A new series of studies suggests that unusual experiences like premonitions, déjà vu, and out-of-body sensations are not rare, but instead quite common—and that people who report them often share distinct psychological traits. The research, published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, found that individuals high in a trait called subconscious connectedness were significantly more likely to report frequent anomalous experiences. These experiences were also associated with traits such as dissociation, magical thinking, absorption, and intuitive thinking.
Anomalous experiences are events that seem to go beyond what conventional science can explain. These include extrasensory perceptions, vivid or unusual dreams, perceived telepathic events, or an unexplained sense of presence. While such experiences are often dismissed as illusions or signs of mental illness, some researchers argue that they are widespread in the general population and deserve more scientific attention. The new study was designed to better understand what kinds of people are more likely to report such experiences and how those experiences might be related to underlying psychological traits.
“I have been formally studying the personality trait of subconscious connectedness for several years. It is a line of research that indicates that some people have a much closer connection with the non-conscious or subconscious parts of their mind than other people; meaning that their consciousness and their subconscious mind influence each other to an unusually high degree in their everyday life,” said study author Olafur S. Palsson, professor emeritus of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“This can be measured with a questionnaire called the Thought Impact Scale, which I developed and validated. By using scores on that scale, people can be reliably divided into those with high, moderate, and low subconscious connectedness. It is a personality characteristic that is normally distributed in the general population.”
“Having high subconscious connectedness seems to be associated with a range of specific personal tendencies and behaviors, and I have been investigating those systematically in several studies,” Palsson explained. “These side effects, so to speak, of high subconscious connectedness include greater proneness to engage regularly in creative or artistic activities, higher hypnotizability and being more likely to seek hypnosis treatment, and greater probability of experiencing certain stress-related physical health problems such as irritable bowel syndrome and migraine headaches. A tendency to have a lot of unusual life experiences is another characteristic that I have long suspected to be associated with high subconscious connectedness.”
“Anomalous experiences are a broad and heterogenous class of phenomena that simply have in common that they are things that people sometimes experience that are outside the conventional framework of understanding of how the world operates. I noticed many years ago that clients in my practice as a clinical psychologist who showed indications of high subconscious connectedness seemed to spontaneously report various anomalous experiences more commonly than my other clients.”
“For example, they more often described being able to sense the thoughts of other people, having predictive dreams, experiencing highly improbable and very meaningful synchronicities, or having out-of-body experiences,” Palsson continued. “This observation led me to conduct a series of three studies to examine whether greater proneness to anomalous experiences is indeed a side effect of having high subconscious connectedness.”
Palsson conducted three separate studies involving over 2,200 adults in the United States. The first study was a pilot involving 216 participants from a university community. The second and third studies were large, demographically balanced online surveys conducted with nationwide samples—500 people in Study 2 and 1,500 people in Study 3.
All three studies used the newly developed Unusual Experiences Questionnaire, which asks people about 13 types of anomalous experiences and how often they occur. Examples include sensing someone is watching you before you turn around, having predictive dreams, or noticing meaningful coincidences that seem too unlikely to be chance. The team also used the Thought Impact Scale to assess the psychological trait of subconscious connectedness.
Palsson found that people with high subconscious connectedness reported more anomalous experiences than those with low scores on the Thought Impact Scale. In all three studies, the difference between high and low scorers was not just statistically significant—it was large. For example, in the nationally representative Study 3, people with high Thought Impact Scale scores reported, on average, more than three times as many repeated anomalous experiences as those with low scores. In fact, 86% of participants in that survey said they had experienced at least one of the anomalous events more than once.
The correlation between Thought Impact Scale scores and the amount of anomalous experiences was moderate to strong across all three studies (r = .53 to .69). Moreover, every single one of the 13 experiences listed in the Unusual Experiences Questionnaire was more common among people with high subconscious connectedness—ranging from déjà vu to feeling their thoughts had influenced other people’s behavior.
“What surprised me most was to see how many adults have certain anomalous experiences again and again,” Palsson told PsyPost. “The most common of these repeated experiences was déjà-vu — that is, the sense that what one is experiencing in the present moment has happened before, when that is not possible. About sixty percent of people in the U.S. national population samples reported having had déjà-vu at least a few times. And between forty and fifty percent of all the people surveyed reported that they had at least a few times sensed correctly being stared at before looking, having had premonition that came true, and objects oddly disappearing and showing up later in places where they had already looked for them.”
