EVP II (Electronic Voice Phenomena)

Fig. 1 One of the earliest EVP reports published in the XX century: "Voices from the beyond on the telephone. New and admirable system of communication. Spirits talk on the telephone''.

As in XK's karaoke recordings, the Electronic Voice Phenomena or EVP (*) gained notoriety when F. Jürgenson (1903-1987), a Swedish artist and singer, was recording birdsongs in 1959. At first, he believed voices were interference sources coming from radio stations operating nearby. Since the voices replied unmistakably to “callings”, and other anomalous answers were obtained even when the equipment was shielded in Faraday cages (to block external electromagnetic radiation), Jürgenson was convinced of their paranormal origin. Since then, names like Konstantin Raudive (1909-1974) and Hans O. König are linked to the history of EVP as relevant researchers who recorded many clear voices which cannot be explained away easily. In what appeared to be an acceptance of something already known, some Vatican authorities supported EVP experiments and claimed the voices came from Purgatory.

In fact, the interest in contacting spirits with electronic equipment is as old as the invention of wireless communication. It soon became clear to technical celebrities such as Thomas Edison (1847-1931), Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), and Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) that it might be possible to use the recently invented radio or some sort of electric circuit to communicate with the dead. Edison exchanged correspondence with William Crookes (1832-1919) about the possibility of obtaining images of spirits. In an interview for Scientific American in 1920, (an unthinkable interview given the publication standards of this journal today), Edison trustfully stated:

I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities that have passed on to another existence or sphere.

After declaring he knew nothing about the subject of “our personality passing on to another existence or sphere”, Edison continued: 

But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus that will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.

He proposed to build a highly sensitive instrument in which electric currents could be manipulated by the dead provided they existed in “another sphere”. It did not occur to Edison that the human ear is such a sensitive machine. As it is known, at the threshold of human audition (~1 pW/m2), the ear can detect oscillations in air molecules as small as 1/10 the size of an atom! 

Zarrelli stated properly that the “spirit phone” was Edison’s most fruitless invention. This failure should be attributed to Edison's disregard for the conditions under which the phenomenon occurs. Just having any apparatus, no matter how sensitive, is not enough. But Edison’s reasoning is very much alive these days. In a recent article, the same conclusions were drawn for the super-ultra-sensitive LHC collider in the context of detecting “other dimensions” including “ghosts”. 

Communication by electronic media was possible since the widespread use of wired telephony. Predating Raymond Bayless experiments in 195, Oscar D’Argonnel published in 1925 Vozes do Além pelo Telephone (“Voices from the beyond on the telephone”, see Figure 1). This book reports D’Argonnel’s experiences with spirit communication a decade before its publication in Brazil. Recent research unveiled a curious Brazilian patent filled by the Portuguese Augusto de Oliveira Cambraia in 1909. Named Telegrapho Vocativo, its purpose was to transmit information through the air by using “souls and spirits floating in the atmosphere”. However, today it is hard to know what Cambraia meant by “souls and spirits” (it seems an improper reference to radio waves). Such scattered accounts of anomalous communication by wired phones at the beginning of the XX century can be linked to EVP reports using tape recorders much later. 

Because no theory was ever available to explain how the voices could be picked up anomalously (or more generally speaking “signals” in the case of ITC – instrumental transcommunication), the EVP research took a purely empirical path since Jürgenson’s first recordings. Several technical arrangements for obtaining EVP were invented: using a simple tape recorder, with a recorder and a shortwave radio, with a recorder and a noise generator, using computers converted into digital recorders and noise generators, using a single or several radios as a noise source and a digital recorder and many others. 

Since Edison's time, enthusiasts have supported the thesis of EVP as a non-mediumistic phenomenon par excellence. Provided a refined method existed in the future, they believe EVP could become the most trustworthy way of communicating with the beyond. After all, the information would come directly from the source (the spirits) to the equipment with no human influence. Perhaps many officials of the Catholic Church supported EVP in this non-mediumistic sense because the idea undermined any non-Catholic explanation implied by the medium’s presence.

But such non-mediumistic nature attributed to EVP is a naïve oversimplification of what may really happen during the voice recordings.  In 1925, D'Argonnel emphasized the need for special mediums in his telephonic experiences. Clear phrases were obtained by a few researchers in the past and today.  Others have recorded utterances as noise modulations which could be interpreted as acceptable answers to proposed questions. In fact, many EVP messages are barely lengthier than a couple of words forming short phrases. The majority of EVP enthusiasts have recorded barely understandable words feeding pareidolia-based explanations by skeptics. The frequency and quality of EVP messages are definitely correlated to the presence of certain people. 

Notes

(*) EVP acronym is used for both phenomenon (sing.)  or phenomena (plural).

