In addition to reading his mail, the FBI and CIA followed Krippner closely enough to include in his dossier a description of him as a 5-foot-10 male with brown hair and blue eyes who is "anything but approachable." Time has whitened Krippner's hair and stiffened his gait (being run over by a truck 25 years ago in Spain contributed as well). But unapproachable?
When Krippner's plane touches down in Brazil, they're always there to meet him. Three to four dozen total strangers want him to interpret their dreams on the spot, offer advice, travel to their villages to inspect paranormal goings-on, or simply shake hands. "They're waiting for him like he's a rock star," says Sex at Dawn author Christopher Ryan, Krippner's former student and frequent traveling companion. "Stanley just has a total lack of ego; he's not good at saying no. He would stay there all night. One of my jobs was to pull him away from those people. I got to be the asshole for hire."
Courtesy of Stanely Krippner
Krippner’s study of shamanic drumming is a world apart from analyzing EEG readings in the dream lab.
Courtesy of Stanely Krippner
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If the Feds really wanted to approach Krippner, they should have asked him to collaborate on a book. One pile of loose papers nearly 3 feet high towers over the other paper piles on the L-shaped desk in Krippner's San Francisco office — "that's stuff I'm writing," he notes. Dozens of finished products in the corner are a testament to both his wide breadth of interests and inability to fend off would-be collaborators. Among works on shamans and dreams, however, The Park Avenue Diet seems out of place. Dr. Stuart Fischer, the book's primary author, notes that Krippner's concept of "personal mythology" made him a natural co-writer of a book that deigns to move past merely telling people how to eat. But there's more: "Stan changed my dreams with ESP!" gushes Fischer.
Krippner spent 1964 to 1973 in the basement. Working in the catacomb-like corridors beneath Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, Krippner had the rare distinction of penning "Dream Lab Director" under "occupation" on his IRS forms. Even generations later, it's hard to find a subsequent parapsychological study that has delivered such striking results. "In terms of just knocking your socks off," says U.C. Irvine statistics professor and parapsychology "advocate" Jessica Utts, "What they produced is some of the most exciting stuff."
Those results were wrung out of a time-consuming and costly procedure that, at its core, involved the mind-numbing necessity of observing a subject sleep. All night. Repeatedly.
While the subject dozed away, wired to an electroencephalogram, a scientist in the next room waited for rapid eye movement (REM) sleep to commence. When it did, the scientist would hit a buzzer, and then the process began. That buzzer alerted the "agent," who was ensconced in a remote room somewhere within the hospital. The agent would remove a randomly chosen photograph or art print from a sealed envelope and attempt to mentally "send" it to the slumbering subject. This purported transmission of information from one individual to another is known as telepathy. At the end of each REM session, the subject was awakened and made to describe his or her dreams. These transcripts were delivered to independent judges, who selected which of an array of images the description of the dreams corresponded to. Over the course of a decade, the participants in the telepathy experiments Krippner administered alongside Montague Ullman and Charles Honorton were judged to have dreamed of the agents' images at a hit rate far exceeding the baseline odds of mere guessing. Randomly obtaining these results would require Powerball-like odds.
The knock on parapsychology studies has long been that any so-called evidence of ESP is usually limited to negligible effects only detectable after scouring massive bodies of data. "Those to whom this criticism has any appeal should be aware that the Maimonides experiments are clearly exempt from it," wrote Irvin Child, Yale's former psychology department chair, in American Psychologist, the APA's flagship journal. "I believe many psychologists would, like myself, consider the ESP hypothesis to merit serious consideration and continued research if they read the Maimonides reports for themselves."
Dream telepathy is a field that has treated Krippner well. He doesn't have much company. Prominent skeptic Ray Hyman praises Krippner's dream lab studies as "interesting work" and admits "there's no smoking gun to say they didn't have something." But, he adds, no one has ever duplicated the striking success of the Maimonides dream lab — a charge to which Krippner pleads guilty. "There you have it," he admits with a shrug. This, he notes, is a perfect example of skeptics' standby critique of parapsychology — it just doesn't repeat on demand.
And yet, it's not so easy to dismiss Krippner's overall assertion that something — something — was happening in those experiments to indicate we don't yet understand every last mystery of the universe. As a teenage lab assistant and subject, Fischer dreamed of men struggling to walk against a snowstorm. As the agent that night, Krippner concentrated on a Japanese portrait of just that. Many decades later, Fischer accompanied Krippner to a symposium in Kyoto. As they left for their hotel, a snowstorm whipped up, and the men struggled to walk against it.
