Premonitory dreams, impressions of déjà vu, the feeling of a presence when no one is there: these strange episodes mark the lives of many people. For a long time, they were placed in the “paranormal” or “pure imagination” box. Psychology, however, is beginning to consider them as valuable clues to the functioning of the mind.
An American team has just published, in the journal
Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practicea study of more than 2,200 adults. It shows that people who often report unexplained experiences share the same profile: a strong subconscious connection and certain well-identified psychological traits.
Unexplained experiences: a more commonplace phenomenon than it seems
These “abnormal experiences” cover supposed telepathic perceptions, dreams which seem to announce an event, very improbable coincidences or even the sensation of being observed. “Anomalous experiences form a broad and heterogeneous category of phenomena that simply have in common that they are things that people sometimes experience and that lie outside the conventional framework of understanding how the world works,” describes Olafur S. Palsson.
In the largest national sample, 86% of respondents said they had repeatedly experienced at least one of the 13 experiences listed by the Unusual Experiences Questionnaire. Nearly 60% reported repeated déjà vu, and between 40 and 50% said they had realized premonitions, correctly felt that they were being watched, or seen objects disappear and then reappear elsewhere.
Subconscious connection: when the unconscious weighs on daily life
To explain these findings, researchers look to the subconscious connection. “I have been formally studying the personality trait of subconscious connection for several years,” says Olafur S. Palsson. His work describes people whose consciousness and subconscious interact strongly, to the point that thoughts, intuitions and internal images seem to have a marked impact on everyday experience.
This trait is quantified by the Thought Impact Scale, which divides the population according to a low, medium or high score. In all three studies, people with the highest scores reported more than three times as many repeated abnormal experiences as those with the lowest scores. The correlation between subconscious connection and number of events was between r = 0.53 and 0.69.
A particular psychological profile, without equivalent to a disorder
People reporting many such events were also distinguished by other traits: a tendency toward mental absorption, a propensity toward fantasy, dissociation, faith in intuition, magical ideation, and paranormal beliefs. They reported more stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms, although the links with happiness remained weak and no clear link appeared with perceived quality of life. “The first important point is that anomalous experiences are actually very common. They tend to be dismissed as exceptions or rare events, but the results indicate that they are an integral part of our human experience,” insists Olafur S. Palsson. For him, the propensity to experience these episodes is a stable personal characteristic rather than a temporary disorder. The author points out that these data do not prove causality and are based on limited self-reported questionnaires.