When Mary Osborne was in the eighth grade, she had a dream in which she saw a girl hanging from a clothes rod in a closet, a sheet tied around her neck, her feet tucked underneath her. She couldn't see the girl's face, only her back. The next day, someone called her with the news that one of her friends had hung herself in a closet.
"The dream itself was really upsetting to me," Osborne, now a UNC-CH sophomore, says. "I had never even seen that happen in movies. I saw the exact spot she was hanging in, and I'd never been in her house before. I had no idea that one of my friends was going to do anything like that, so I was horrified. This was the first concrete evidence that I had some sort of an ability."
The Fall 1995 Carolina Poll shows that 66 percent of North Carolinians report having a dream that later came true, having a feeling that something was going to happen before it happened, or feeling the presence of someone who had died. Women and younger people were more likely to report having these feelings or dreams. Seventy percent of the women and 61 percent of the men polled reported having these experiences. Seventy-six percent of those under age 45 said they had had one of these experiences, while 53 percent of those over age 45 reported having one. There was no relationship between the level of education of respondents and the likelihood of their reporting one of these experiences.
Some psychologists attribute such events to the imagination, says Barton Mann, assistant professor of psychology at UNC-CH. Some people have a personality characteristic called "fantasy proneness," which means that they have vivid fantasies which often seem real. People who are fantasy-prone often report having these experiences, Mann says. "That's the skeptic's view."
John Palmer, a psychologist and senior research associate at the Institute for Parapsychology in Durham, believes that many, but not all, of these experiences may be due to fantasy. An experience can be considered psychic if it appears that information was obtained without use of the five senses, he says. Many of these experiences have some conventional explanation, he says, but "there may be some others that are genuinely psychic. It's very hard to tell in spontaneous cases, which is why we go into the laboratory." Parapsychologists use scientific methods to study anomalies, events in human experience that seemingly cannot be explained by current scientific models.
The Carolina Poll respondents who reported having a "psychic" experience were also asked a second question: "Which of those kinds of experiences have you had most often?" For 45 percent of these respondents, the answer was "having a feeling that something was going to happen before it happened." Having a dream that later came true was the next most common experience, at 28 percent; 16 percent said feeling the presence of someone who had died had happened to them most often.
Age made a difference when it came to what type of experience respondents had most often. More than one third of the respondents in all age groups said their most common experience was having a feeling that something was going to happen before it happened. But having a dream that later came true was more commonly reported among 18- to 24-year-olds than among other age groups; 43 percent of these respondents said they had had such a dream, compared to between 19 and 30 percent of those in other age groups. Feeling the presence of someone who had died was more commonly reported among those 45 or older; 28 percent of these people reported this experience, while only 9 percent of those in other age groups told of this kind of experience.
Osborne believes that she developed psychic abilities because she grew up with parents who were open to different kinds of experiences. "A lot of people just don't develop their abilities," Osborne says. "It's called the sixth sense, and pretty much I believe that's true."
The Fall 1995 Carolina Poll was conducted between October 15 and October 19, 1995 by the UNC-CH School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Institute for Research in Social Science. A random sample of 620 adult North Carolinians was interviewed by telephone. The sampling error is plus or minus 4 percent for the total sample, but is larger for comparisons between groups.
Last modified: 5/20/96