In December of 2023, I participated in a University of Edinburgh in Scotland funded Ganzfeld Experiment, through their Koestler Parapsychology Unit established in 1985. The unit named after Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was the author of many works, including The Roots of Coincidence (1972). This book introduces parapsychology, the study of psychic and paranormal phenomena, which is broadly the university unit’s aim in research, and expands on the concepts of ‘synchronicity’ popularized by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) as meaningful coincidences and causal connections, and ‘seriality’ by Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer (1880-1926) as the concept that all events are connected through waves.
The Ganzfeld Experiment is a parapsychological study meant to enhance and record psychic abilities, introduced in 1975 by German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger (1899–1979). The participant/receiver is set up with ping pong balls on the eyes, and white or pink noise plugged into their ears, a kin to sensory deprivation. As they sit there and concentrate, the receiver will then narrate what they see and hear. During this time an outside source or secondary participant in the experiment should be sending mental information to the receiver.
During my clinical trial, I was situated on an oversized recliner, made to make me as comfortable as possible, equipped with oversized noise-canceling headphones, and wearing a red tinted eye mask and red lights pointed towards me. We began with a nine-minute meditation session where the initiator asked me to slowly relax my body. Then, about twenty minutes of white noise was played. With my eyes open under the mask, I concentrated on what I was seeing and feeling while narrating my visions and emotions out loud.
One of the major issues I had during the experiment was trusting what I was seeing and feeling. I wondered what was appropriate to say, what was too detailed or not detailed enough of a description. Within the red infinite landscape, I saw light forms or even white illuminations of shapes and designs, animals migrating, general movement, and the feeling of passage, but as amorphous as the design, I had to relax into my mental state more than my body. As it was the first time I had done the experiment, I was uniquely self-conscious of the situation. I thought perhaps I was seeing my eyelashes or even my own retinas, which took me back and forth out of the trance we placed ourselves in while doing the experiment. Should I have just said what came to mind? As for parts of the experiment I thought about the television series I stayed up to late the night before watching, whether I was breathing out of my nose loudly or if I had my mouth drooped awkwardly in front of the women I just met, taking notes on what I was saying. Did I speak too much or too little?
After twenty or so minutes, I was asked to watch four randomly generated videos and rate them from 1 to 100, with one of which I thought was the video I was supposed to be visualizing or channeling during the experiment. The first video was a couple having fun and laughing while making alcoholic watermelon jellow shots, I like jellow shots, but the first video meant very little to me regarding my session. The next was a winning play-through of the 1981 Atari video game Ms. Pac-man. This was much more interesting because it felt abstract in the way I was seeing shapes travelling through the maze during the experiment. It was a benign game play, yet I was nervous watching the video, anticipating the route and win or loss of the player, a much more animated reaction then I had during the session. The next was the music video for 2001 song “Sonne” by Rammstein, depicting the fairy tale of the seven dwarves (played by the band) reimagined as coal miners controlled by a sinister and beautiful Snow White. During my session, at one point I saw a mouse wearing a backpack, which I though perhaps could have related to the videos coal miners wearing work gear, but what was much more interesting than my in-session hallucination was the synchronicities that I encountered before and after this video, as I had listened to the song on shuffled playlist during my hour long commute to the university that morning. A song I enjoy but meaningful only in this very moment. The other was directly after the conclusion of the experiment I went to the Writers’ Museum of Edinburgh just a short walk away. A wonderful little building filled with the history and memorabilia relating to Scottish authors such a Robert Burns (1759-1796), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). In the giftshop they sold letterhead, notebooks, pens, and postcards, and surprisingly and almost randomly ornaments of little felt mice with backpacks on.
The last of the series was a home video taken at chest level of a slow walk through a busy day at Disney land, which to me felt like the most relevant of the bunch as it related to the experiment. A slow walk of continuous movement, with a content but curious emotional state. The animals as costumed performers, and bustle of human traffic as what I thought was my eyelash flickering. I chose this video because it just felt right somehow, or it was the closest to what I saw, which turned out to be correct. I had a one in four chance I would be correct which is not that difficult of odds.