Stanley Krippner

Stanley Krippner (born October 4, 1932) is an American psychologist and parapsychologist. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1954 and M.A. (1957) and Ph.D. (1961) degrees from Northwestern University.

From 1972 to 2019, he was an executive faculty member and the Alan Watts Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in Oakland, California. Formerly, Krippner was director of the Kent State University Child Study Center (1961-1964) and director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory in Brooklyn, New York (1964-1972).

Following his time at Saybrook, he continued on as an Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, professor of psychology at Akamai University, and as a research professor at the California Institute for Human Science, which he helped found in 1992.

Krippner has written extensively on altered states of consciousness, dream telepathy, hypnosis, shamanism, dissociation, and parapsychological subjects. Krippner was an early leader in Division 32 of the American Psychological Association (APA), the division concerned with humanistic psychology, serving as President of the division from 1980–1981. He also served as president of division 30, the Society for Psychological Hypnosis, and is a Fellow of five APA divisions. Krippner has conducted experiments with Montague Ullman into dream telepathy at the Maimonides Medical Center. In 2002, Krippner won the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology.

The dream laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Centre was established in 1962, and Krippner joined the staff in 1964 as the first dream telepathy studies were commencing. The design of the first experiment had already been established at this point, by Montague Ullman and Sol Feldstein. In total Krippner, Ullman and Alan Vaughan list ten dream telepathy experiments in their 1973 book Dream Telepathy, beginning with the first screening study in the summer of 1964 and ending with "The Second Bessant Study".

All ten experiments involved an 'agent' who would attempt to transmit the contents of an image to the sleeping target, usually an art print. Krippner, Ullman and Vaughan concluded that the majority of these studies produced statistically significant results, with the exception of three which did not. One of the better known studies involved a single subject, dream researcher Robert Van de Castle, and took place over 8 discontinuous nights over the course of 1967. This is the experiment which was later detailed and criticized by C. E. M. Hansel (see 'Reception' below).

In September 1961, at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in New York, Krippner attended a panel featuring Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, Frank Barron, and Gerald Heard on psilocybin and other psychoactive substances. Following the panel, he wrote a letter to Leary expressing his desire to volunteer as a test subject for the Harvard Psilocybin Project. In March 1962, he traveled to Harvard University to participate in a session of the experiment organized by Leary. Krippner took a 30-milligram psilocybin tablet, and afterwards reported his experience of the 'trip' to Leary. He has stated that this session led to his subsequent lifelong research interest in psychedelics, including a chapter in the 1968 book The Psychedelic Artist. Krippner remained in contact with Leary from 1962 until Leary's death in 1996, and attended Leary's wedding to Nena von Schlebrügge in December 1964. In 1965 he wrote a summary of several of Leary's psilocybin experiments for the journal A Review of General Semantics, in which he discussed the benefits of psychedelics in helping distinguish the "maps" formed by words from the "territory" of the experiential world.

Krippner was introduced to Mickey Hart, one of the drummers for the Grateful Dead, at a birthday party for Alla Rakha in New York in 1967. Hart wanted to ask him about hypnosis, and its potential to improve his drumming. This meeting led to a long relationship between Krippner and the band. Krippner would hypnotize Hart and fellow drummer Bill Kreutzmann, in order to help them better sync their drumming. In 1971, the Grateful Dead collaborated with Krippner on a series of six "ESP Shows" at the Capitol Theatre in New York. At some point during the concert, slides projected on a screen above the stage would advertise to concertgoers that “YOU ARE ABOUT TO PARTICIPATE IN AN ESP EXPERIMENT”, then show them a picture and encourage them to use ESP to send the picture to a man named Malcolm Bessent, sleeping at the Maimonides lab 45 miles away. Krippner published the results of these "experiments" in an article titled An experiment in dream telepathy with "The Grateful Dead" in the Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine. A pair of judges were asked to match each of Bessent's six dream reports against each of the 6 images shown to the concert crowd, and score the similarity out of 100. Krippner reported in his article that the "correct" pairs received the highest ratings for 4 of the 6 images.