Here is a nice short article describing some dowsing experiments undertaken by a group of 10-12 school children, who were attending a boy’s school in Eastbourne, England. The author had taught himself to dowse and led the investigation. Though a short account, it highlights a number of features of dowsing.

www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No30_1940_p212.pdf

First point of note was that the boy’s interests ranged across the spectrum from interested to sceptical, but this had no bearing on whether an individual could obtain a dowsing reaction, a result which is a little counter-intuitive.  Furthermore, the sensitivity of dowsing reaction seemed to depend on the choice of dowsing instrument, so they were allowed to choose the device best suited to them. In fact, a couple of boys could dowse naturally with no instrument.

They began with water detection and depthing. The two depthing methods used were interesting, one involved them imagining they were descending down a shaft, until a reaction was obtained. The depth at which this occurred was the depth of the water and interestingly, this could be doner using any unit of measurement. Another method (inspired by Cryke’s method, see post “Another approach to water divining” on 04-04-2020) involved tracing a circle of dowsing reaction around a metal object placed in the ground immediately above stream, the radius of the circle represented the depth of water. This observation seems to suggest that the conscious mind can impose rules on the unconscious mind concerning how to process information.

Another example of the mind’s filtering ability was also observed when searching for objects on or near the surface of the ground. Here they noticed that to detect objects close to the surface, one had to think “shallow”, but for deeper objects, one had to think “deep”, or the object could be missed.  Similarly, when searching for water, thinking too much of water would miss iron pipes carrying water.

Finally, they observed the effect of other people disturbing their dowsing results. In fact, it was possible for onlookers to “plant” a dowsing reaction in another dowser. It is interesting to speculate, whether this effect was also related to the observation that contact between an experienced dowser and one who has otherwise great difficulty dowsing, can produce results in the latter. This observation has often been reported in the BSD journals.