Dr. Louisa Rhine's letters revisited: The children

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Dec, 2002 by Athena A. Drewes

[O]ne could proceed here on the assumption that if ESP occurs in nature, it does so more than once. If it is a human ability, even an uncommon one, then by observing carefully the times when with some likelihood it is operating, the true aspects should add up, and the mistakes of individual memory, observation, etc. should, in effect, cancel out. By this method of treatment, a validity based on numbers could be given the material. (Rhine, 1961, p. 21)

She further added:

[M]any similarities show up among these experiences, even though they come from people so widely different and unconnected. More than that, through the patterns of similarities one can glimpse in the background a rationale that could hardly be the result of only a series of mistakes of testimony, over-interpretation, imagination, coincidence and all that. Instead it could be the visible sign of a reality. (Rhine, 1961, p. 22)

LER categorized the letters, based on content, into four forms. The first two were intuitions and hallucinations, which occurred when the percipient was awake (Weiner & Haight, 1986). "Intuitions are imageless impressions that seem to 'come out of the blue'. They provide relatively few details....Hallucinations mimic genuine sensory experiences" (Weiner & Haight, 1986, p. 17), with the percipient not aware the experience was a hallucination until sometime later. Rhine (1953) reported visual hallucination cases as the most common but later on found an abundance of auditory experiences. The next two categories were realistic and unrealistic dreams, which usually occurred while the percipient was asleep. Realistic dreams appeared like everyday life and were the most commonly reported, making up more than half of the collection. Realistic dreams appeared to be about the future rather than current events. An unrealistic dream was one that contained symbolism or an element that was fanciful (Weiner & Haight, 1986).

Various analyses were performed on blocks of usable letters by LER from 1951 through 1978, as well as by Schouten (1982). The collection was also written about by Stokes (1997), who summarized various studies and comparisons conducted by Schouten and others (Rao, 1986a, 1986b; Schouten, 1986; Weiner & Haight, 1986). Weiner and Haight (1986) summarized LER's written analyses from 18 reports on the spontaneous experiences. They reported that LER's work could be divided into four major categories, with some published articles falling into more than one category. The majority of articles, 15 of the 18, dealt with "characteristics of the experience, primarily from the percipient's point of view... She addressed such questions as the way psi information was expressed, how complete and accurate it was, and whether the percipient believed at the time of the experience that the information was true" (Weiner & Haight, 1986, p. 16). The second category dealt with precognition, the third category with whether the agent or percipient was the "cause" of the ESP experience, and the fourth category with psi hallucinations or spontaneous PK events with regard to "post-mortem survival" (p. 16).