The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People

By Sally Rhine Feather and Michael Schmicker

Can some people see the future? Do some dreams contain warnings? Can we observe events unfolding thousands of miles away? Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, a director of one of the world's most respected institutes for paranormal studies, says yes—and she provides dozens of examples of how ESP appears in real life. Referring to decades of research of hard facts and data as proof that ESP is real, Dr. Feather now reveals breakthrough discoveries which include: what circumstances trigger ESP experiences, why some people have more of this gift than others, and whether the fate revealed in a dream or vision can be changed.
Don't miss:

· The dream that prevented a fatal heart attack of a stranger
· Children's visions of dead people bringing messages for the living
· A letter written and mailed that precisely predicted a nephew's injury in war
· The stolen car recovered in Cleveland with the help of a vision
· …and more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781429904179

Sally Rhine Feather

DR. SALLY RHINE FEATHER, an experimental and clinical psychologist, is the daughter of the founders of the Parapsychology Lab at Duke University. She is a director of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina.

Book preview

1

THE FALLING CHANDELIER

All good science starts with observation, and humans throughout history have been recording observations about their psychic experiences. My father coined the generic term extrasensory perception (ESP) to cover the three basic types of these experiences: precognition, clairvoyance, and telepathy. In each instance, the mind receives information in an unusual way, without the help of the five known senses.

PRECOGNITION

The following mother’s experience is an illustration of precognition—the ability to foresee an event before it happens; to break the barrier of time and peer into the future.

The Falling Chandelier

A young woman in Washington State, whom I will call Amanda, woke up at 2:30 A.M. so upset by a terrifying dream that she had to wake her husband and tell him about it. She had dreamed the large chandelier that hung over their baby’s bed in the next room had fallen into the crib and crushed the baby. In the dream, Amanda could see herself and her husband standing amid the wreckage. The clock on the baby’s dresser read 4:35 A.M. In the dream, she could hear the rain on the windowpane and the wind blowing outside. When she told her husband of the dream, he just laughed at her. He said it was a silly dream, and she should forget it and go back to sleep. In a matter of moments, he did just that himself, but Amanda could not sleep. The dream was too frightening. Finally, she got out of bed and went to the baby’s room, picked her up, and brought her back to their bed. She looked out the window and saw a full moon. The weather was calm. Feeling foolish, she got back into their bed with the baby. About two hours later, they were wakened by a resounding crash. She jumped up, followed by her husband, and ran to the nursery. There, where the baby would have been lying, was the chandelier in the smashed crib. They looked at each other in amazement, then at the clock by the crib. It was 4:35 A.M. Stunned, they listened to the sound of rain on the windowpane and the wind howling outside.

The dream Amanda had several hours in advance of the accident had essentially come true. In her dream, she had foreseen the future in remarkable detail: the chandelier falling on her baby’s crib, the time it would fall, and even the unexpected change in weather.

For most people, no type of ESP experience seems harder to believe than foreseeing the future. Prophecy, an older, more familiar term for precognition, dates back to the beginnings of human civilization. Many people, especially those coming from a religious perspective, accept the reality of prophecy, but they associate it with gifted individuals connected to the divine and living in ancient times—not with ordinary people. Parapsychologists have found that precognitive experiences are reported more frequently than any other type of ESP, making up more than half of all reported ESP experiences. Modern precognitive experiences, unlike prophecy, do not usually cover grand sweeps of time but typically involve only minutes, hours, or days. Modern precognitive experiences bring information involving everyday life, and they are predominantly realistic and often true to small details, as Amanda’s chandelier experience was. Occasionally, precognitive information comes in symbolic form, similar to what people experience in their dreams.

CLAIRVOYANCE

Clairvoyance, a second type of ESP, is the ability to see an event as it occurs in a distant place, without the help of our five senses. The distant event can sometimes be seen in great detail with the clarity of actual sight at close range. Recently, I received the following clairvoyant experience from a woman in Michigan.

A Dog Named Brady

Betty and her son Chris had a dog named Brady that they loved very much. When he went missing for a week, they placed an ad in the newspaper with a fifty-dollar reward. According to Betty, "At about eleven o’clock one evening, I received a phone call from a man who was sure he had Brady. He gave me instructions to his house, which I quickly wrote down on paper, but in the rush of excitement to see if it was Brady, I forgot the paper on the kitchen table. I knew the general area and the name of the road that he lived on. Two of my sons jumped in the car with me.

