EREAMS Study – Design & Results

Published 2026-04-25 · Reading time approx. 11 minutes

Investigating mediumistic messages scientifically sounds like a contradiction in terms. That is precisely what Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar, a business-informatics professor with a medical background, has tried systematically with the EREAMS study. The acronym stands for Empirical Research of the Effectiveness and Authenticity of Mediumistic Messages from Spirit. The results were published in 2021 in the book "Jenseits von Materie" (Giga Verlag). While the accompanying blog covers Lazar as a person and the genesis of the project, this article focuses specifically on study design, methodological choices and results.

The research context

Mediumistic research has a long tradition. As early as the late 19th century, William James (Harvard) and Frederic Myers (Cambridge) studied trance-mediumistic phenomena systematically. In the past 25 years, two research lines have stood out:

• Gary Schwartz (University of Arizona): a series of studies with blind/double-blind designs from 1999 onwards.
• Julie Beischel (Windbridge Research Center): quintuple-blind studies with standardised evaluation procedures from 2007 onwards.

Both work with blinding (medium and sitter do not see each other, do not know each other). This is methodologically clean, but comes at a price: mediumistic work relies in practice also on personal connection. Lazar's EREAMS sets a counter-accent – he does not seek scientific rigour through blinding, but through the specificity of the verifiable statements.

Team and structure

EREAMS is a four-person project:

• Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar – methodology, design, evaluation. Natural scientist and university professor (FOM, Düsseldorf).
• Bettina-Suvi Rode (Essen) – co-initiator, medium.
• Tanja Schlömer (Bottrop) – second medium.
• Kathrin Stefan (Tübingen) – clinical psychotherapist. Brings clinical grief expertise and psychological evaluation – important for the second main aspect of the study (comforting impact).

Notable: mediumistic competence and scientific methodology are combined on equal terms. Both mediums were co-authors, not "study objects". This has consequences for methodological assessment – more on that below.

Study design

Sample

243 participants in the first wave. They come from Germany, the US, France, Spain, Luxembourg and Denmark. Included were all persons who had regularly booked a session with Bettina-Suvi Rode or Tanja Schlömer – not subjects recruited for the study. Thus the data reflect actual practice rather than a specially selected group.

Deliberately not blinded

Where Schwartz and Beischel separate medium and sitter, EREAMS allows personal contact – for two reasons. First, in Lazar's observation, the emotional connection changes the quality of a session; an enforced distance is not what occurs in practice. Second, the methodological refutation of cold reading (psychological tricks based on appearance, clothing, reaction) is not achieved by blinding here, but by the content of the message.

A three- to four-week waiting phase

A central methodological choice: the questionnaire was not handed out immediately after the session, but 3–4 weeks later. Reasons:

• Filter out the euphoria effect. Right after a setting many bereaved are emotionally aroused – this skews any rating toward "all wonderful".
• Allow time for verification. Messages the sitter cannot directly place often require research with relatives, in old documents or, for example, with the police. These verification steps cannot happen in real time.

Highly specific evidence as the gold standard

The methodological core of the study. A message counts as highly specific evidence only if it meets all three criteria:

1. The bereaved did not know the information at the time of the session. – rules out simple telepathy between medium and sitter.
2. The information is not researchable. – rules out hot reading (advance research by the medium via social media, public databases, etc.).
3. The information can be verified afterwards. – via relatives, files, police, hospital.

Examples of message classes that can satisfy this:

• Family secrets (e.g. a miscarriage of the deceased mother, never publicised)
• Police-documented locations (e.g. a jacket on a bridge railing)
• Highly specific pet combinations (e.g. "a hare and a single fish")
• Objects placed in the coffin
• The contents of a letter in the coffin
• Last words at the deathbed, verbatim
• Dialect or speech impediment of the deceased, imitated by the medium

The two main research questions

Lazar formulates two measurable outcomes:

1. Authenticity: how many sessions deliver at least one piece of highly specific evidence in the above sense?
2. Comforting impact: how does the session affect the bereaved over time? Subjective scale rating 3–4 weeks after the session.

Both outcomes are captured via structured questionnaires.

