Blindsight
This is fairly rare phenomenon where patients who have sustained damage to their primary visual cortex still have the ability to perceive visual stimuli where they have said they are blind. Arguments have arisen, suggesting we can distinguish and perceive things without the normal awareness we have with normal sight. This further suggests that there is a distinct difference between our visual performance and our visual awareness.
Dreams
Extremely important and popular in psychology as a whole, dreams also come into parapsychology. Though theories with dreams existed before, the onset of rapid eye movement (REM) detection brought dreaming into the realm of science. It was discovered that dreams mostly occur during a phase of sleep called REM sleep. This is when there are bursts of rapid movement in the eyes. With this arrival, new areas of sleep research opened up, and two in particular hold interest with parapsychologists – lucid dreaming and paranormal cognition within dreams.
Lucid dreaming is when you are actively aware you are dreaming and can exert increased control (compared to non-lucid dreaming), something that is quite rare. Around one in five people will experience a lucid dream more than once a month. This infrequency in itself makes lucid dreaming an unusual experience.
Paranormal cognition within dreams is the suggestion that when we dream, we are able to rise above the limits of space and time, where precognition can be experienced and ESP shared. The fact that dreams so often contain irrational and fantastic content lends a degree of support to this. Indeed, for quite some time, dreams including spontaneous telepathy have been reported, making up a large percentage of ESP reports. The most common topics that arise in such dreams are those of danger and death, though they lack the features needed that they can be accurately tested.
Ghosts
Although separated from the subject of parapsychology in the 1930s, the study of ghosts and poltergeists has become a part again, albeit only a very small one. This is due mainly to the small amounts who accept the phenomena and the large amounts of time and resources required for investigation of them. In addition to this, even if a good report is presented, with valid witnesses and decent recordings, it is still easy for critics to challenge any reliability and genuineness the case might have. As such, this is an area rarely touched on, though a few parapsychologists still investigate, due to their opinion that science is disregarding an authentic area of experience, no matter how infrequent it occurs.