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Strange But True S04E07
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00:00Good evening.
00:26Each year, NASA pours a staggering $22 billion into space exploration.
00:32It seems that putting a man on the moon and sending probes to the far reaches of the solar system
00:37have only served to fuel man's desire for knowledge of outer space.
00:42But while we look to the skies, there is a great unknown much closer to home, and that's inner space.
00:49The workings of the human brain are in many respects a mystery to us,
00:53and the world of dreams is no exception.
00:56We all dream, but some of us dream lucidly.
01:02Scientists claim to have established that while remaining asleep,
01:05we can become aware that we're dreaming, and then start to control the course of our dream,
01:10as if directing a film.
01:13I was on holiday in Portugal when I dreamt that a friend of mine contacted me to say
01:19he had to go to a funeral. He was very upset.
01:22The funeral was in London. Could I go with him?
01:24And the next thing I knew, I was in a big funeral limousine following the hearse with him,
01:29and he was very upset, and we were in terrible traffic.
01:32He thought we were going to be late getting to the crematorium, so I said,
01:35Don't worry, we'll fly. And with that, the car took off into the clouds and soared over London.
01:44It was absolutely wonderful.
01:45All the sensations were very vivid. The colours were brilliant.
01:50I could see everything. I could feel everything.
01:52And I had this enormous sense of power.
01:55So when we arrived at the crematorium, there was a crowd of mourners there.
01:59I was able to turn the whole event into a party.
02:03With this dream, Diana Clift joined those people whose lives have been changed
02:08by the mysterious powers of lucid dreaming.
02:11At first, it was an ordinary, vivid dream.
02:15I was walking along a beach, and everything was wonderful.
02:19And then I saw some coins, and I knelt down to dig them out, basically.
02:25They seemed to grow, and it occurred to me that the only explanation here is that this is a dream.
02:32I decided to conjure up a dream partner.
02:35So I saw a stack of deck chairs, and I thought, well, behind the deck chairs will be this person.
02:40And first, there was no one there.
02:42I looked up, and as I did so, a girl was walking towards me.
02:46And she was short, with dark hair, rather curvaceous, in a bikini.
02:51She came up to me and said,
02:52Hello, my name's Jane.
02:55And we embraced, and had quite a nice dream together.
03:00Dr. Keith Hearn had this dream over 20 years ago.
03:04He became so interested in lucid dreams that he started to study them.
03:08We still don't know why we dream.
03:10It's just a mystery.
03:12We dream for about two hours every night,
03:14which tots up to six years or so in the course of a lifetime.
03:19And REM, or rapid eye movement, dreaming sleep,
03:22occurs every 90 minutes or so in the sleep period.
03:25When I started my research, it was thought that you'd go mad if you didn't dream.
03:32But studies have shown that there are certain drugs,
03:35antidepressants, for instance, which completely knock out REM sleep,
03:38and yet people show no harmful effects.
03:41I wanted to prove that lucid dreams were genuine dreams.
03:45The problem was that in REM sleep, the body is actually paralysed, except for the eyes.
03:52So I had the notion that I could get subjects to signal
03:55by moving their eyes left or right several times.
03:58I also had a method of inducing lucidity
04:02by giving electronic pinpricks to subjects
04:05at a level which would not waken them,
04:08but would be incorporated into the dream,
04:10and so establish lucidity.
04:12Among the subjects of Hearn's experiments
04:16to prove the existence of lucid dreams was Pam Green.
04:20She can still remember the lucid dream
04:22which led to a scientific breakthrough.
04:24I was roller skating downhill,
04:26which is quite a scary experience for me
04:29because I don't roller skate.
04:30I was aware that the ground was disappearing beneath me very quickly.
04:34I had a wall on one side of me and a roadway on the other,
04:38so I had to be very careful that if I veered off a straight course
04:42that I would either crash into the wall or run into the road.
04:46I felt the pinprick.
04:48This was the signal for me to look left and right and signal to Keith.
04:52For some reason, I felt I had to close my eyes to do this.
04:56This worried me slightly because it meant
04:59that I may crash into the wall or run into the road.
