Charles Anthony Selby McCreery is a British psychologist, best known for his collaboration with Celia Green on work on hallucinatory states in normal people.
The three main areas of McCreery's work with Celia Green have been the types of hallucinatory experience known as lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, and apparitional experiences. McCreery was the co-author with Celia Green of a book entitled Apparitions. According to a survey they conducted most apparitions appear visually within three metres of the person, and the experience is usually short, lasting less than a minute in many cases. They put forward the hypothesis that not only was the figure of the apparition hallucinatory, but the rest of the field of perception at the time as well. Green and McCreery proposed the term metachoric experience to denote experiences of this kind, in which the subject’s entire field of perception is replaced with a hallucinatory one. This enabled them to relate apparitional experiences to lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences, which they argued also meet this definition. McCreery later collaborated with Green on a book on lucid dreaming, which discussed further the concept of metachoric experience, and added false awakenings to the category. In addition to books co-authored with Green, McCreery has published two accounts of a proposed theory ofpsychosis, linking the phenomena of psychosis, such as hallucinations and delusions, to arousability, Stage 1 sleep and dreams. The first of these accounts appeared in a collection of papers edited by Gordon Claridge. A fuller account appeared subsequently as a standalone paper: ‘’Dreams and Psychosis, A New Look at an Old Hypothesis.’’ In 2006 McCreery published a paper on the implications of hallucinatory experiences of the sane for the philosophy of perception. This argues that the phenomena provide empirical support for the theory of representationalism as against that of direct realism. McCreery has also published a series of online tutorials on statistics for first-year psychology students. McCreery’s most recent book is a study of the psychology of genius, with particular reference to the economic conditions which have favoured the development of genius in the historical past, notably the role of private patronage.
Books
Science, Philosophy and ESP. Foreword by Professor H.H. Price. London: Faber and Faber, 1967.
Psychical Phenomena and the Physical World. Foreword by Sir George Joy. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973.
Apparitions. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975.
Lucid Dreaming: the Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep. London: Routledge, 1994.
The Abolition of Genius. Foreword by Professor Hans Eysenck. Oxford: Oxford Forum, 2012.
Selected papers
McCreery, C., and Claridge, G., ‘A study of hallucination in normal subjects – I. Self-report data’. Personality and Individual Differences, 21, 739–747.
McCreery, C., and Claridge, G., ‘A study of hallucination in normal subjects – II. Electrophysiological data’. Personality and Individual Differences, 21, 749–758.
‘Hallucinations and arousability: pointers to a theory of psychosis’. In Claridge, G. : Schizotypy, Implications for Illness and Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCreery, C., and Claridge, G., ‘Healthy schizotypy: the case of out-of-the-body experiences’. Personality and Individual Differences, 32, 141–154.
‘Perception and hallucination: the case for continuity’. Philosophical Paper No. 2006-1, Oxford: Oxford Forum.
’Dreams and psychosis: a new look at an old hypothesis’. Philosophical Paper No. 2008-1, Oxford: Oxford Forum.
