SPEAKER_00 1:19

My phone call with Dr. Stanley Krippner. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daily. And if you're a serious researcher of mysterious phenomena, you probably know the name, Dr. Stanley Krippner. He is a psychologist, parapsychologist, a professor associated with some large mainstream universities like Kent State and Saybrook University in California. I was first introduced to his work many years ago as I was studying psychotronics. And that's because he was really the only trusted American researcher who was there in and around the Soviet Union in the heyday of psychotronics and actually spent time with Robert Pavlita and others understanding the kind of research that the Soviets were doing. So I can tell you, Dr. Stanley Krippner has studied it all. Okay? Dreams, telepathy, the afterlife, you name it. We could go anywhere with this conversation. And so it is a monumental honor and delight to say, Dr. Stanley Krippner, welcome, sir, to the program.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

Well, thank you so much. And you have given me a very gracious build-up. I hope I do not disappoint your listeners.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

This is a dream come true for me to be able to talk to you. And we've been corresponding so far just online, and uh I've just been uh really impressed with your uh continued interest in all of these amazing, mysterious things and getting out, you know, the word, the message about what you're discovering. But let me start by saying for those who are listening who are not familiar with you, uh please give us an overview, the basics. Where are you from, where are you now, and what is your description of what you do?

SPEAKER_02 3:33

I think that this is a very important question. I'll try to be as precise as I can. What has motivated me as a scientist over the years has been to explore experiences, behaviors, phenomena that are baffling, that are hard to explain by conventional means. And this can be done in any number of ways. It can be done through the arts, through literature, through esoteric rituals, through a great deal of reading past literature. But I think that from my perspective, what makes me happier is to apply the lens of science, because in science you don't enter with a prejudged opinion. You see where the data will lead you. And so when I, for example, was interested in examining telepathy, I was able to link up with Dr. Montague Ullman in Brooklyn, New York at the Maimonides Medical Center, and we put together a program where people would be sleeping in one room and somebody would be focusing on an art print in another room, trying literally to send the image on that art print to the person who is asleep in dreams. The person who was asleep was awakened periodically during the night and asked to report the dream. Now I think you can see that in this way we have everything under control. We're not waiting until somebody actually has an experience that they call telepathy. We're making the arrangement so that uh this can be fostered. It was Sigmund Freud, after all, who said that dreaming provides the perfect condition for telepathy, and we're taking Freud and others at their word, and for uh for ten years when I was in New York City in Brooklyn, this is what I was studying, and I think that the results were very, very fruitful. We came up with a book, a monograph, and something like one hundred articles that uh were published in various uh journals and reports over the years. So uh just to use another example, um I've always been interested in mythology, the great classic mythology of the Greeks and the Romans, but also Asian African, Latin American uh mythology. And this is something in the humanities. How do you bring that into science? Well, in psychology we have a number of terms for people whose personal myths get the better of them. Uh script, worldview are just two of the terms. Um when people have an image of themselves or of the world that really doesn't quite conform to the way things actually are, we would say that they need to come up with a new mythology, one in which what they think is happening is much closer to what is actually happening. And this led to the book that I wrote with David Feinstein, Personal Mythology, which is a collection of two dozen exercises that people can do, and all of them are based on uh scientific principles. All of them are based on what we know from cognitive uh neuroscience, for example, and what has been done in the field of rational mode of behavior therapy for another point of view. Now, when people revise their belief system, this leads to changes in behavior, this leads to changes in emotion, and as a result, people live a happier, more fulfilling life because they've taken the initiative to do this study and to come up with something that is actually self-correcting. So those are just two examples, just two examples of the different paths I've taken to understand these puzzling phenomena.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Well, that's one of the things that's most interesting about your work is that you have had a very open mind and you have been exploring all of these mysteries from so many different perspectives and points of view. And I know that you're the type of guy I could talk to for you know days, but since I was introduced to you by looking into radio excuse me, psychotronics, um, let's just jump to that. Please tell me about the evening you spent at Robert Pavlita's house in what was then, I suppose, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

