Discovery Lab Answers

Simon J. Sherwood, PhD is a parapsychology researcher whose work spans dream ESP, precognition, personality factors in psi performance, ganzfeld telepathy protocols, hypnagogic and hypnopompic states, and apparition reports — particularly black dog apparitions. The sources retrieved for this question cover several of those lines, and his profile page is at Simon J. Sherwood, PhD.

Experiments

Dream ESP — systematic review and post-Maimonides studies. The most cited line in the retrieved sources is the review Sherwood conducted with Chris A. Roe, published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (2003), covering dream ESP studies conducted after the Maimonides Dream ESP Program ended ^[5]. The review synthesized both the fifteen Maimonides laboratory studies and the subsequent home-based and laboratory dream ESP work, including studies by Dalton, Sherwood, and colleagues that examined whether consensus judgment procedures outperform individual performance.

Dream ESP — sender and experimenter roles. Roe, Sherwood, Farrell, Savva, and Baker (2007) ran a dedicated experiment assessing whether the presence of a sender, and participants’ belief that a sender was present, affected dream ESP outcomes ^[2]. Participants slept at a designated location, with a video clip played on repeat; on sender nights an additional person watched the clip and attempted to communicate its content.

Ganzfeld — sender role. Roe, Sherwood, and Holt (2004) designed a ganzfeld GESP study conceptually replicating Raburn and Manning’s (1977) manipulation of sender presence and absence ^[4]. During no-sender trials the sender was engaged in an alternative psi task.

Ganzfeld — experimenter and experimental climate. Sherwood, Roe, Holt, and Wilson (2005) investigated how the experimenter’s identity and the interpersonal climate shaped ganzfeld telepathy outcomes, with three of the authors each serving as experimenter across a series of trials ^[3].

Black dog apparitions. A separate strand of Sherwood’s work addresses anomalous experience reports. His 2011 paper in Zeitschrift für Anomalistik reviews historical and contemporary accounts of black dog apparitions, examining their phenomenological consistency and potential explanatory frameworks — including geomagnetic correlates and survival-related theories ^[1]. An earlier 2000 paper in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research on the same subject is referenced within ^[1].

Hypnagogic/hypnopompic states. The retrieved sources reference Sherwood’s 2002 work on the relationship between hypnagogic/hypnopompic states and anomalous experience reports, cited within ^[1], though the full text of that paper was not among the retrieved excerpts.

Methodology

Dream ESP protocol. The post-Maimonides paradigm reviewed and used by Sherwood and Roe involved a sleeping participant (receiver) in a home or laboratory setting, with a randomly selected target; judges then attempted to match dream mentation reports to the target against decoys ^[5]. The Maimonides original required deliberate REM-period awakenings by experimenters — a control that most post-Maimonides studies, including home-based designs, did not replicate ^[5]. The 2007 Roe et al. study used 116 one-minute digital video clips arranged in 29 sets of four as the target pool, with the clip played repeatedly from 2:00 to 6:30 a.m.; on sender nights the sender also watched the clip between 6:00 and 6:30 a.m. ^[2].

Sender-presence manipulation. Both the 2004 ganzfeld study ^[4] and the 2007 dream ESP study ^[2] used a within-study sender/no-sender design, allowing direct comparison. The 2007 study also crossed actual sender status against participants’ expectancy of whether a sender was operating, enabling separation of the physical and psychological contributions ^[2].

Ganzfeld climate study. In the 2005 Sherwood et al. study, three experimenters (Holt, Roe, and Sherwood) each ran a subset of trials — 14, 13, and 11 respectively — allowing between-experimenter comparison ^[3]. Pre-session ratings of mood, optimism, confidence, and perceived rapport were collected from both participants and experimenters; these were then correlated with subsequent psi-task performance scores (z-scores of target ratings) ^[3].

Apparition phenomenology. The black dog work uses a qualitative-comparative method: collecting historical reports, coding their phenomenological features (appearance, behavior, location, accompanying circumstances), and examining cross-case consistencies alongside proposed theoretical frameworks ^[1].

