Lucid dreams: watching others get the benefit

text of a letter to a journalist sent a few years ago

When you came you asked me whether I regretted having written the first book on lucid dreams, and I should like to answer that in writing. It may be too late for your article, but I am often asked similar questions by journalists and maybe when I have written it down it can go in my forthcoming book.

In my previous letter to you I referred to academics who make applications for funding for a project, don’t get any, and then find someone else is doing a similar project. Do you suppose they regret making the application? Of course with hindsight they may think that if they had known the outcome they would not have bothered, but they could only have found out what the outcome would be by making the application, so in a sense I suppose they do not regret having made the attempt.

My position about lucid dreams is similar. I had no wish to write a book about lucid dreams, and would not have done so if I had had any way of proceeding with actual laboratory research on lucid dreams or on anything else, but all the possible sources of funding with which I had contact were impervious, and so I made what was in effect an application for funding. But I had no way of doing that except by publicising to the world my acquaintance with this potential field of research.

Of course, the academic who finds his ideas being copied has no cause for complaint. His ideas are not protected by patent or copyright, and if he makes them known to the personnel of a grant-giving body they may leak. There is no law against insider dealing in this area. In any case, even if there were, he would find it difficult to pin anything on anybody, unless his application drew on unpublished material known only to himself and this clearly appeared in the design of the other person’s project. This is very unlikely to be the case, and if specialised information is not involved, the other academic can always claim that he thought up the project independently. Great minds are said to think alike, and mediocre ones certainly do.

And, of course, it does the rejected academic no real harm, unless you count emotional bitterness as harmful, to see someone else implementing his ideas. In this respect, however, the emotional pain has been decidedly more severe in my case, in relation to lucid dreams, than that of the average rejected academic is likely to be. The academic has his status and salary; a certain lifestyle including ancillary staff and dining halls etc, facilitating intellectual activity, is assured. I was attempting to compensate for my lack of these things by getting funding to enable me to live a decent academic life, and this was a desperate long shot at best.

It therefore caused me some intensity of despair to observe that one of my long shots had in fact succeeded to the extent of providing other people, already safely on academic career tracks, with a field of research. As the minimal funding which had made possible the writing of the book had run out, there was no way in which I could hope to improve on the application for funding which I had just made.

A person on a desert island cannot exactly say that he regrets having fired a distress rocket without success. He understands what led him to do it, and in the same circumstances he would do the same again. But if I had known what the consequences of initiating this field of research might be, I might have refrained. The expansion of work and interest in this field can only appear to someone in my position as a cruel mockery of it, a refinement of torture which I could have done without.

Article on lucid dreaming in BBC Focus Magazine

text of an email from the picture editor at BBC Focus Magazine:

Dear Ms. Green,

I am mailing from BBC Focus Magazine, a popular science and technology publication. In our August issue we are running a feature about dreams, and how you may be able to take control of them. We mention your early research into lucid dreaming in our piece, and I wondered if you might be able to provide us with an image of yourself that we can put alongside the copy.

I would be happy to credit the image and send you a copy of the magazine in return.

Best wishes,
James Cutmore

text of my colleague Dr Charles McCreery’s reply:

Dear Mr Cutmore,

Thank you for your message to Celia Green, to which Dr Green has asked me to reply. I am the co-author with her of her follow-up book Lucid Dreaming, the Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep, published by Routledge.

The position is not merely that Dr Green carried out ‘early research’ into lucid dreaming, but that she was the first to develop the subject as a field of scientific study, a programme for which she laid out in her book Lucid Dreams, first published in 1968 by Hamish Hamilton.

This priority was fully recognised by her successors in the field some years later, notably Professor Stephen LaBerge and Dr Keith Hearne.

I add below three links to pieces which Dr Green has published on the topic of lucid dreaming in recent years on her blog, which describe our attempts to get funding for continuing her research in this area.

I will send you a scan of a photograph attached to a separate email.

Yours sincerely,
Charles McCreery

text of James Cutmore’s reply:

Dear Charles,

Many thanks for sending the image through to me. We do, in fact, state that Dr Green was the first person to experiment extensively with lucid dreaming, and develop an understanding of it. My first email was written in haste, so many apologies for that.

Please enjoy the rest of your day, and thank you again for your help.

Best wishes,
James Cutmore

More about the threat of intelligence

text of a letter to an academic

I have written to you about the IQ test that I did when I was ten, and in retrospect I realise that probably my father’s initiative had little to do with it; more likely the educational psychologist was set on by the local authority to spy on me and work out how best to damage my education.