05:01However, I risked it and found afterwards I was okay.
05:07I was now aware because I was dreaming
05:09that it was perfectly safe to do what I wanted to do.
05:12It was an incredible experience
05:14when I first saw the signals from a person who was in a lucid dream.
05:19Suddenly, a sequence of left-right eye movement signals came through.
05:22It was like getting signals from another universe.
05:27It was amazing.
05:29Hearn's next quest was to discover
05:31how the powers of this mysterious world could be used.
05:35It's long been known that dreams offer a source of creativity.
05:38One of the many artists inspired by dreams
05:40was the 18th-century Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini.
05:45After dreaming that the devil played a violin to him,
05:48Tartini woke and wrote the music now known
05:50as the Devil's Trill Sonata.
05:53Hearn himself has tapped this reservoir of creativity.
05:57In this dream, I was walking along a riverbank
06:00with my girlfriend at that time.
06:04Now, in reality, the relationship was breaking down
06:07and I was feeling very upset about this
06:09because I really loved this woman.
06:12And the dream seemed to reflect the sadness
06:17and at that time, I heard some music.
06:20It was a flute tune, very plaintive.
06:24Anyway, on Waking, I wrote down the music and developed it
06:30and called it Walk to the Pagoda
06:33and it's since been recorded.
06:35Hearn believes that anyone can harness the powers that lucid dreams offer.
06:42Lucid dreams are an amazing phenomenon
06:45and they can be available to anyone.
06:48I think they constitute the ultimate therapy.
06:52They can make us feel good.
06:54They can banish phobias, fears.
06:58And through lucid dreams, we can heal ourselves.
07:02One such example is where people have chronic nightmares.
07:07You can actually change nightmares to pleasant lucid dreams
07:11and the trick is to change your mindset from thinking,
07:14Oh, my God, here's the nightmare to great, wonderful, here's the nightmare.
07:19That means I'm dreaming and I can control my dream.
07:24But some professional dream therapists believe
07:27that if we try to change the natural course of dreams,
07:30we're avoiding important messages that they can give us.
07:33I do believe that dreams have a functional meaning.
07:35I think there's a reason for us to dream.
07:39And I believe that the unconscious gives us another perspective on things
07:44and that is part of the point of the dream.
07:47When we're stuck in a situation,
07:48sometimes a dream will illuminate the situation in a completely different way.
07:52My concern about lucid dreaming would be that it seems
07:55that it might be actually interfering with the dream
07:59as a communication from the unconscious,
08:01a letter from the unconscious as somebody once described it.
08:05Michael Edwards has other reservations
08:07about the way lucid dreams can be used.
08:11Carlo Rossi is a personal trainer.
08:14Two years ago, his father died.
08:16Shortly after, Carlo had an ordinary non-lucid dream about him.
08:21We were hugging each other
08:22and I went to look at his face
08:27but I couldn't quite see his face clearly.
08:33Carlo is now determined to try to use lucid dreaming
08:36as a way of re-establishing contact with his father
08:38to see him again fully.
08:40The trauma hard is to regain my father's face in the dream.
08:48Definitely, I need that contact.
08:49Grieving is a necessary process
08:53and usually, inevitably, a painful process.
08:57It would concern me if lucid dreaming was seen as a kind of panacea,
09:01a way of avoiding that,
09:04a way of opting out of it,
09:05a way of escaping the pain of it
09:07and therefore never grieving properly.
09:09There's a deep emotional experience that we have to go through.
09:12It's too facile, it's too easy, I think,
09:15just to say, well, it's so good I can call up my father again.
09:18For those people who want to induce lucid dreaming,
09:21a whole technology has sprung up.
09:24It's claimed that the Nova Dreamer, for instance,
09:26can alert you when you're dreaming.
09:28It consists of a soft sleep mask
09:30that you put over your closed eyes
09:32and you go to bed.
09:34When you're dreaming,
09:35your eyes move rapidly from side to side.
09:38The sensors in the mask spot the eye movements
09:41and realise that you're dreaming.
09:43Then it waits a little and it flashes a red light.