“A person having any such peculiar experience once can perhaps be dismissed as misperception or imagination. But to see that a large proportion of the general population experiences particular anomalies again and again over time is eye-opening to me, and suggests that these phenomena warrant far more research. Most surveys of anomalous experiences have unfortunately only asked whether people have ever experienced what is described, but not how often it occurs. That is a mistake, I think. For if some subjective experience happens repeatedly over time, it is a psychological tendency, and likely says something about the mind of the person who has that experience.”
But subconscious connectedness wasn’t the only trait linked to these experiences. In the first and third studies, Palsson also measured several other personality traits previously associated with anomalous experiences. These included absorption (becoming fully immersed in thoughts or sensory experiences), dissociation (feeling detached from oneself), fantasy proneness, faith in intuition, magical ideation (the belief that one’s thoughts can influence the world), and belief in paranormal phenomena. All of these traits showed significant associations with the number of anomalous experiences participants reported.
Palsson also explored how these experiences relate to mental health and well-being. People who reported more anomalous experiences tended to report more stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms. However, the correlations were modest. The number of anomalous experiences was only weakly related to lower happiness and had no clear relationship with perceived quality of life. These findings suggest that while unusual experiences may be more common in individuals with higher emotional distress, they are not necessarily impairing or distressing themselves.
Demographic patterns also emerged. Across the two national surveys, younger adults reported more anomalous experiences than older adults. The highest prevalence was found in participants under 50 years old, while people over 65 reported the fewest. Some racial and ethnic differences were also found: in the third study, Black participants reported more anomalous experiences than white participants, while Hispanic participants fell in between.
“I think there are two important points that emerge from this work for the general public,” Palsson explained. “The first is that anomalous experiences are actually very common. They tend to be dismissed as exceptions or rare events, but the findings indicate that they are a normal part of human life experience. The series of three studies that I describe in the paper that was just published is the most comprehensive investigation carried out so far on anomalous experiences in the U.S. general population.
“Two of the studies were nationwide surveys of nationally representative samples of adults. Both of those population studies showed that about four out of every five American adults have at least one kind of anomalous experience repeatedly, and in fact, most of them have multiple different kinds of such odd experiences again and again. In my view, this suggests that having anomalous experiences is something that should be considered to be a part of our natural psychological makeup as human beings.”
“The second important takeaway from this research, I think, is that people vary greatly in regard to the extent to which they have odd life experiences,” Palssons said. “Proneness to have anomalous experiences is most likely a stable personal characteristic over time, and is probably determined in large part by how much people’s conscious and subconscious minds communicate with each other in everyday life. What this means is that if you are a person who frequently has anomalous experiences, and you have a friend who rarely or never has such experiences, that particular difference between you will probably still be there years from now.”
Palsson cautions that while the findings are robust, they do not prove that subconscious connectedness causes anomalous experiences. It is possible that both are influenced by other underlying factors, or that people who are more open to experiences are simply more likely to notice or recall unusual events. Another limitation is that the Unusual Experiences Questionnaire does not cover all possible anomalous experiences—such as religious visions, communication with the dead, or UFO encounters—so the findings may not apply to those domains.
“The main limitation of this research is that I used a short questionnaire in the three survey studies to measure anomalous experiences,” Palsson noted. “It is therefore unclear whether the findings apply to all types of anomalous experiences. For example, we cannot know for sure whether seeing ghosts is related to being high on the psychological trait of subconscious connectedness, because my surveys did not ask people whether or how often they have seen ghosts. However, because all thirteen types of anomalous experiences that were measured in my surveys showed a robust association with high subconscious connectedness, it seems likely that other such experiences are also more common for people with high scores on that trait.”
The authors hope their findings will encourage more scientific attention to these experiences and promote a better understanding of their psychological roots. Whether or not anomalous experiences reflect hidden aspects of reality or just the quirks of the human mind, they appear to be deeply woven into how many people experience the world.
“I continue to actively pursue research to enhance understanding of the effects of having high, or low, subconscious connectedness,” Palsson said. “In regard to anomalous experiences, future studies will aim to examine what specific cognitive differences related to high subconscious connectedness result in proneness to have anomalous experiences.”
The study, “Anomalous Experiences Are Associated With High Subconscious Connectedness,” was published April 17, 2025.