I was very much in the dark at the time, and it was only in 1956 that a book* was published which discussed reading at two as indicating a mental age of six to seven, and thus an IQ of over 300. It was only then that I realised that the test score obtained by the educational psychologist could not very well have been less than 200, although I was told, via my father, that my IQ was 180.

In fact, it appears possible that all the new legislation concerning the ages at which external school exams could be taken, which was created at the time of my education, was made with me in mind, and affected me very badly.

When I told you how early I learnt to read, you quoted an official opinion to the effect that there are so many variations in early development that (by implication) anything of this kind is not meaningful.

No doubt this is what everyone wanted to think, even at that time (i.e. in the 40s). When the post-war Labour landslide occurred in 1945, the minimum age for taking the grammar school scholarship was raised; and if I had not taken the scholarship in the last year before it became the 11-plus, I would not have been able to take it for another two years.

However, I slipped through the net, although not without attracting attention. When, still aged ten, I was interviewed for entry to the Ursuline High School, the Reverend Mother told my parents that I had been one of the youngest candidates, and had got 100% on every paper of the grammar school scholarship (English, arithmetic and intelligence). She had clearly got this information from the local authority, and it was obviously accessible to the government as well.

So the local authority probably set their educational psychologist to spy on me and find out whether they had any grounds for attacking my father. Allegations about his pushing me were already circulating, and did not stop doing so when the educational psychologist could find no grounds for them.

I had been relatively inconspicuous between the ages of two and nine in a private preparatory school, from which I frequently stayed away, my parents paying the fees for the term and squaring it with the headmistress. This inconspicuousness did not last once I became exposed to the state educational system.

* C.W. Valentine, The Normal Child and some of his Abnormalities, Penguin, 1956.

Intelligence: a threat to the welfare state?

text of a letter to an academic

My life continues to be constricted by the anti-exceptionality syndrome of modern society.

When I was about ten and had come top of the grammar school scholarship, my father, wishing to show his dependence on expert opinion, had my IQ tested by an educational psychologist who lived nearby – possibly because he (my father) was sceptical about the result of the scholarship exam.

The psychologist’s verdict, as I was told, was that he had never tested a child like it before, and never expected to again. Testing school children for local authorities was, more or less, his occupation in life. He added that I had a phenomenal memory. Of course he was only able to test my short-term memory, which he had done by reading me lists of numbers and asking me to repeat them backwards. Eventually he had asked me how I did it, and I said that I fastened the numbers on my fingers and read them off again. (This may sound like a way of memorising things with eidetic imagery that some people use, so I think I should explain that no imagery was involved, it was just a case of connecting the associations of a number with an ordered sequence.)

I was told that my IQ was 180, which they described as ‘near genius’. Genius was defined as over 200, and there was apparently supposed to be a population of people with IQs between 180 and 200. Probably my father would not have told me my IQ was 180 if he had not realised it was an understatement.

The educational psychologist appeared to pride himself on his own IQ of 140, which he described as ‘a professor’s IQ’.

This was in about 1945.

This account of what happened to me may provide some indication of the accepted attitudes to intelligence at that time. But things were changing fast.

Nowadays the concept of IQ is considered of doubtful significance by most psychologists, and IQ tests have been progressively changed, supposedly to allow for cultural differences between different cultural and ethnic groups.

The concept of IQ was originally developed as a predictor of academic success within the academic system of that time. The academic system has changed, and IQ tests have changed with it.

As the system has changed, academic standards, both in universities and in professional environments, have also changed, so that in both environments it is common to find people writing English that routinely needs to be edited and proofread by somebody else.

Part-time ex-Oxford lecturers

text of a letter to an academic

I wonder if you know anyone who knows the Principal of Ripon Theological College, which is in Cuddesdon and fairly near to where we live?

The inflation continues to make it more difficult than it has always been to be even minimally productive in this incipient academic institution. Whatever the official figures may suggest, many of the types of expenditure which we face seem to have risen significantly in price over the last couple of years.

It would be helpful if we could alleviate the constrictive pressures by supplementing our incomes as part-time or temporary lecturers or tutors at university level. Three of the people here now have Oxford doctorates – two of them former Oxford college lecturers – and between us we cover a wide range of topics, including statistics, mathematics, accounting, psychology, philosophy and history of religion.

