Summary: The author of, Dreamer: 20 Years of Psychic Dreams and How They Changed My Life, discusses his psychic and precognitive experiences. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview discussing precognition and the psychic dreams of author Andy Paquette. During the interview Mr. Paquette discusses the differences between real life precognition expereinces and labratorty experiments on ESP like those of Dr. Daryl Bem, “Well, the funny thing about asking me a question like that is that while I am aware of some of those things, I became aware of them after I already knew that precognition happens because it happened to me in much more dramatic ways than was ever recorded in the lab. On the other hand, the reason he is studying it in the first place is because there are people like me who’ve had more dramatic examples of precognition. We’ve recorded them or passed them on to other people and this eventually makes researchers curious.” Paquette continues, “Now the problem with testing in the lab as I see it, is that you’re trying to duplicate an effect that has a very specific reason for coming into being without knowing what that reason is and without having any way to recreate those conditions because you don’t understand the reason to begin with. This, in my mind, is the reason why laboratory results tend to be very weak. It’s because they’re not really duplicating the right circumstances that cause these kinds of things to happen. So what happens is they kind of nick the edge of this thing that they’re researching, and even that little tiny slice they get is enough to support a hypothesis of precognition. However, it’s not as dramatic as the kind of real-life, spontaneous examples such as the ones that occurred with me.” Visit Andy’s website Help pilot Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s telepathyexperiment.com Play it: Download MP3 (31:00 min.) Read it: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris. Before we get started with today’s interview I just want to make a quick little announcement here. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, whom many of you know through his work, his many books, his very interesting website, and his appearance on the Skeptiko show, is launching a telephone telepathy experiment here, available in the U.S. and Canada. He’s looking for some folks to help him pilot this study. So if you’re interested in doing some telephone telepathy experiments and helping out in getting this project off the ground, please visit telepathyexperiment.com, or you can visit the link on our website and hear more about that. It’s actually a slight bit of a lead-in to today’s interview because today we welcome Andy Paquette, whose book Dreamer is a fascinating account of his experience with precognitive dreams and all the associated strangeness that goes with them. Andy is a frequent contributor to the Skeptiko forum and if any of you visit there I’m sure you’ve read some of his posts. But this book of this I thought really deserves the only kind of attention we can give it in a full episode. So here’s my interview with Andy Paquette. Alex Tsakiris: Well, this book of yours is really quite amazing. I found it very, very interesting but also challenging. It reminded me of reading the autobiography of a Yogi many years ago. I walked away thinking that either this guy, Yogananda, is a complete liar and that seemed quite unlikely, or that this personal account was going to radically shift how I thought about the world. So I kind of felt the same way with this book, in a way. The way I want to try and pull it apart in this interview is to go down two paths. They’re the two paths that we’ve been exploring on this show and one is the “Is it real?” path. Does precognition really occur and maybe more sp[...]