Next post:  EVP III (Electronic Mediumship)

EVP I (A haunted Karaoke)

Fig. 1 Spectrogram of the first recording showing the audio feedback at about 1KHz and the anomalous voice (AV1) after 11 seconds. The number of audio samples for each FFT segment is 256.

But, soft: behold! lo where it comes again!

I'll cross it, though it blast me. - Stay, illusion!

If thou hast any sound, or use a voice.

Speak to me!

W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.1

My nephew XK lives in the US and is a young American who speaks both Portuguese and English. Driven by his love for singing, he was alone at home recording songs with a Karaoke system. Careless about one of his recordings, he left the recorder on a little longer. To his surprise, he noticed an unexpected voice at the end of one of the files. After inquiring the unseen to give him and his mother a reply, the unusual voice appeared a second time. Fearing the invisible, he abandoned his karaoke sessions since then.

Fig.2 Filtered waveforms of AV1 in the indicated interval showing the anomalous voice.

My sister sent me two of the raw MP4 files sampled at 48KHz. The first recording was obtained on June 18 2019 at 4:03 pm and the second one about one hour later. The total recording time length of samples 1 and 2 is 13.76s and 17.62 s, respectively. In the first sample, the Karaoke speaker was on and the characteristic audio feedback is clearly heard. In the second file, registered with the speaker off, no feedback is present, but the output volume is much lower.  

Fig. 3 Spectrogram of the second recording showing the presence of the anomalous voice (AV2) after 14 seconds following an initial ``invocation''. The number of audio samples for each FFT segment is 256. 

It is possible to visually analyze sounds by calculating and displaying their spectrograms. These are frequency-time diagrams showing the time distribution of intensity amplitudes of each tone that compose the original sound. Spectrograms are the result of applying the famous “Fast Fourier Transformation” method (FFT in short) to the sampled audio signal. The first recording spectrogram is seen in Fig. 1.  The “anomalous voice” (AV1) is present after about 11 seconds with a spectrum distribution between 1-8 KHz above the characteristic audio feedback (in the range 0.75-1.3KHz and 2.8-3.1KHz). By applying a 76dB flat filter in these ranges, the audio noise is reduced significantly. The filtered anomalous signal waveform in the time interval [11.6,12.75] is seen in Fig. 2.  AV1 sounds like a whispering male voice pronouncing “I see”.

Fig. 4 Audio waveforms of AV2 ("yes") in the indicated interval showing the anomalous voice modulation.

Fig. 3 is the corresponding spectrogram of the second sample where other features are indicated. In particular, there is an initial "invocation'' in Portuguese that can be translated as "tell something to mom'' in the interval 1-2 s. Cracking sounds can be heard between 10-14 s. After 14.5 s, the silence is broken by an unmistakable but very low “yes” distributed mostly in the frequency range 1-2KHz, and whispered by the same male voice of the first recording. A zoomed view of the AV2 audio signal  is seen in Fig. 4 in the time interval [14.75, 15.6] s. 

The original single-channel versions were converted to WAV format, and can be listened here (1) and here (2).  The complete filtered file can be accessed here.

Next post: EVP II (Electronic Voice Phenomena).

The spiritist interpretation of dreams

"The dream" by Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, 1883. Source: Wikipedia.

"Poor human beings! how little do you know of the commonest phenomena of your life! You

fancy yourselves to be very learned, and you are puzzled by the most ordinary things. To

questions that any child might ask, 'What do we do when we are asleep?' 'What are dreams?'

you are incapable of replying." (1)

“One day it will have to be officially admitted 

that what we have christened reality is 

an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.” ― Salvador Dali

We sleep a considerable portion of our lives, more precisely, about one-third of our incarnate lives. What happens in this state? It is easy to understand the need for sleep - so natural that we hardly question its importance - however, how do we justify dreams? What does the understanding of the dual nature of the human being, allowed by the Spiritist knowledge, help us to understand the mechanism of dreaming? 

The dream experience is quite different from the ordinary experiences of the waking state. The latter admits "witnesses", who share these experiences publicly. If I travel with my family to a tourist destination, the experiences I had there are the same my relatives had. In dreams, however, this does not apply. Thus, if I dream about going to a distant place with my relatives, they will not confirm the same experience if I question them about their dreams. In principle, the whole experience of dreaming is private, that is, lived only in the "first person", by myself exclusively. Such a striking difference makes dreams to be considered mental experiences par excellence, that is, experiences created solely by the dreamer's mind. 

Another distinguishing feature of dreams (I have already experienced this myself) is the apparent lack of causal connection among events within a dream. What happens at a particular moment - even though the apparent cause is declared in the dream - is not related causally to the following dream action. I remember a dream when I parked a car in a certain place. After other facts in the dream, when I return to get the car, it was no longer there or, at least, I could not remember where I had left the car in the dream... But I also remember dreams in which I was aware I was dreaming and could also keep the details of previous dreams connected to the last one I was having. In these cases, I was just finishing an adventure of a few nights before (someone told me in the dream): a situation best described as a "lucid dream".