09:47These machines that are on the market at the moment,
09:50which claim to be able to induce lucid dreaming
09:52and give you these wonderful nights of entertainment,
09:55I think are an awful idea.
09:58I find it very unhealthy,
10:00this notion that instead of just having dreams,
10:03we have to view them as some sort of entertainment,
10:07some sort of commodity.
10:08I think some people might consider the Nova Dreamer to be a toy,
10:11but we've had some so amazing stories,
10:13we know it's more than that.
10:15For example, once we had a guy who was chair-band,
10:18he was physically disabled.
10:20With the Dreamer,
10:21he was able to walk around the countryside and fly above it,
10:24and he went from being depressed when I first spoke to him
10:27to somebody feeling full of their life and revitalised.
10:30I think that in the next century,
10:33a lot of people will have their own dream machines
10:35and be able to conjure up virtually any situation they want
10:39at night in their dreams for recreational purposes.
10:43But I also think that technology is going to advance so much
10:46that we'll be able to see what people are dreaming
10:49by monitoring the visual cortex,
10:52so we'll be able to actually watch this on a television set.
10:55Presumably we're going to have to pay somebody
10:57for the privilege of seeing our own dreams.
11:00I think this reflects the attitudes of our society today.
11:04It's all about ego gratification, about instant entertainment.
11:08And I think it's a pity that we're now starting to see
11:12our own mental processes in these terms
11:15as just another form of entertainment.
11:17Keith Holm believes we may only have to wait about 15 years
11:21before it's possible to record and play back our dreams,
11:24just like TV programmes, I suppose.
11:26We might even pop down to the video store
11:28and rent someone else's for the weekend.
11:31A bit like examining another person's laundry.
11:38You might have noticed that children have a unique
11:40and very direct way of looking at things.
11:43Their minds are free from the worldly clutter
11:45which preoccupies adults.
11:47Could this mean that children are more receptive
11:49to unworldly phenomena?
11:51Some observers believe that they can possess
11:54exceptional psychic powers.
11:58Former teacher and psychologist Cassandra Eason's interest
12:01in psychic children was triggered by an incident
12:04involving her husband John and her young son Jack.
12:07The story begins one Sunday morning in 1988.
12:16I'd been up most of the night with a teething baby.
12:19We were having breakfast and I was desperately waiting
12:22for my husband John to come home from his overnight shift.
12:26Journalist John was doing his usual morning motorbike journey
12:29from his London offices to his Reading home
12:31over 40 miles away.
12:38Oh, look at the mess!
12:41We looked at the clock
12:42and I thought he'll be home any moment now.
12:48Jack looked up from his cornflakes and said,
12:50Mummy, Daddy's got roly boys on his bike, but he's OK.
13:04Eat your breakfast, Jack.
13:07God, where is your father?
13:08I was driving home when all of a sudden
13:15I just hit this patch of oil.
13:16I was trying to slow down and skidded on it
13:19and came off it.
13:22The bike wasn't too badly damaged.
13:25I wasn't too badly damaged either.
13:27I just picked myself up and kept driving home.
13:33Sometime after 11,
13:34the sound of John's motorbike was outside.
13:40I rushed out.
13:41I know what happened. Jack told me.
13:43Just a few cuts and bruises, I'm OK.
13:45Jack told me!
13:47Of course, at that moment, it all fell into place.
13:50I was fairly stunned.
13:52I couldn't explain it at the time.
13:54It had turned out that
13:55about the time Jack had said what he'd said,
13:59John was actually falling off his motorbike.
14:02I tried to work out some sort of logical explanation.
14:04It might have been that he was expecting
14:05me to have an accident because I had a motorbike
14:08and he'd heard about people having motorbike accidents.
14:11But I couldn't explain the coincidence
14:12of the time that he said it
14:14was about the time that I was falling off the bike.
14:17The episode intrigued Cassandra,
14:19who began researching children's psychic abilities.
14:22Over nine years that I've been working in this field,
14:26I've come across thousands,
14:28not just hundreds,
14:29but thousands and thousands of experiences involving children.