I do not know what areas are included in the courses provided by Ripon College, but it is likely that they include several in which somebody here could function as a tutor or lecturer. If the Principal of Ripon College knew about us, he might realise that we could provide a fill-in if there was a temporary absence or breakdown of some present lecturing arrangement. We could also act as temporary lecturers for Oxford University or for Oxford Brookes University, but these could only be very temporary on account of the travelling.

However, if a student in the Oxford area were having difficulties with his work and could drive himself into Cuddesdon for tutorials, it might be very significantly to his benefit to do so.

We should like our availability in these capacities to be known about on the academic network.

Opportunity in Cuddesdon, Oxford

text of a letter to the author of an investment newsletter

Dear ...

I am a long-term subscriber to your newsletter. I am an outcast academic, publishing, when able to, under the imprint ‘Oxford Forum’.

It is easiest to account for my position in life by going right back to the beginning. The rejection of hereditary ability is a salient, if somewhat concealed, feature of modern anti-capitalist ideology.

I showed remarkable precocity from an early age. This is something of which the modern world does not approve – although pre-1945, the concept of IQ was still accepted. As a result, I was thrown out at the end of my ruined education with no usable qualification with which to make an acceptable career. Therefore I founded my own independent academic organisation with the intention of working my way back into a normal university career at a higher level.

I hoped that others would join me in this endeavour, but in practice found that my position aroused little sympathy, but did arouse intense opposition. Over the decades I acquired some associates. Those who are here now are people who had themselves aroused unjustifiable opposition, which had made it impossible for them to make suitable careers. Other associates I had fell away, apparently for no better reason than that somebody like me, who had been thrown out by people with status, should receive no help in attempting to remedy his position.

I am seeking people to come and live nearby, because cooperation between individuals who are prepared to criticise the ideology could lead to significant, and possibly dramatic, increases in the resources and opportunities of those concerned.

You are the sort of person we have in mind, since you are clearly prepared to envisage increasing your own capital and helping other people to increase theirs as well. We would like people like you to come and live in Cuddesdon, a village on the edge of Oxford, which is easily accessible to both London and Oxford. Cuddesdon is on a hill, with clean air, and views of the Chilterns.

Kind regards,
etc.
Celia Green

‘We appeal for £5m as initial funding for our unrecognised and unsupported independent university.’
Charles McCreery, DPhil

Socialism and the Cleare family

From the onset of socialism, it clearly reduced the opportunities of the most exceptional. This may be illustrated by its effects on the family of my Cleare grandfather (my mother’s father), which was always struggling to overcome the effects of its socially displaced position.

My great-grandfather had been relatively wealthy but had lost his money some time in the late 1800s. His son, my grandfather, had gone to a bad state school, as education was already compulsory up to the age of fourteen. However, at this early stage, it was possible to leave school completely if one had passed the school leaving exam. This my grandfather did at the age of 12. He became a shop boy and, by saving money, a shop owner. He worked very hard, and flourished since he could add up everyone’s bills in his head by mental arithmetic. He worked all hours, and would get up to sell something in the night if someone threw a stone against his bedroom window.

His rate of progress was slowed down when time limitations on shop opening hours were introduced in the early 1900s, so as to prevent people who wanted to from working longer hours in order to make more money.

Before the law was changed there had been demonstrations by shop assistants in favour of restricting opening hours. So people may argue that the introduction of time limitations on shop opening hours was in the interests of the shop assistants, and not done for the sake of reducing the opportunities of exceptional people such as my grandfather.

Whatever the ostensible motivation for the restrictions may have been, they did have a bad effect on my grandfather’s attempts to improve his position. (My mother, being philosophical about it, said that it was advantageous to her, as it meant he took her to the music halls every Sunday.)

It is likely that one effect of the restrictions was to damage my grandfather’s ability to pay for qualifications for his children. My mother went to teacher training college for two years, having said that she was not sufficiently interested in any subject to want him to pay for her to get a degree by spending three years at a university. My mother’s school (East Ham Grammar School) had thought she was so exceptional that she should go to university. In those days it would have been paid for by her father, and it was very rare for a girl to go to university.

My uncle Harry (one of my mother’s brothers), who was the captain of the Essex chess team, was not able to take a degree in spite of his father having announced, ‘Harry is going to be a lawyer.’

Uncle Harry later won a university scholarship in a national competition for local government employees, but did not take it up, out of a very realistic fear that he might lose his job as head of a local government department if he took leave of several years to take a degree. (In his case, the government would have paid his university fees.)