The dream as a mnemonic synthesis of past experiences of the soul during sleep.

Dreams are the remembrance of what your spirit has seen during sleep, but you must remark that you do not always dream, because you do not always remember what you have seen, or all that you have seen. Your dreams do not always reflect the action of your soul in its full development; for they are often only the reflex of the confusion that accompanies your departure or your return, mingled with the vague remembrance of what you have done, or of what has occupied your thoughts, in your waking state. (1)

As already described in Question #402 in The Spirit's Book (1), dreams do not reduce themselves simply to the state of the soul freed from the body. If this were so, the experience, although private, should be consistent, in other words, dreams would be indistinguishable from "out-of-the-body" experiences. Dreams may be described rather as a kind of mnemonic synthesis of what occurs during sleep which is meaningful to the spirit; a re-construction or assembly, greatly affected by memories of past experiences, of what is important to the mind during sleep. Although the mechanism is fully unknown, this synthesis or composite is constructed from almost everything relevant to the individual at the moment of awakening: desires, fears, the reinterpreted experience of the previous day, memories of the present and past lives, and even past experiences the spirit has had recently, that is, the very memories of other dreams.

For me, the immense majority of people (including myself) cannot perfectly retain, through the "prism of the brain", the memories acquired by the senses of the soul during the dreaming state. The events of the dream are therefore recreated from a "bank of memories", almost entirely based on previous experiences of the waking state. It is like creating a new movie using a sequence of edited scenes from old films. In this "editing" process, the memory bank is accessed and its symbols, scenes or poses are used to "synthesize" a memory of the actual experience. Thus, after waking up, most recollected sequences are often erratic or does not fit into a rational or logic arrangement.

For example, imagine that I, in spirit state, was in contact with other people during sleep. When I awake, the remembrance process will most likely substitute the personality whom I have been in contact with by other people I recognize in the vigil state: sometimes a friend I know later was indeed awakened, or another person whom I have long forgotten and so on. It is even possible that the dream is filled out with an image of a discarnate relative. And so we usually wake up with the impression of having been in contact with that dead relative, but in fact, that was not true. It was rather a recreation because in no way my physical brain is able to sustain faithfully the images of my actual experience as a spirit in the dream. Only the script is more or less similar. The mnemonic assembly is necessary to give a meaning of those experiences lived in the dream to my consciousness in the awakened state. We should remember that the experiences of the dream do not reach the soul through the common pathways of the material senses (the nervous system). Therefore, they are reinterpreted when they finally reach the brain when we awake.

So, those were not the ones I have been in contact with when I dreamed about my deceased mother, father or any other relative? Not necessarily. A somewhat different situation occurs in the already mentioned lucid dreams, which are a category of rare and peculiar dreams. In them, the dreamer knows he/she is dreaming or is having the experience. In the dreams I had with my deceased mother, I had a distinct impression that she came to visit me. Amazingly, the dream environment was the bed I was lying - somehow I know it - and the dream finished when I woke up in tears. These particular dreams differ greatly from the immense majority of banal, meaningless dreams we have often because they are full of meaning to us.

The idea of dreams as a process of re-creation of experience of the soul during sleep by assembling preexisting memories allows us to explain the so-called "premonitory dreams". In fact, these can also be recreated from previous images, but they deal with future events based on the experience of the soul in the Beyond regarding these facts. Trying to interpret them may be a frustrating practice because they only make sense to the dreamer who preserves their real meaning unconsciously. Moreover, premonition dreamers might not be competent in conveying or communicating the true meaning in time, which is a source of countless confusions.

In summary, we can divide the impressions caused by the dreams in three levels of meanings:

1. The deep meaning, ultimately existing only for the soul, that is, as an unconscious "memory" impressed to the incarnate being, an "unfelt awareness". The sense can be recapitulated in other dreams or invoked in lucid dreams. It certainly survives physical death as the heritage of the soul experience,
2. The fragmented vigil meaning, recreated on the base of preexisting images or memories of the vigil state, the materialized meaning for the waking being, perhaps to be forgotten with physical death,
3. The sense conveyed to others, depending on our ability to communicate the dream experience to others in the incarnate world. This meaning can cause a very different impression, making their "interpretation" difficult, although in some anomalous case, the meaning is very clear. 

"Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream" (Genesis cap 41, 14-36),
The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 199. Source: Wikipedia.