14:33Since the incident involving her son,
14:36Cassandra has found enough material to write several books
14:39on the paranormal detailing the claims of psychic powers in children.
14:43All children seem to have a latent psychic ability,
14:49but it's something that people find frightening
14:53because it's not something you can take into a laboratory
14:56and weigh or measure.
14:57So what is the scientist's view?
15:00David Marks is a professor of psychology at Middlesex University.
15:05It wouldn't surprise me if we found more psychic reports
15:08from children than from adults,
15:10but I would suggest that this is bound up
15:12with their very fantasy-prone personalities.
15:17Fantasy, perhaps.
15:19Erin woke up one morning and she'd had a dream about Zach, our cat.
15:34She dreamt that he was killed.
15:37He was killed in her dream.
15:38There was this girl and she kicked Zach into the river
15:43and then someone found his body in the river
15:47and then I woke up and I thought Zach was dead.
15:55I ran into my mum's room
15:57and I told my mum about my dream
16:01and she says she isn't dead, he's still alive, it's all right,
16:05it was only a dream.
16:06Then a few days after that,
16:10we realised Zach was missing.
16:12He didn't come in for his usual feed and things.
16:15So I contacted the vet
16:17and they said that they had found a cat
16:19that fitted Zach's description.
16:22When I realised the dream had come true about Zach,
16:26we remembered that she'd had other dreams
16:28about previous two cats that we had.
16:32I had a dream about my cat Rams.
16:35I had a dream about my mum had a party
16:38and they dropped a penny on the floor
16:40and my nanny told Jasmine to pick up the penny
16:43and before Ramps swallowed it
16:46and she swallowed it
16:47and it got stuck in her throat
16:50and she died.
16:52Within a few days of Erin's dream,
16:54Ramps died.
16:55Erin also dreamt that a third cat they had
16:58called Gandhi died.
16:59Within two days, he too had passed away.
17:02When we realised that she was having these dreams
17:05and the cats were then dying
17:07within a short period of time after the dreams,
17:10we did realise that this was quite strange.
17:13Erin now has a fourth cat, Tommy.
17:16Fortunately, she hasn't dreamt about him yet.
17:18Many parents will be familiar with their young child
17:23having an imaginary friend
17:24whom only they can see and communicate with.
17:27Some children claim they're talking to a dead relative,
17:30perhaps someone they've never even met.
17:3213-year-old Nicholas Mason from Wolverhampton
17:35believes he's contacted regularly by his dead granddad.
17:39My father was...
17:40He was an amazing character.
17:43He was very, very well loved by everybody
17:45and I can close my eyes now
17:47and I can see his face clearly.
17:49When I told my father that I was pregnant,
17:52he was thrilled to bits
17:53and when it was a boy,
17:54he was the very first grandchild in the family.
17:57He wouldn't put him down.
17:59They were very, very close
18:00and after my father died,
18:03Nick, to say that he was only three and a half
18:05when my dad died,
18:07he missed him terribly.
18:10He really cared for me.
18:11He took me everywhere,
18:13took me to the park,
18:15out shopping,
18:17got my nice stuff.
18:20After his death,
18:21Nicholas felt his granddad still talk to him.
18:24His mother didn't think too much of it.
18:26It seemed a comfort to Nicholas.
18:28But then when the family car,
18:29once owned by Nicholas's granddad,
18:31was stolen,
18:32something happened that no-one could explain.
18:34It got to about mid-afternoon
18:40and Nicholas was playing with his friends on the green
18:42and he suddenly came up to me and he said,
18:45Mum, I know where the car is.
18:47What do you mean you know where the car is?
18:48Granddad told me.
18:50Now, I always believe in listening to a child.
18:53So I said, all right, then where's the car?
18:55With that, he goes off into the corner of the garden
18:58and I can see him nodding his head
18:59and shaking his head
19:00and listening and thinking.
19:02And then he came back and he says,
19:04Granddad says, you know where the car is, Mum.
19:06Granddad said he was next to these two bridges.
19:09What do you mean, two bridges?
19:11Two bridges that you could go over and under.
19:14Do you mean bridge north?