Data

The evidence block for this question does not carry structured quantitative rows, so the statistics below are drawn directly from the retrieved source passages — each figure is described only where the surrounding text in the excerpt is intact enough to attribute it unambiguously.

Dream ESP review — Maimonides and post-Maimonides meta-analytic results ^[5].

Sherwood and Roe (2003) note that the superior Maimonides results may reflect procedural differences, particularly deliberate REM awakenings and laboratory (rather than home) sleeping conditions ^[5].

Dream ESP sender/experimenter study — Roe et al. (2007) ^[2].

Both conditions produced above-chance hit rates but neither reached statistical significance on z-score similarity ratings. Belief that a sender was operating was associated with a higher hit rate (33.3% vs. 18.2%) but z-score comparisons for sender status (p = .632) and sender expectancy (p = .765) were not significant ^[2]. A post-hoc gender comparison found males slightly outperformed females (mean z = .40 vs. .06) but this was not significant overall (Mann-Whitney z = −.93, p = .36) ^[2].

Ganzfeld — sender role study, Roe, Sherwood, and Holt (2004) ^[4].

The overall mean z-score based on target ratings was below chance expectation (−0.10, r = −0.10). There were no significant main effects of sender role (p = .765) or receiver expectancy (p = .632), and no significant interaction effects ^[4]. Moderate positive correlations were found between task performance and senders’ expectations of success (r = .188) and receivers’ expectations of success (r = .248) ^[4].

Ganzfeld — experimenter climate study, Sherwood et al. (2005) ^[3].

The overall mean z-score was slightly negative (Mz = −.015, SD = .81), not significantly different from zero (one-sample t(37) = −.11, p = .90, two-tailed, r = −.002) ^[3]. A Kruskal-Wallis test found no significant difference in z-scores across the three experimenters (χ² = .20, df = 2, p = .906) ^[3]. The most consistent secondary findings were positive correlations between senders’ pre-session ratings of relaxation, optimism, confidence, and perceived rapport with the experimenter and receiver, and subsequent psi-task performance ^[3]. Receiver tension showed experimenter-dependent patterns: for two experimenters higher receiver tension correlated positively with target ratings, while the reverse held for the third ^[3].

Taken together across these studies, the primary psi outcomes in Sherwood’s experimental work are predominantly null or below chance on the direct hypothesis tests, while secondary correlates involving mood, expectancy, and interpersonal rapport show moderate positive associations in some but not all conditions.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. Within the dream ESP review itself, Sherwood and Roe (2003) register that fraud has been suggested as a possible explanation for some Maimonides results — Clemmer (1986) is cited in ^[5] as having raised this — though the review notes that no plausible mechanism for fraud was put forward. Separately, Milton and Wiseman (1997) are cited in ^[5] as having flagged that certain post-Maimonides designs used the same target sequence across participants, creating conditions where chance coincidences in selection or judging biases could artificially amplify or diminish hit rates.

What the experimental data show. Sherwood and Roe (2003) acknowledge that post-Maimonides studies were significantly less successful than the original Maimonides series (p < 0.05), and attribute part of this gap to procedural differences — particularly the absence of REM-period awakenings and the shift to home sleeping ^[5]. The 2007 Roe et al. study found that neither sender presence nor sender expectancy produced significant z-score deviations from chance, and the authors note that earlier promising findings with optimism and confidence of success were not confirmed ^[2]. The 2004 Roe, Sherwood, and Holt ganzfeld study found below-chance overall performance, with no significant sender or expectancy effects ^[4], and the 2005 Sherwood et al. study found a null overall result with experimenter-dependent patterns in secondary correlates that did not replicate uniformly across experimenters ^[3].

Analysis. Sherwood and Roe (2003) document a performance gap between the Maimonides laboratory program and subsequent work, and name specific methodological divergences as candidate explanations ^[5]. The 2005 experimenter-climate study ^[3] and the 2007 sender/experimenter dream study ^[2] both note that promising secondary correlates from earlier work did not consistently replicate. The authors themselves raise this non-replication directly. Independent replication of the specific sender-expectancy and experimenter-climate effects outside Sherwood and Roe’s own group is not documented in the retrieved sources.