"As I was driving, I said to my boys, ‘I hope we can find this place, and I sure hope it’s Brady.’

"My son Chris, who was about eleven at the time, said, ‘Oh, it’s Brady all right; I can see her.’

"When I asked him what he meant, he said he could see her. I thought he was kidding, so I kidded back and asked him more.

"He went on to describe what he ‘saw’ in his mind: He said the house was long and white. There was no deck on it, just very long. The roof was black. He said there were two dogs outside, but neither of them was Brady. He said Brady was on the inside. He said when you walk in the house the TV set is very loud and to the left. He said a baby lived there. He said the man had a red shirt or jacket on. He said the lady had a shirt on that had a lot of green on the front. He thought it was a Green Bay Packers shirt. He said the living room was blue, all blue.

"When we pulled up the road, I did not know the exact house. We pulled into two driveways, neither one was like Chris had described. I told Chris I’d give him twenty dollars if he was right. I really didn’t believe him, but he is a good kid, and he sounded so truthful and sincere.

"We pulled into the third driveway, and there was a white trailer home, no deck, black roof. Two dogs tied up outside. It was weird. When we got inside, down the hall comes Brady. We were so excited that I didn’t think about what Chris had said. We paid the fellow and left. Chris said, ‘I told you so.’ The only thing I had noticed inside was the very loud TV, which was to the left. Riding home, we were all freaked out, so when I got back home, I called the lady to check out what we hadn’t paid attention to because we were so excited to find our dog. Her husband had a red shirt on, she had a sweatshirt with a scene of a deer standing in the middle of pine trees. They had a two-year-old who was asleep in her crib. They had just remodeled their living room with new blue carpeting and a new blue living room set. The only thing that my son had wrong was the green pine trees, which he thought was a Green Bay Packers shirt. I would have never believed this story if it hadn’t happened to me.

"The only other time Chris did this was when a friend of the boys had run away from home. He had stopped at our house and then left. Chris and his brother were walking down to the corner store and Chris said, ‘There’s big trouble coming over that hill.’ A second later over the hill came two cop cars and the boy’s parents. Chris really tried to do this again, but he only did it in small things that were questionable.

My question is this: I believe that he was extraordinarily correct in his description of where our dog was. I am not exaggerating one bit. And I am wondering if he could somehow develop this, and is there any use for it? Is this what people do when they help people solve crimes? I also wondered if it only happens under stress as these situations involved a lost dog and a runaway kid.

Individuals with clairvoyant ability are being used by a number of police departments across the country to help solve crimes. The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime, written by the late Dr. Marcello Truzzi, describes many such cases. Dr. Truzzi began collecting data and case histories on the blue sense in 1980. At last report, his Psychic Sleuths project files were the most comprehensive database in the U.S. on the use of ESP and clairvoyance in the service of criminal justice.

Recently there has been considerable public attention to a type of clairvoyance called remote viewing, which will be discussed later in this book. Begun at the Stanford Research Institute in the early 1970s, the research effort quietly evolved into a classified program to employ psychics to use their ESP ability in the service of their country. The intelligence-gathering part of the research program wasn’t publicly confirmed until 1995, when the government admitted that for more than twenty years the CIA and many other government agencies had used specially-trained clairvoyants in such operational missions as penetrating secret Soviet military installations, locating a downed Soviet Tupolev-22 bomber lost in the jungles of Zaire, looking for an American general kidnapped by Italian terrorists, and helping in other still classified missions.

TELEPATHY

Telepathy is what most people associate with the term ESP. It is the paranormal ability to acquire information about the thoughts, feelings, or activity of another person—in short, the ability to read someone’s mind. Experiences involving another person’s thoughts are not necessarily the most striking of ESP experiences nor are they the most frequently reported. And yet, telepathy captured popular imagination early on. This ability was the easiest to accept—a seemingly natural consequence of close rapport between two people. Telepathy was the first type of ESP to get scientific and scholarly attention, because the earlier investigators believed it implied something about the human mind that went beyond the laws of matter and suggested a spiritual