounds cranky, it was some kind of presence."

Tony was one of scores of seemingly well-adjusted people who told us similar stories. Among them was Carolina Few: "This was in my bedroom. I was in my bed. I woke up, but I couldn't move. There was some kind of force, holding me down. But I could move my eyes, and I knew he was there, standing in the doorway. A man, a figure, I'm not sure. I tried to scream, but I couldn't speak. It wasn't a dream, it was real. People will think I'm mad, but it did happen."

According to sleep scientists, about one in five people will at some time in their lives wake up in the night, unable to move, with the sense that some threatening "presence" is in the room. In many cultures, it is believed that if the attack goes on long enough, the victim will die. But for most the experience ends after a few minutes when, with immense effort, the victim manages to move.

Though we don't often talk about these terrors nowadays, people have been experiencing them for thousands of years. In medieval Europe, the mare was a demon which arrived in the night to paralyse and push down on the chest of its victims. In its original usage, the Anglo-Saxon word nightmare referred specifically to an attack by the night-demon. Fuseli's painting The Nightmare, in which the night-demon sits on top of the paralysed sleeper, tapped directly into the tradition. Victims of "paralysis attacks" are always convinced that they were awake when the attack happened, and that it was not a dream. So what causes them? Sleep lab studies show that victims have entered a mixed state of consciousness, in which the brain is both asleep and awake at the same time. The eyes are open, and electrical measurements of the brain show that the victims are awake. But at the same time, elements of REM sleep have carried over into the waking state. Hence both the paralysis and the "waking dreams", in which victims see demons and other threatening creatures.

Professor David Hufford of the University of Pennsylvania, the leading expert on these attacks, agrees that they result from an overlapping of the waking and dreaming states. But even after many years of studying them, he finds the attacks deeply mysterious: if they are just dreams, why is everyone having the same dream?

Over the years, Hufford has collected thousands of stories relating to the demon attacks. He has identified more than 30 common elements: the sound of approaching footsteps, a pressing sensation on the chest, the belief that an evil presence is in the room, and so on. "I get told these stories by people who have no interest in the paranormal and who've never heard of anything like this. If they gave me a lot of bizarre, different stories, I would say we had it explained - because that's what happens when you dream. It's the fact that their accounts have all these similarities. The more you look at it, the more mysterious it gets."

There didn't seem to be much prospect of a solution to Professor Hufford's mystery, but when we met in Philadelphia he said I should try to talk to Dr Stanley Krippner, the man who'd given the thumbs up to Tart's OBE experiment back in the Sixties. While Tart had been working in California, Krippner had been involved with studies being carried out at the Maimonides sleep laboratory in New York. Hufford said that it was here that Krippner had produced some of the most astonishing results in the history of sleep science.

Like Tart, Krippner had been largely ignored by the scientific mainstream. He is still working, as the director of the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco. The only trouble was, he really didn't have much time for "television people", who he felt had been simplifying and distorting his work for 30 years. I opted for a tried and trusted approach. Twenty-seven phone calls later, Krippner agreed to meet me. But he wasn't going to make it easy. The rendezvous was to take place at the Holiday Inn, Encinitas, a Californian seaside resort some 30 miles from the Mexican border, at 8am on a Sunday morning. And more than three months from the time of the phone call.

So it was that one Saturday evening, I found myself driving south along Interstate-5 from Los Angeles. I kept thinking, "This had better be worth it."

Krippner's work at the Maimonides sleep lab was on telepathy. In surveys at the time (the statistics are much the same today), some 50 per cent of people would testify to the belief that they had had some kind of telepathic experience, and most said that it came in a dream.

Krippner and his colleagues devised a series of experiments which they hoped would settle the question of whether telepathy was a real or imagined experience. They wanted to find out whether a person's dreams could be influenced telepathically by "a sender" - a psychologist locked away in a different part of the laboratory.

The plan was simple. At the start of the evening, a "recipient" (or dreamer) would arrive at the laboratory and be introduced to his counterpart, "the sender". The dreamer would then be "wired up" with electrodes, taken to his bedroom, and locked in for the night. Meanwhile, "the sender" would be asked to select one of eight sealed envelopes, and then he too would be taken to a room and locked away. Once inside, the psychologist would open the envelope, which contained the picture of a painting. The psychologist would look at the painting and attempt to "transmit" the image to the sleeper in a distant part of the hospital. The sleeper would be woken up at the end of every REM period and asked to report his dream. Once the dream had been tape-recorded, he would be sent back to sleep. And so the night would go on.

One of the first "recipients" was Dr Robert van der Castle, a young sleep researcher who had developed a reputation as a telepathic dreamer. From the first night in the lab, van der Castle's dreams began to change. "I knew what my usual kind of dreams were. And my dreams were being altered. There were these sensationalistic elements that were quite out of sync with what I usually dreamed about. I knew that these were not, in a sense, my dreams."

One night, van der Castle dreamed of a young man wearing a long white robe. He was taking part in a kind of Catholic ceremony. In the dream, the ceremony had some national or historic significance. It was taking place at somewhere called Atlantic Beach. "Many of my dreams that night involved choirboys and crucifixes; crosses on big white unfurled banners."

Van der Castle could have had no way of knowing - at least by any ordinary means - that the target picture that night was The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus by Salvador Dali. It depicts the young Columbus in a dream about his future voyage across the Atlantic. The viewer sees Columbus, wearing a long white robe, disembarking from his ship and striding towards the beach. The painting reeks of messianic Catholicism. The Virgin Mary is shown on a banner borne by Columbus. Catholic acolytes, bearing white flags showing crosses, stride through the water towards the Atlantic beach. The similarities between dream and target were striking.

As with those of all other participants in the study, van der Castle's dreams were assessed by a panel of judges. They were given a score of one to eight (one being the top score), according to how closely they matched the target painting each night. On six of the eight nights van der Castle spent in the lab, he scored a rating of one - a direct hit.

In the course of ten years, Krippner oversaw more than 450 trials involving hundreds of "percipients". Statistically, it is a huge sample. Thirty years on, it has not been matched. "We did find evidence of something that was very difficult to explain by ordinary means," says Krippner. "When you take all our studies together over the ten years, it's thousands to one that the results could be due to chance alone."

In fact, Krippner is wrong about this. Recently, Dr Dean Radin (also of the University of Nevada) completed a re-analysis of the Maimonides data, using modern statistical techniques. He concluded that the odds against the results being produced by chance alone were 70 million to one. "A scientist is never absolutely sure about anything. We can't exclude the possibility that the multitude of correspondences between dreams and targets were produced by chance. It could just be that one in 70 million. But the odds are that we are dealing with something real. And the best word we have for it right now is telepathy."

So that's the story of how what started out as a worthy science series turned into something stranger and more perplexing. Personally, I liked both Tart and Krippner enormously. But I couldn't help noticing a tinge of bitterness about the way in which their work continues to be overlooked by the scientific establishment. Of course, their research doesn't contain all the answers. At present, they don't exist. But I am now convinced that in the dream state it may be possible to perceive things not visible to us in the waking state. One thing is for certain: we've only just begun to glimpse the truth.

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