Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 28, 1993 TAG: 9306260151
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE LENGTH: Medium
She is a researcher of psychic phenomena at the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, N.C., she said during a recent visit to speak at the Wytheville Chautauqua Festival.
She has a repertoire of psychic field cases, such as the man who phoned the center about a recurring dream of a plane crash one day before it happened as he described it. Or the Los Angeles family who had instances of rain inside its home - always after, the researchers discovered, arguments between parents who had been swim-team champions and a son who did not like the sport.
Dalton and her husband, also a researcher, could find no natural explanation and ended up giving this advice: "If you want this raining to stop, you should give serious thought to letting this kid quit the swim team."
They did, and it did.
While these cases generate public interest, Dalton prefers to talk about the controlled studies into various psychic areas at Durham.
"Our methodology is getting better and better," she said. "These results are being replicated from lab to lab."
One area being tested is telepathy, or mind-to-mind communication. Dalton says findings indicate this happens mostly between people who are closely related or know each other well.
Interestingly, she said, a tape of an old cartoon - "Bugs Bunny Goes to Mars" - has proved easier than anything for receiver groups to pick up.
Then there is clairvoyance, or seeing in one's mind something that is actually happening; precognition, viewing an event - often in dreams - before it happens; and remote sensing, or seeing things over distance. Dalton said the military is interested in remote sensing if it can be made more reliable.
Still another area is psychokinesis, which covers mind over matter, levitation, teleportation, out-of-body or near-death experiences, and reincarnation theory.
Much of this is regarded as hokum by scientists in other fields. Dalton knows she would have trouble getting a science teaching job with parapsychology on her resume.
But the American Association for the Advancement of Science did accept it as a legitimate field of inquiry in 1969. "That was a real coup for us," she said.
The institute where she works was started in 1927 at Duke University by J.B. and Louisa Rhine.
The couple kept running into fraud and trickery when working with mediums or attending seances to try to measure psychic phenomena. So they moved their inquiries to a laboratory setting without outside interference.
The goal is to answer such questions as who has psychic experiences and why, how the experiences relate to physiological processes and mental states, and whether they represent abilities that can be controlled and used to solve human problems.
Some people apparently think so. There are police departments who use "psychic detectives" to try to solve crimes or trace missing persons. There is "psychic archaeology" in which people study maps and suggest where to dig. Even some stock market analysts hire consultants for their intuition, and dousers are used not only to locate water but oil and rare minerals underground.
"We are learning what we can do to enhance our ability," Dalton said - such as using eye-shields to ward off distractions, or setting up a "dream lab" since so much seems to come through dreams.
Most so-called psychics get information from a subject and feed it back, Dalton said. Or they come up with things like "Your favorite color is blue" (the favorite of most of the population, Dalton said), or "You have a scar on your left knee" (most right-handed people have taken falls on their that knee) or `Your love life is a roller-coaster" ("Whose isn't?" she said).
She also has little use for books or tapes that claim they can give someone psychic abilities. But there are ways to enhance abilities, she said.
One approach would include periods of meditation to focus thoughts, keeping a journal to determine common factors when psychic phenomena happen, and being objective about their reality.
"You need to know when it's really valid and when it's just a stray thought out of your subconscious," she said.
Surveys indicate that 50 to 80 percent of the population reports having psychic episodes of some kind, she said. About half of those involve extra-sensory perception.
"We're finding correlations," Dalton said. "We believe that there is a rational explanation for it, but we're not at the point yet where technology can tell us what that is."
by CNB