The Judging Problem, and an Argument About Neglect

The weakness of the design is the same one that afflicts every free-response protocol and is worse here than in the ganzfeld. A dream report is long, associative and full of imagery; a painting is dense with content; and a judge asked how well one matches the other is making a global similarity judgement with very little constraint on it. Two independent judges will often disagree, and a judge who scores several transcripts against several prints has considerable latitude.

The forced-choice card task Rhine used has the opposite profile, tight scoring and thin content, and neither format has solved the other's problem. Independent laboratories that attempted the dream protocol did not reproduce the effect, and the programme ended when the laboratory's funding did. In 1985 Irvin Child published a paper in American Psychologist arguing that mainstream psychology had misrepresented the Maimonides work in textbooks, describing it inaccurately and dismissing it without engagement. That charge is about the conduct of the discipline rather than about whether the effect is real, and the two are frequently conflated when the paper is cited. Nobody has run the series again at scale with modern sleep-laboratory methods.