Krippner

THE DREAMS AND VISIONS OF EVA HELLSTRM

Stanley Krippner Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco
INTRODUCTION
Eva Hellstrm was born in 1898 and died in 1986, after spending most of her life in Stockholm and helping to form the Swedish Society for Parapsychological Research. Hellstrm claimed to have had many anomalous experiences over the years, primarily in the form of precognitive dreams and what she referred to as visions. Hellstrom recorded these experiences and shared them with serious parapsychological researchers, both in Sweden and abroad. For example, several of these experiences were cited by Ian Stevenson in his 1970 book Telepathic Impressions and by Schriever in her 1987 article A 30-Year Experiment with Time, appearing in The European Journal of Parapsychology. Occasionally, Hellstrom described her own experiences, as in Veridical Precognition of Girls Dancing, published in a 1962 issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. She played an important role in the formation of the Swedish Society for Parapsychological Research, an organization founded in her home in 1947. Until 1968, Hellstrm served as the Society's secretary and general manager. She initiated the John Bjorkhems Minnesfond Foundation, which she hoped would be devoted to initiating parapsychological research in Swedish universities. However, there were internal disputes within the foundation, primarily about the role to be played by members devoted to spiritualism, a topic that Hellstrm had abandoned years earlier. In 1970, Hellstrm sent me a notebook consisting of 21 of her reported dreams and 45 of her reported visions. They had been neatly typed, and the paper had been glued into the notebook. In an accompanying letter, Hellstrm wrote me that these cases are precognitive; most of them have come in deep dreams, some are hypnopompic or hypnagogic visions. Each experience was followed by a lengthy verification (pasted into the notebook), typically consisting of statements elicited from other people, from newspaper articles, or from photographs relevant to the purportedly precognized material. Needless to say, these "verifications" were collected after the fact, and conscious or unconscious selection factors could have been at work. Several dreams and visions were missing from this journal (having been given to other investigators) so I simply worked with the material at hand, asking the question, What are the characteristics of the reported dreams and visions of Eva Hellstrm?

METHODS
To answer this question, I used three instruments, one rating scale, and the services of four judges. Instruments included Krippner and Faiths (2001) 12 exotic dream categories (of which 5 were pertinent to this investigation), Castos Spirituality Scoring System (Casto, Krippner, & Tartz, 1999), Strauchs (2001) content analysis system for bizarreness, and a 5-unit rating scale to evaluate the purported veridical correspondences between the report and the precognized event. Two judged classified the material into the exotic dream categories, one judge evaluated the material on the Casto Scale, a different judge employed the 5-unit rating scale (one=low veridicality; five=very high veridicality), two judges utilized the Strauch scales. In the rare cases when there was a disagreement between judges, I made the final decision. Casto developed her system in an attempt to identify spiritual content in dream reports. Utilizing the categories from the well-known Hall and Van de Castle system (Hall & Van de Castle, 1966), Casto developed several categories as well as criteria for each, i.e., Spiritual Objects, Spiritual Characters, Spiritual Settings, Spiritual Activities, Spiritual Emotions, Spiritual Experiences. The Parapsychological Association Convention 2004 441

The dreams and visions of Eva Hellstrm Strauch developed scales to identify two specific types of bizarre content, paranormal and magical, as well as miscellaneous bizarre content. Under the heading, paranormal phenomena, she has differentiated psychological, biological, and physical events. Under the heading of magical phenomena, she has differentiated magical activities, characters, objects, and scenery. Miscellaneous bizarre content falls into six categories: activities, characters, objects, sensations, settings, and speech. The paranormal psychological phenomena category, according to Strauch, comprises extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), related abilities (e.g., out-of-body sensation, flying), and anthropomorphism (e.g., talking animals). Paranormal biological phenomena include bodily changes (e.g., shrinking, becoming taller) and invulnerability. Paranormal physical phenomena include animism, changes in form, disappearances, time travel, and unidentified flying objects.

RESULTS Exotic Dream Categories

Of the 66 dream/vision reports investigated, 55 were classified as precognitive, 6 as clairvoyant, 2 as spirit visitation, 2 as telepathic, and 1 as healing. Hellstrm claimed to specialize in precognitive dreams and the results of this analysis support her claim.

Casto Spirituality Scoring System

Only 4 of Hellstrms dream reports were spiritual in nature as measured by the Casto Spirituality Scoring System. Dream report #2 contained a spiritual object, clerical garments and bishops requisites. Report #79 contained a spiritual character, The Queen of Heaven. Report #102 contained a spiritual setting, a cathedral. Report #135 contained a reference to a spiritual character, a woman in profile with folded hands. In other words, spiritual content was not a predominant theme in Hellstrm's dreams.