The results

Authenticity: over 90 %

More than 90 % of participants report at least one piece of highly specific evidence in the defined sense. For some, the evidence was directly verifiable in the setting (e.g. a known family detail); for many, only after subsequent research. That is precisely why the waiting phase mattered: some participants had to ask relatives or authorities to place a statement. 82 individuals in the first wave reported messages that were not directly verifiable and could only be confirmed through external research – a finding documented in this form by no other study to date.

Comforting impact: 96 % positive

The psychological impact was assessed on a five-point Likert scale:

• 82 % "very comforting"
• 14 % "somewhat comforting"
• 4 % "neutral / not comforting"

The combined positive impact is 96 %. Compared with the outcomes of classical grief counselling, this is a remarkably high rate. Standard grief counselling typically reports 60–75 % subjectively positive impact; pharmacological grief support (SSRIs) about 40–55 % in moderate grief.

In the book Lazar directly addresses the obvious sceptical objection: bereaved parents have a motivated interest in ticking "comforting". Co-author Kathrin Stefan, a psychotherapist, explicitly disagrees:

"There are no more critical people than bereaved parents. You cannot talk them into anything. They really want to know whether their child is still there – and they only say 'comforting' if they can actually believe it."
— Kathrin Stefan (paraphrased, EREAMS book 2021)

Methodological assessment

Strengths

• Large real-world dataset. 243 participants from six countries, all from actual mediumistic practice – not from an artificial research setting.
• Methodological innovation: specificity instead of blinding. If the message is objectively verifiable and contains information neither medium nor sitter knew, cold reading is methodologically excluded as an explanation – even without blinding.
• Waiting phase as a clean filter. The 3–4-week pause clears out the euphoria effect that has compromised earlier studies.
• Interdisciplinary team. Business informatics, mediumistic practice and clinical psychotherapy together – methodologically broader than most predecessors.

Limitations

• No blinding. Sceptics can still argue that the level of detail could be due to the medium's unconscious cue reading. Lazar counters this with the specificity definition – but that has to be checked case by case, which makes the study laborious for external reviewers.
• Self-report by participants. Verification of the messages rests with the bereaved – not with an independent external body.
• No control group. A comparison to "sessions with non-mediumistic persons that proceed identically" is not part of EREAMS. It would strengthen the study methodologically.
• No peer-reviewed publication. Book publication at Giga Verlag rather than in a specialist journal. This is common in the field of mediumistic research (Beischel and Schwartz also often publish in open-access journals with less reach), but reduces scientific reach.

Comparison with other studies

EREAMS has by far the largest sample among the serious mediumistic studies – but the weakest blinding design. It complements the international literature methodologically and in scope, but does not replace it.

What's next

In 2025 Lazar started the second wave of data collection. EREAMS is intended to become a long-term study – the first wave's data will, over the years, be extended and reproduced (or revised) by fresh data. This will also show whether the high authenticity and comforting figures remain stable.

For the Heaven Connect platform this is interesting because the study has a very direct practice link. The recommendation at the end is not "believe or don't believe" but a concrete one: think of grief counselling – mainstream medicine – reputable mediumistic contact as complementary offers, not as alternatives.

Context

This article is the methodologically focused complement to the person-and-history blog on Oliver Lazar, in which the personal background (accident, two independent mediums, the path to becoming a researcher) is described in detail. In scientific context EREAMS sits alongside work on near-death experiences (van Lommel, Greyson, Pam Reynolds, Kuhn, van Laack), the philosophical framing (Brüntrup), clinical integration (Bösch/Claes) and the physical background question (matter and the Higgs field).

Sources:
• Oliver Lazar, Jenseits von Materie, Giga Verlag 2021.
• Bettina-Suvi Rode & Oliver Lazar, EREAMS study protocol (documented in the book).
• Julie Beischel et al., Windbridge Research Center, The contribution of anomalous information reception in mediumship readings, Explore 2007ff.
• Gary Schwartz, The Afterlife Experiments, Atria Books 2003.
• Patrizio Tressoldi et al., University of Padua, studies on mediumistic accuracy (open access).
• WissensWerteWelt (YouTube), interview with Oliver Lazar on the EREAMS study, youtube.com/watch?v=LwEKH4hAuwc.

For more, see our curated knowledge collection – both the Lazar interview and related studies (Beischel, Tressoldi) are linked there.