19:15No, not bridge north.
19:17It's where we used to have picnics.
19:2024 hours later,
19:21police found the stolen car
19:23abandoned by the thieves seven miles away.
19:26Roseanne was asked to pick it up.
19:30Mum, Mum, there's a car.
19:32And there's two bridges.
19:34Just like Granddad said.
19:36When we found the car in the exact place
19:38that Nick had described,
19:39I was absolutely thrilled to bits.
19:42To me, it was proof
19:45what Nick had told me had actually happened.
19:48The car was parked next to two bridges
19:51near a picnic spot,
19:53just as Nicholas said his Granddad had told him.
19:55If he'd have said something like that
19:57after the car was found,
20:00old Granddad told me it was going to be found in that place,
20:03then yes, there would have been a lot of doubt.
20:05But he told me before the car was found.
20:08So how do scientists explain claims
20:11that children can talk to dead relatives
20:13who give them information they couldn't possibly know?
20:16Coincidence is one explanation.
20:19I think to a scientist,
20:21we can explain it in terms of the children's imagination,
20:24which is extremely vivid.
20:26But is there a darker side
20:28to some children's apparent psychic abilities?
20:31Could it in fact be harmful?
20:32The church believes it can.
20:35The Reverend Tom Willis
20:36is a Church of England exorcist.
20:38He is called in, usually by distraught parents,
20:41to exorcise demons they believe
20:43are possessing their child.
20:45Exorcism is part of the church's healing ministry,
20:48which has been revived a lot in recent years.
20:51Reported cases of children being possessed by spirits
20:53have risen steadily
20:54since the abolition of the Witchcraft Act in 1952,
20:58a repeal which decriminalised practicing the occult.
21:02Since then, a lot more people have dabbled
21:05in our generation, in the occult,
21:07in seances and the Ouija boards
21:09and astrology and tarot cards.
21:11And the church has to mop up the results of all this.
21:15There has been an increase
21:16in the number of people asking for this ministry
21:19and the number of children involved has also increased.
21:24Reverend Willis has exorcised many children
21:26who he believes were possessed by evil spirits.
21:29Well, I recently had a case of a young child of three
21:33who was swearing and blaspheming
21:36and they knew the child couldn't have learnt this
21:38and said, who's telling you all this?
21:40And she said, the old man that comes into my room,
21:43he says these words.
21:45And eventually when we prayed for the repose of the soul
21:48of this chap and blessed the house,
21:50they moved house and they say,
21:52now there's no more problems.
21:53Are these genuine cases of spirits possessing children
21:57with psychic abilities
21:58or is there a more mundane explanation?
22:02Children can believe sometimes that they're possessed,
22:06so can adults,
22:06but in children it's very, very vivid.
22:09There are much more rational explanations.
22:12For example, a child has a dream
22:15that they are being possessed by some sort of spirit.
22:18They wake up the next morning,
22:20they're very frightened by this,
22:21they tell their parents and the parents panic
22:24and contact the local priest.
22:26The priest comes along,
22:28he may himself believe in spirits,
22:30he then reinforces the belief in the child
22:32and they go through an exorcism.
22:35But really here what we've got is a medieval story,
22:37a medieval fairy tale
22:38to explain and interpret complicated experiences.
22:47Well, whether or not kids are psychic,
22:49one thing's for sure,
22:51they do have special powers
22:52to wrap you around the little fingers.
22:54Good night.
22:55Good night.
23:01-"I would have been leftIS bem.
23:04Who would have set this love on the track,
23:05and have sisters dark,
23:06that know what or not right
23:06or the joy of me,
23:07to be baik,
23:08and other people inꁵ come for now,
23:09to beꕈ wung with patients.
23:10Then we're set to find this love on the track.
23:10And it's great work.
23:12So we we see in the tradition,
23:13this is恄恍mary,
23:13a one thing that is not about
23:14as a contemporary world,
23:14that know why it's happening.
23:17Under the east,
23:18it's 23 years after the night
23:19and it's או comets
23:20so we'll stick to death.
23:21And it's medium to go to,
23:23let's have a brief comment on that,