Presentiment and Crisis Apparitions in Victorian-era Case Collections: Phantasms of the Living (1886) as seen through Natural Language Processing

Presentiment in the classical sense is a form of precognition involving a feeling, perception or premonition that something will or is about to happen. From experimental parapsychology, the term now refers to an effect involving capacities to feel or intuit the future. This modern sense of presentiment (feeling) sets it apart from precognition (knowing)

Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886 by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), contains a collection of 702 Victorian-era cases involving classical presentiment phenomena occurring in various forms to include: dreams and premonitions; clairvoyance; as well as crisis apparitional experiences

Phantasms was also a pathfinding study on extrasensory perception as it presented the case for “telepathy.” The authors believed presentiment involving living persons in moments of crisis or danger, to include crisis apparitions, were evidence of "shock-induced” forms of thought transference

As a project, we wondered how might how machine learning might make sense of classical presentiment experiences in the Phantasms case collection



Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of computing that enables computers to analyze, understand and communicate human language. The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a platform of libraries and programs for natural language processing written in the Python programming language

Word clouds are the most basic and familiar NLP products. Word clouds do not support fine grained analysis, but instead provide a visualization of key words and phrases, where the sizing of words reflects their prominence within the text. The implementation of the word_cloud application used here was developed with elements of NLTK and other Python modules

Phantasms is available in various Internet archives in a variety of digital formats. For this project, a corpus (body) of plain text was created from a reprint of Phantasms hosted at the Esalen Center. The book is comprised of two volumes spanning over 1400 pages

To derive meaningful insights the corpus was processed to remove stop words, such as commonly used prepositions. Since the work represents a case collection, the set of stop words was expanded to remove references to “case(s)” and “fact(s)” and how they were documented, (i.e. words like “said ” and “told”). Formal salutations (“Mr”, “Mrs”, “Miss”) were also added to stop words

Since presentiment experiences can occur at any time, words having a temporal character were excluded from consideration to include: "day”, “night”, “morning”, “evening”, “hour”, and “time.” Many presentiment experiences were singular events, hence ordinal and cardinal numeric references were also removed to include: “first”, “second” as well as “one” and “two”



Finally, some words often associated with precognition such as “will” and “may” were also added to set of stop words to allow greater emphasis on the features of the experiences and encounters



The resulting word cloud presents a case pattern of presentiment experiences primarily involving families and friends. Mothers featured prominently in case accounts often as the percipient, and in other instances as the agent (or source) of the presentiment experience

Many presentiment experiences were in the form of dreams or premonitions that were coincident with or presaged the deaths of loved ones. According to various surveys and studies, precognitive dreams involving vivid or intense imagery “are among the most commonly reported seemingly paranormal experiences.“

It is believed that psi functions more efficiently at an unconscious level, as is the case with dreams, and this has given rise to implicit versus conscious measures for testing extrasensory perception in experimental parapsychology

Beyond dreams, the case collection of presentiment experiences also features several varieties of extrasensory perception (e.g. telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition) in addition to crisis apparitional encounters

The fact that mothers featured so prominently in presentiment cases suggests a wider question, which arises elsewhere in parapsychology, of whether there is a natural (or evolutionary) explanation for presentiment and for psi functioning writ large.

Toward this end, one of the authors of Phantasms concludes:

"If the natural system includes telepathy, Nature has certainly not exhausted herself in our few hundreds of instances: that these facts should be genuine would be almost inconceivable if she had not plenty more like them in reserve”







REFERENCES

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 100(3), 407. Hosted on Semantic Scholar



Bird, S., Klein, E., & Loper, E. (2009). Natural language processing with Python: analyzing text with the natural language toolkit. “ O'Reilly Media, Inc.”.



Gurney, E., Myers, F. W. H., & Podmore, F. (1886). Phantasms of the living (Vols. 1-2). London: Trübner & Co. Reprint by the Esalen Center, Carmel CA



Radin, D. (2016). Presentiment. Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research



Smith, M. D. (Ed.). (2009). Anomalous experiences: Essays from parapsychological and psychological perspectives. McFarland.



Watt, C. (2017, Jun 6). Precognition: From Life to Lab. Koestler Parapsychology Unit, University of Edinburgh

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Wordcloud from Phantasms of the Living Corpus. (2018, Feb 24). © Maryland Paranormal Research ®. All rights reserved.