My grandfather gave my parents a small house when they married, and might have been able to do more to alleviate the pressures on my father, both before and after their marriage, if he had been better off, which he might well have been without the restrictions on shop opening hours.

Clearly several people with exceptional ability were involved. My grandfather himself, my mother, my father who was brought into the family circle by his association with my mother, my uncle Harry (my mother’s brother), and myself. The restrictions on shop opening hours and shop employees, and also the introduction of rent controls which gave tenants security of tenure at controlled rents, were very damaging for my grandfather’s attempts to rise to a position more comparable to that which his father had lost.

If his attempts to improve his position had been less hampered, he might well have been able to pay for degrees for some or all of my mother, my father and Uncle Harry. Then I might have gone to private schools, and been saved from exposure to the state educational system which ruined my life.

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the area of social policy, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topic continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.

Education against ability

copy of a letter to an academic

We never get a break, which is not surprising as modern society is geared against ability. There has been no response to our appeals and invitations for people to come and work here, and for financial and moral support of all kinds.

The idea of preventing people from taking exams ‘too’ young did not come in until after the Second World War. There was a time in the late 1800s when the statutory school leaving age was 14, but it was possible to leave earlier if you had passed the school leaving exam, as my grandfather did, leaving school at 12. At 14 everyone was free to leave, whether or not they had passed the school leaving exam.

Nowadays there is no ostensible minimum age for taking GCSEs (what used to be O-level exams), but they can normally only be taken under the auspices of an educational institution, which may well resist attempts to take exams at an ‘inappropriate’ age.

When I was 12, the majority of the school population left at age 14, without having taken the School Certificate exam, so that only a minority of the population had taken a qualifying exam, which was regarded then as much less important by future employers.

Nowadays nearly everyone has results of qualifying exams that have been taken within the school system, which are regarded as much more important than they used to be, although they are actually far less significant than when a smaller population was taking them.

When I was 14, a law came in restricting the sitting of the School Certificate exam to students of 16 and over. This was reported in newspaper articles, which also mentioned that anonymous ‘representations’ had been made against the change by a number of schools on behalf of their cleverest pupils. I noticed that one of the schools had mentioned a ‘girl of 14 who is awfully good at science’. At the time I thought this could not be me, as I was ‘awfully’ good at all academic subjects. In retrospect, I see that this could well have been me. I suppose it is more noteworthy for a girl to be ‘awfully good at science’ than at other academic subjects.

No concern was expressed by the articles about possible harm being done by holding anyone back, nor was there any suggestion that people at different levels of ability might need to do things at different ages. Instead, discussion revolved around the question of how people with nothing to do might fill in their time.

I took the School Certificate exam (later O levels), A levels and S level exams when I was 16, but this was really far too late for me.

We appeal for £5m as initial funding for a social science department in my unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish preliminary analyses of areas in the history of education that are currently being ignored because they do not fit with the prevailing ideology.

Means-testing of pensions

I am reposting this piece from August 2010, in the light of the recent Daily Mail investigation by Tony Hazell that the government will not be paying the additional state pension to everyone, as claimed. The report also points out that an inflation increase, which certain former employees were guaranteed, will no longer be paid.

When Money Mail contacted the Department for Work and Pensions, it claimed it had never actually paid these inflation increases and the belief stems from ‘an over-simplification’. Yet we have obtained Government statements and leaflets published over many years which state time and time again that it does pay these inflation increases.

It looks as if the policy of cheating national insurance payers, where they think they can get away with it, is alive and well.

* * *

Of course the terrible financial crisis is taken as justification for yet more penalising of the more functional members of society in favour of the less functional (‘we must protect the poor’).

Both the means-testing of pensions, and the charging of those who have some capital assets for ‘care’ either in their homes or NHS prisons, are iniquitous. However the ‘care’ situation is complicated by treating as a ‘benefit’ (the same thing as a person might have paid for with his own money) what is really better described as an oppressive persecution. So I leave discussion of this complex question for the moment and confine myself to the rise of means-testing.

The state pension was initiated well before the rise of the Welfare State circa 1945, and for that reason was conceived as something which would be received as a right by those who had made the necessary number of qualifying payments - which were supposed, always fictitiously, to provide a fund which could be invested, and from the income of which the pensions would eventually be paid.

When I first went to the Society for Psychical Research after being thrown out of Oxford University in 1957, I thought that I must do everything possible to reduce the disadvantage at which I would be in comparison with, say, an Oxbridge professor of physics on reaching retirement age. At the time I did not find it credible that it would take me many years to get back into the right sort of academic position, but until I did, I would want the intervening years to drag down my pension income by as little as possible. Therefore I paid voluntary contributions for the unpaid student years, and went back to paying them each year as soon as I was no longer receiving a salary from the SPR.