Well, of course, this goes back many, many decades. I think we need to put this into context for many, many years, actually, for about half a century. I've been part of the Essen Institute, uh Soviet America, now Russian American, uh venture in human potential. And most people don't realize the extent to which Eastern European and also Russian attempts to explore unusual experiences have been going on. They've done quite a bit of work, and I've been able to see some of it firsthand on my various trips to the Soviet Union when there was a Soviet Union. I took about a dozen trips there, but also different countries in Eastern Europe. Now, psychotronic is sort of a term that was used to deflect people from the word parapsychology, which uh um is of course a controversial term. Use a term something like psychotronics, nobody knows what you're talking about, so you can get away with much more. So when I was in Czechoslovakia visiting Zenek Radak and his team of researchers, he took me to the home of Robert Padlita, who was doing some very interesting experiments, and again, this has not been followed up on, it's not been uh checked into adequately enough. I even hesitate to talk about it when we could talk about so many other uh more worthwhile things. But Pablita had concocted a series of metallic and wooden receptors that he claimed stored psychic energy. Now, of course, we've heard this before, we've heard it from the Chinese and their concept of key energy and the different exercises where they bring key energy into the body. We know about it from Wilhelm Reich and Oregon energy and the so-called orgone accumulators. In all fairness, I have to say that nobody has ever demonstrated that this energy source actually exists, but this is Robert Pavlita's attempt to store, manipulate, and ultimately to use the uh stored energy. What he was hoping to do was to depollute the air, depollute the water, depollute the streams and the rivers through the psychotronics. He didn't live quite long enough to pull that off, but it was a worthwhile goal. When I was with him, he and his daughter took a number of these uh oddly shaped um gizmos and they were probably about the size of a small flashlight. And as you brought them close to um the body, you could see some activity going on, and sometimes they'd be so constructed that when they had these so-called energy stored, they would serve as magnets, and we saw them working as magnets in some of his demonstrations. So what can I say? This is one of those leads that ultimately didn't get followed up on adequately, and uh I just wrote it up, published it, stored it away, and hoping that somebody else will pick it up in the future. You know, you do a lot of explorations, some of them lead to dead ends, some of them lead to something very, very promising. This is just the nature of the game.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

And so, Dr. Krippner, do you believe that um there is a genuine physical effect there that deserves more uh serious research, or is there in retrospect another explanation for what he was doing with these machines?

SPEAKER_02 13:22

Well, you're talking about whether the gizmo actually worked. It worked in terms of uh it did what Pablita said to do. When he wanted it to magnetize something, it did that. He wanted to repel something, it did that. Wanted to attract something, it did that. He told us in advance what the gizmo would do, and it did exactly what he predicted it would do. And so in that way the demonstration was very successful. And that's why I think there's potential there. I I can't follow up on everything. And something like this involves apparatuses and apps, you really have to have a budget. Uh the old saying, follow the money, that goes in science as well as in as well as in gambling. Um when there's uh resources there, when there's finances there, okay, I follow and I do a project as long as the money holds out. The money for the dream telepathy work at my Monday's Medical Center in Brooklyn, we were very fortunate that money lasted me for ten years. And within ten years, as I said before, uh Montague Ullman and I and our associates published about uh 100 articles or book chapters, interviews, etc. Published a book Dream Telepathy, which was very well reviewed, which was in print for many, many years, published a monograph for the Parapsychological Foundation, which is still in print. So we really made a lot of good use out of the money which was available, and most important, we sp we spurred other research. Now there are a dozen laboratories around the world who have done these experiments with dream telepathy using the same basic procedure that we did, and not always, but usually they get positive results in terms of the dreamer actually dreaming about the image or the picture that somebody in a distant room is sending them, and uh under controlled conditions, so that nobody can be accused of fraud or sleight of hand.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Well, you know, Dr. Krippner, this is a tough question because it's kind of like asking uh who is your favorite child. But uh let me put it this way after so many years of research, what is the most valuable thing you've learned that you think we should all know about?

SPEAKER_02 15:54

Oh, that's a good question. Yes. I think that I think that I'll put this into, you know, I'm actually affiliated of humanistic psychology, and I'll put this in humanistic psychology terms, in terms of being accepted, being broad-minded, and being kind. When Aldous Huxley at the end of his life asked what he had learned in his long and brilliant career, he said, I've learned that people need to be kinder with each other. And I think that this is an important finding. I think that in my own research, instead of people being condemned or called psychotic because they think that they're getting messages from another person, no, let's investigate and see if this actually is a possibility. And let's be kind to people who report unusual experiences, whether they be near death experiences, out-of-body experiences, so-called past life experiences, uh telepathic experiences, lucid dreaming experiences. It's very easy for all of these things to be called psychotic or mental illness or even cheating and lying. That's not the humanistic way to go. You find a way to experiment, you find a way to rule out all other hypotheses, and then see what is left after the sifting and windowing has taken place. And if it conforms with your bias, fine. If it doesn't, well you have to set aside your bias and accept a different result.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

So you are accepted. You know what? I I'm so glad you said that. I could not agree more. We underestimate the significance of that. And which is uh even more um, I think outstanding because now we are trying to figure out what the difference is between the physical world that we're living in every day and and other dimensions. And uh and one of your biggest specialties has been studying dreams. And I personally have extremely vivid and often lucid dreams every single night, Dr. Gibner. So tell us, after all the study you've done, what is happening when we dream?

