Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Seeing the future – or just dreaming?
#1
UNITED KINGDOM. Can Chris Robinson see the future? He says he has been predicting events for 20 years with clues that come to him in dreams.

If true – and he has many supporters – then he undoubtedly deserves inclusion in the UK’s Five TV documentary series “Extraordinary People”, screened on 10 September, 2007, six years after an American professor witnessed Robinson predict the US terrorist attacks in New York.

But did the TV investigation, titled The Man Who Dreams The Future, corroborate the dream detective’s claims? Not as far as the Guardian’s TV reviewer Sam Wollaston was concerned. He argued that the documentary’s title was wrong: it should have been “Ordinary People: The Man Who Doesn’t Dream The Future or, more snappily, just Liar Liar, Pants On Fire”.

That, of course, ignores the fact that – unlike many who claim paranormal powers – Robinson, who lives just north of London, willingly cooperates with investigators, attempts to identify randomly-chosen targets by recording his dream impressions throughout the night, and then discusses them with those who are testing him, well in advance of the predicted event or being taken to a target location.

Where’s the lie in that?

The problem we have in evaluating Chris Robinson’s intriguing claims is that much of the evidence depends on interpretation -– his own and that of others – because his dreams are frequently symbolic. He has come to understand the meaning of many of these symbols over the years. Dogs, snow and ice, and meat, for example, indicate that something awful is going to happen.

Rarely does he see an event exactly as it will occur, but that’s what apparenetly happened in 2001, whilst being tested by Prof Gary Schwartz (left) at the University of Arizona. At breakfast he told Schwartz and other witnesses that he had just had a terrible dream in which aircraft were crashing into tall buildings.

Schwartz dismissed this as just a nightmare and forgot about it – since it had no relevance to the controlled experiments he was doing with Chris Robinson at 12 locations – until 9/11, a short while later. The fact that he had been a witness to what appears to be a horribly prophetic vision of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York clearly had a huge impact on Schwartz, as did his own experiments with Robinson, and he spoke very positively about him on The Man Who Dreams The Future.

Sceptics, of course, will argue that Robinson’s nightmare and the events of 9/11 were just a coincidence. It depends who’s doing the judging.

Even Schwartz’s experiments at the University of Arizona did not satisfy British sceptic Prof Chris French of Goldsmiths College, who said they were not rigorous enough without explaing why. He proceeded to conduct his own experiments with Robinson, for the Five TV programme, in which the “dream detective” was taken to a different location on three days, after being asked to dream about them the night before.

How this experiment was any more rigorous than Prof Gary Schwartz’s more extensive tests was not explained.

French asked an independent adjudicator to look through Robinson’s notes each morning and try to match them with the eight target locations that were in the pool from which one would be chosen at random each day. Robinson scored one out of three: a failure in scientific terms.

But Robinson and others will argue that one of the failures was really a hit. He had dreamt about paint, sheets painted white and a person he knew at school. The target proved to be a very unusual venue – the Ice Bar – where everything is made of ice. Robinson’s response when his blindfold was removed was that he was surrounded by white and sheets of ice.

French and the adjudicator scored this as a miss and so for the majority of TV viewers the programme had “proved” that Robinson could not do what he claimed to do. But he will maintain that he got two out of three right: a success.

Whoever is right, three experiments set up for TV are certainly not enough to reach a scientific verdict on Chris Robinson’s alleged psychic powers and Prof Chris French or the documentary makers should have made that clear. Just like his dreams, this will have to be a matter of interpretation until someone comes up with a better way of assessing his abilities, or Robinson himself manages to dream more realistically about the events he claims to see in the future.

More information about Chris Robinson and the experiments that have been conducted with him can be found on his own website. See also our report on his Internet video postings.

http://www.paranormalreview.com/News/tab...fault.aspx
Reply



Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread:
1 Guest(s)

Powered By MyBB, © 2002-2024 Melroy van den Berg.