As time passed, I became aware that the hostility to the idea of my working my way back into a suitable career was very great, and perhaps permanently insuperable. I continued every year, without fail, to pay voluntary pension contributions both for myself and for anyone who became associated with me and might be permanent. So I was paying four, and maybe five or six, contributions per annum out of what was usually a nugatory income. After forty years my own pension became payable, although I was still having to pay three voluntary contributions a year for other people. But the situation was turning around from being a drain on our pathetic resources to an annual income, although even when all the pensions became payable, the total income would still be very far short of what was needed to run the very smallest residential college cum research department.

Soon after my 40 years of efforts had been rewarded with the then basic state pension, I started to notice statements by officials to the effect that pensions would be allowed to ‘wither on the vine’, implying that no attempt would be made to keep them adjusted to inflation. After I had received my pension for some years the government decided that these pensions should be means-tested, so that help could be given to the ‘poorest’.

I felt (and always have done) pretty close to being the poorest of the poor myself, in being deprived of a salaried career, but I had built up capital over the years. This was because my only way of getting ahead in life had been to provide myself with capital, the gains on which could be used to finance my institutional environment, so that eventually I might be able to do something.

The means-testing was achieved surreptitiously. Annual increments became much smaller than they would previously have been, while an annual ‘Pension Credit’ (initially ‘Minimum Income Guarantee’) payable to those with very little in the way of savings began to increase.

Making the pensions means-tested was retrospective legislation, as everyone paying into them had been led to believe that they would not be means-tested.

Now I receive only the basic state pension, and not the supplement, which is paid to those who had made no attempt to increase their independence by saving money, such as the chronically unemployed who roam the streets of Oxford and draw disability allowances.

I believe it is the case that I would be receiving thirty-six percent more than I am receiving, if I were eligible for pension credit.

The question of ethics with regard to pension policy is one of the issues on which critical analyses could be being published by Oxford Forum if it were provided with adequate funding to do so. Meanwhile, the idea that it is ‘fair’ to penalise better-off pensioners is likely to receive further reinforcement from pseudo-research published by the universities.

From heredity to genocide?

Today there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled:

Intelligence – born smart, born equal, born different

According to the Radio Times,

The analysis of inherited intelligence is something of a moral maze ... [does research on this topic] really threaten all our utopian ideas of equality?

Francis Galton
(1822 - 1911)

In 1869 Francis Galton published his book Hereditary Genius, exploring the possible genetic basis of high ability. The idea of hereditary ability had already been of long standing when Galton’s book appeared.

The concept of an ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) as a measurable predictor of academic success only started to become of serious interest with the rise in state education. However, IQ soon became unfashionable again, perhaps because studies such as those of Cyril Burt suggested there was a significant inherited component to it, which did not fit with the politics of the time. And so research on IQ was gradually expunged from academic awareness.

IQ began to be referred to as ‘the false hypothesis’, as if it had been intrinsically bound up with the assertion of hereditary ability, whereas in fact the heredity idea had been around since well before the nineteenth century. Dismissing the concept of IQ as dubious also made the idea of heredity per se taboo in academic circles, and it now appears to have become something that is not even ‘talked about in polite society’.*

According to the Daily Mail** preview of the programme, Galton’s ideas

were taken up with lethal enthusiasm in many countries in the early 20th century, leading to the theory of eugenics, sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ and, ultimately, Nazi genocide.

This of course is the standard way in which the concepts of heritability and innate intelligence are nowadays made to seem controversial, to the point that it supposedly becomes reasonable to suppress discussion of them. The argument is that they are somehow responsible for the Holocaust, as well as other atrocities.

An alternative line of argument, which seems no less plausible, is that what made the Holocaust, the Gulags, and various other genocides and human rights abuses possible is the notion that the collective has a right to invade the individual’s territory, provided it is done for the benefit of society.

Accepting this line of argument would make concepts such as ‘the interests of society’, the ‘right of the majority’, ‘social justice’ or ‘state planning’ seem ethically dubious, and would point towards such concepts being strenuously avoided in discussion.

However, in practice this line of argument is never applied.

* David Willetts, The Pinch, p.198
** Weekend Magazine, 26 April 2014

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the areas of intelligence and heredity, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topics continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.