SPEAKER_02 18:31

Well, one of the great joys of my life was that my studies in dreams and dreaming, and that of many, many other people also, has led to the formation of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and this group of investigators has been around for decades. We had to postpone our annual international meeting this year because of the pandemic, but hopefully we'll be back on track again next year. And the study of dreams and dreaming from a number of different points of view has now become an interdisciplinary and international cooperative process. And this makes me very, very pleased. And after all of these research projects have been done, we still are not absolutely sure why we dream and what the function of dreaming is. I think we have some pretty good leads, and I'm going to tell you what those leads are. But other people in the field might disagree with me on this. I think it all goes back to human evolution. And when something repeatedly happens over and over again in human evolution, it must serve a purpose. It must be adapted, it must foster the uh survival of the people who do it. Well, mate selection certainly does that. You have people running around because their ancestors mated, and so mating certainly is adaptive. But what about dreaming? That's not quite as blatant, it's more subtle. I think that dreaming is adaptive, and many people will disagree with me, but I think that dreaming is very adaptive because it helps us to download emotions while we're asleep. And once those emotions get worked through the system in a dream, we don't wake up the next morning with an emotional hangover. I think that also we can uh solve problems while we're asleep. We can rehearse what we are going to do the next day. We can learn from our mistakes on the previous day. So I think that problem solving is also adaptive, and I think we can uh get to it while we are while we are dreaming. And I also think that storage of memories is important. When we've done something correct, we remember it and we'll do it the same thing the next time. And so if you're only sleeping but not dreaming, you don't have a chance to work through in a, shall we say, virtual reality what you've been done during the day that has led to the storage of the memories, the downloading of emotions, the problem solving. These are very practical functions of dreams, and I think this is why dreams have helped us survive over the years. Now, you talk about how frequently you dream. Everybody dreams frequently, it's just that not everybody remembers their dreams. If you remember your dreams, fine, more power to you. Many people would be very, very envious of you for having that wonderful ability. Now you mentioned lucid dreaming. This is when a person is actually aware that they're having a dream while the dream is going on. I can remember when I was in college, our Psychology professors so that oh, these talk about lucid dreaming? Nonsense. You can't be asleep and awake at the same time. Well, they were wrong. You certainly can be awake and asleep at the same time. You can be aware that you're having the dream, and yet your whole physiology indicates that you're fast asleep. So this is one of the wonderful rewards of studying human consciousness. You get to find out things that were called impossible many, many years ago. And now we know they're not only possible, but they can be used for human betterment and for human creativity.

SPEAKER_01 22:42

Well, you know what? Everything that you just said makes so much sense. And I think that uh everyone who's listening to this is going to have a lot more clarity about this mystery of dreaming. And and you know, I I realize you're a very busy man and you have another appointment today. So uh let me just ask you two more questions. Uh this one may seem a little redundant, but I think whenever I uh have the honor to interview someone of your magnitude, I think it's important to ask this question. What is the most amazing thing you've seen in your life?

SPEAKER_02 23:21

What is the most amazing thing? Oh, good heavens. Well, first of all, the most amazing thing is life itself. How is it that after the Big Bang, the spontaneous creation of the universe, and after literally billions of years, it all came down to the evolution, at least on this planet, of human beings which have an infinite variety. There are so many varieties of human beings, which, as I say, which we have to be tolerant and broad-minded, because there's so many of us and many ways of doing things, and many ways of being human. And I think that when you look at the human brain, for example, this is the most complicated thing in the universe. More complicated than anything we've ever discovered in terms of black holes and dark energy. And we all have this perfectly amazing apparatus in our bodies. Let's make sure that we use it well and that we uh understand it well. So the most amazing thing that I have discovered is life itself, not only humans, but non-humans, of course, because uh animals, birds, even uh insects do a lot of amazing things that uh have helped them survive over the years. I think that if you want to go a step further, I think that the research results that I've come up with over the years, I and my colleagues have been pretty amazing. I think that uh I think that when you go into a laboratory and you bring back data that are pretty solid data that teach us about human creativity, that teach us about mental health, mental illness, that teach us about um extraordinary experiences, this is something you'd be confident in and something that has contributed to human knowledge and human welfare. If I were to take one or two examples, let me just tell you about them. We talked about out-of-body experiences a moment ago. When people have out-of-body experiences while they're dreaming, can they come up with something that is very, very puzzling, very anomalous? Well, a couple of decades ago, my colleague Charles Tart had a woman who claimed she could go out of her body while she was asleep. So he put a five-digit number on a little shelf above her bed and said, I'm gonna wake you up from time to time during the night on the undercom, and then I want you to go out of your body and give me the number. So this is exactly what she did. He woke her up when she was fast asleep and dreaming, and she floated up to the top of the room, and there was a five-digit number that she related to him. It was correct. Well, he published this, and he said, however, she might have been carrying a rod along with her a collapse of a mirror. Uh, we have to rule out such things and do this experiment again. Well, shortly after, this is exactly what I did. We found a medical student who claimed to be able to go out of his body while he was asleep, and instead of using a number, we used a randomly selected picture. This picture was memories of a perfect sunset, and the picture is just what you can imagine. It was a beautiful sunset and various colors. And of course, the students had no idea what was in the shelf, and he had one try, he didn't come out of his body on that try. And then he had another try. He had a dream, but it was not a dream where he had left his body, so to speak. On the third night, yes, indeed, he had a dream of going out of his body, floating to the top of the room, and he described the picture. It was a sunset in various colors. Now, there was no way that he could have slipped a collapse of mirror in because we'd examined him, no way that he could have found out the uh title of the picture because we had that hidden from any anybody, even ourselves. The picture simply slid out of an envelope uh before the experiment started. So this was published, it's written up, it's right there for anybody. This is uh read and report it, and so far to date, nobody has raised any objection claiming that this was fraud or sleight of hand. So I think that's a pretty amazing experience, something done out of controlled conditions, which under controlled conditions, which really sort of is puzzling because our consciousness should remain in our body, shouldn't it? Well maybe so maybe not. Maybe the consciousness is much broader than our body.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

