REALITY AND IMAGINATION - A PSI-CONDUCIVE CONFUSION

Psychic experiences are frequently reported to occur in situations or states of consciousness in which reality and imagination are confused. This maybe either because such confusions lead people to mistake norm al events for paranormal ones, or because psi is facilitated in some w ay by the uncertainty. On the former hypothesis, we would expect exper iencers and believers in the paranormal to be more prone to such confu sions. On the latter we would expect reality-imagination confusions to be psi-conducive. An experimental procedure was designed to induce fa lse memories for pictures of objects. Thirty-three subjects were shown slides of some objects and were asked to imagine others. They also co mpleted the Belief in the Paranormal Scale. Over a three-week period, they were questioned about the objects: and were finally asked whether they had seen them or only imagined them. Through the use of a novel method of testing for psi, half the imagined objects, randomly chosen for each subject, were used as targets in a clairvoyance task. There w as no correlation between the number of false memories and the Belief in the Paranormal score. There were significantly more false memories on target objects than nontarget objects. This suggests that confusing reality and imagination may be psi-conducive.