The importance of anomalous dreams

Presently, most of the theoretical impasse regarding the most popular conceptions of the mind is due to their exclusive reference to the events taking place with the immense majority of people. I understand the reason from a practical point of view. Statistically, it makes sense to devote research effort to what happens most of the time. By doing this, however, we sacrifice the understanding of the deeper causes in detriment of what is more frequent. Thus the anomalies that occur with only a few are swept under the rug by explanations seemingly applicable to what is general. It is reasonable to ask if the truest theory is the one fitting the majority of the facts or the one leaving no fact aside. In medicine, one does not learn anything about diseases by studying only healthy people. Therefore, anomalies should be regarded since they are a way to establish correlations and to explain the exceptions beyond the rule.

The so-called "anomalous dreams" represent precisely this situation. Unlike ordinary dreams, they resemble lucid dreams by bringing meaningful messages containing "anomalous content". An elucidating work about anomalous dreams is due to S. Krippner and L. Faith entitled "Exotic dreams: A cross-cultural study" (2). In this work, the authors identified (from a set of about 1700 dream reports), nearly 185 (or 8%) considered "exotic". Such reports were then classified according to several types: healing dreams, lucid dreams, creative dreams, dreams with out-of-body experiences, shared dreams, dreams within dreams (as I had), dreams of past lives, visitation dreams, etc.

The so-called "shared dreams" are particularly interesting. These are reports of people who experience mutual dreams or dreams whose content is partially shared among individuals. Thus, the "first person" character of dreams may be weakened (3).

In creative dreams, Krippner and Faith reported dream narratives in which people were aided in dreams to solve problems of everyday life.

In a visitation dream, a painter from Japan reported having been advised by her father, who died in World War II, to choose her paintings and even on how to use the brush. The experience was highly significative and helped to improve the painter professional performance.

According to the authors in (2), dreams about tragedies (precognitive dreams) do not always end in a fatal way. They usually manifest themselves as the announcement of diseases or vulnerable situations of people at a distance.

Finally, the authors in (2) suggest a correlation between the incidence of anomalous dreams and the cultural environment in which they occur. In fact, this correlation is expected, considering that dreams are interpreted in terms of previous mental baggage. Therefore, the greater the individual' awareness about spiritual realities, the clearer will be their representation in exotic or peculiar dreams.

As for lucid dreams, it is possible that most people have already experienced - at least once in life - this kind of dream which would be more expected in cultures which value spirituality.

Conclusions

In this note, I have listed some relevant aspects to our understanding of the genesis and unfolding of dreams. A suitable explanation of the mechanism of dreams must both explain the dynamics with the vast majority of people, and the peculiar cases occurring with specific groups as well. Such anomalous experiences may also manifest at least once in people's life.

It is not possible to understand dreams without appealing to the dual nature of the human being, a simple reality that is able to explain both the reported exceptions and everyday life dreams. What we call dreams are, in fact, memories of events taking place during sleep, memories that are reconstructed out of other perceptions of facts lived by the person in the awaken state. This explanation agrees with the idea that, in the dream state, the spirit cannot excite the body directly (that is, the brain), because it is partially detached from it. In the process of "reassembling" the experience as a meaningful narrative to the vigil state, experiences of the present life (everyday facts, known people etc) are used, just as "extraordinary" memories (e. g., of previous lives, or other dreams etc).

The random, erratic or senseless impression of most dreams is a consequence of such reassembly of memories from a bank of internal fragments. In general, the meaning of dreams only exists unconsciously for the person who experiences it. It is very difficult to interpret dreams correctly, although this might be possible exceptionally.

The understanding that dreams are memories of the spiritual life allows us to explain a great variety of accounts considered "anomalous", which are then important sources confirming the proposed mechanism behind dreams. Without proper attention to such anomalous accounts, dreams are often considered merely as "hallucinations" or "fantasies" of the brain, showing no correlation with the true and hidden reality.

In addition to dividing dreams between "ordinary" and "peculiar" types, for most people, dreams may be further subdivided into "ordinary/common" and "lucid" dreams. In the last case, the dreamer knows he/she is dreaming and, therefore, can "control" the dream in principle. Apparently, such control is subjected to training (4).

It seems evident that dreaming is an important stage in the progress of the incarnate soul. By countless repetitions, the spirit liberates itself from the physical world and recalls its disembodied life. In a certain sense, dreaming is a training process for the ultimate physical deliverance that we call death.

References

(1) Question 402, "The Spirit's Book" (A. Kardec). Translated from French by Anne Blackwell. Online version here: http://geeaknorge.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Spiritsbook.pdf (March 2019).

(2) Krippner, S., & Faith, L. (2001). "Exotic dreams: A cross-cultural study". Dreaming, 11(2), 73-82.

(3) Another work related to shared dreams is Davis, W. J., & Frank, M. (1994). "Dream sharing: A case study". The Journal of Psychology, 128 (2), 133-147.

(4) See, e. g., May E. C & LaBerge S. (1991) "Anomalous Cognition in Lucid Dreams". Science Applications International Corporation. In March 2019, this work can be downloaded here:

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00789r003100140001-2