Strauch Scale
Of the 66 dream/vision reports in Hellstrms journal, 26 contained bizarre elements as defined by the Strauch Scale. Under the subheading paranormal phenomena, 3 dream reports contained scorable content. Under the heading of magical phenomena, there was 1 magical object and 4 magical characters. Under the heading, paranormal phenomena, only three dream reports contained scorable content, one of them a paranormal biological event and two of them paranormal physical events. Under the heading of magical phenomena, there was one magical object and four magical characters. Other bizarre content includes elements or events that, from an ordinary perspective, are unusual or impossible. This heading included the largest number of entries: 2 bizarre activities, 3 bizarre characters, 5 bizarre objects, and 9 bizarre sensations. Bizarre sensations were frequently identified in Hellstrm's dream reports, e.g., auditory and visual hallucinations, feelings of dizziness. Hellstrm often connected the bizarre sensations with the purported precognized event in her waking life. For example, in case #123, Hellstrm had a daytime dream in which she hallucinated a bell ringing with no obvious source. When she awakened, she opened her door and discovered a man carrying a large chair up the stairs. He had not rung the bell, as would have been customary. An example of a bizarre object occurred in dream report #59, 6 December 1951, when Hellstrm and her husband were in Egypt. The bizarre object was water that was sinking.
I dreamed last night that I was walking along a big, very wide river; there were floods, and a woman was lying dead in a pool at the riverside. It looked as if the water was sinking, and so she lay there.

When the November 22 Swedish newspaper arrived in Egypt, Hellstrm read about a disastrous flood in Italys Po Valley in which women lost their children and children lost their mothers. This newspaper article was included in Hellstroms notebook. 442 Proceedings of Presented Papers

Krippner A paranormal biological event occurred in Case #56, a vision that Hellstrm recorded on 29 November 1951. It concerned her son, Bosse, who had been studying for an examination.
I saw a picture of a happy Bosse in a students cap.When I saw the vision, Bosse looked down at a girl much smaller than himself and he looked so happy and overly delighted, as nobody can look as he can.

In her notes about the vision, Hellstrm observed that her son wrote his examination papers in the spring of 1952, but failed the verbal section. He scheduled another examination for December 1952, but later postponed it until May 1953. Hellstrm wrote, If he manages the verbal part, [he will] make his matriculation and get a student's cap. I believe in success because of my vision. In May, Bosse passed the examination with distinction and was overjoyed. He and Eva, the girl much smaller than himself, were married in 1956. Hellstrm noted, This is one of the few happy visions I have had.

Correspondence Rating Scale

Of the 66 reports in Hellstrms notebook, 37 received a veridicality rating of one, 7 a score of two, 1 a score of three, 5 a score of four, and 0 a score of five. Apparent veridicality was about the same for both dream and vision reports.

DISCUSSION
A complete collection of Hellstrms dream/vision reports would have yielded more complete information than this truncated collection. Nevertheless, Hellstrms lengthy accounts of the dreams and visions provide phenomenological insights. Researchers in the field have sorely overlooked this aspect of study. Controlled laboratory studies (e.g., Krippner, Honorton, & Ullman, 1972) are most useful in establishing the veridicality of purported precognitive dreams. However, descriptive studies might discover commonalties of veridical dreams, commonalties that would give experients enough confidence to share a dream that appears to herald an event that has potentially tragic consequences. One can not conclude that these reports were veridical because of the informal nature of the reports and the fact that Hellstrm herself determined their accuracy. Nevertheless, one must admire her attentiveness to her inner processes, and the care in which she compiled records of these events over the years.
REFERENCES

Casto, K.L., Krippner, S., & Tartz, R. (1999). The identification of spiritual content in dream reports. Anthropology of Consciousness, 10, 43-53. Krippner, S., & Faith, L. (2001). Exotic dreams: A cross-cultural study. Dreaming, 11, 73-82. Krippner, S., Honorton, C., & Ullman, M.(1972). A second precognitive dream study with Malcolm Bessent. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 66, 269-279. Strauch, I. (2001). Magische und paranomale Phnomene in Trumen [Magical and paranormal phenomena in dreams]. In E. Rther, A. Gruber-Rther, & M. Heuser (Eds.), Trume [Dreams] (pp. 355-364). Innsbruck, Austria: VIP-Verlag Integrative Psychiatrie.

Address for correspondence: Stanley Krippner, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, 450 Pacific Avenue, 300, San Francisco, California 94133, USA. E-mail: skrippner@saybrook.edu

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