Well, you you you're obviously, as you've always done, opening up all of these rabbit holes and wormholes, and I love it. It's all mind-boggling, and uh I'm definitely going to uh use the term emotional hangover from now on. I love it. But um, all right, so let me ask you this last question here uh before you have to go to your appointment. Uh please tell all of us about any books, uh projects you'd like to promote, uh website, anything you can give us for people who want to learn more about you and your work, please.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Oh, I'll be happy to sure. For the professional reader, the most important book that I've ever worked on was Varieties of Anomalous Experience. This book was published by the American Psychological Association, and it tells us what we know scientifically about out-of-body experiences, about past life experiences, about telepathic experiences, about lucid remaining experiences. Now, sometimes we really don't know very much scientifically, but on the other hand, we know much more than many people suspect we know. This was a bestseller from the American Psychological Association, and it's something that uh uh, as I say, a professional reader would certainly enjoy. Now, for the shall we say, the lay reader who wants to develop their potential and wants to engage in expanding their consciousness, get our book by Feinstein and Krippner, Personal Mythology. Both of these books, by the way, were prize-winning books, and personal mythology, uh The Mythic Path, also gives a number of ways that you can not only improve yourself, but work with other people and have better human relationships all around. I think that also interested in dreams, I'd urge them to go to the website of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and if they're interested, join because the regional meetings, there are online meetings, there are podcasts. This is a wonderful way for people to not only understand their dreams, but to understand the process, and they may even to volunteer for some experiments. So, yes, there's any number of ways that people can become engaged. People can join the Institute of Nordic Sciences, Ion, in Petaluma, California, and they can participate in online experiences, and they can get up-to-date information from top-notch scientists around the world. I think that to be all in all fairness, one should also look at the skeptical side of this. There's a very fine magazine called Skeptic, and it's published in Southern California. Uh and this provides, I think, a very proper and reasonable way of looking at things through critical thinking and through skepticism. And I think that this is always needed to keep us into in balance. Michael Schirmer is the editor of Skeptic, and he's the head of the Skeptic Society, of which I am a member. So to really assess all of these unusual experiences, you need to have an open mind, but not a mind where something will drop in and sink to the bottom.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

Yeah, right. Well, you know, my my listeners love to go to websites, and is stanleycrippner.weebly.com, is that your best website?

SPEAKER_02 33:32

My mythos is something that people can go and look at on the internet. This is something my colleague Sidney Monixar has adapted. He's taken the personal mythology principles and has put them into a format for children. So just go to the internet and type in my mythos, you will find his website.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

And that's mymythos.org, uh, mythos, my mythos.org. And uh gosh, I hope everybody who is listening will just go there and go to all these other places you've uh suggested. And like I say, get ready to just spend a day or two uh getting your mind blown. But uh, well, Dr. Krippner, uh unfortunately the clock has got us, but you know, I must reiterate that your work has been truly groundbreaking and inspirational. I hope that everyone will read your books, stay informed through the website you mentioned. Uh gosh, what a job, what a life you've had. And uh I just, you know, I thank you for all the wonderful, fascinating work you have done over so many decades, and thank you for being my guest today.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

Oh, what a great pleasure. Thank you for all the excellent questions.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

All right, there you have it, folks. Dr. Stanley Krippner. Oh, you can see why I could talk to him for days, maybe weeks. We could go on and on. But uh I hope that you will visit my website, joshuapeewarren.com, to stay updated on new uh interviews and podcasts. That is it for today. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your interest and support. Thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.