Telepathic Dreams

“I must suggest to you that you should think more kindly of the objective possibility of thought transference and therefore also of telepathy.” (Freud: New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 78.)

In his paper on “Dreams and the Occult” from which the above quotation is taken, Freud makes a slight distinction between telepathy and thought transference. He says on page 54: “By telepathy we mean the alleged fact that an event which occurs at a specific time comes more or less simultaneously into the consciousness of a person who is spatially distant, without any of the known methods of communication coming into play.” On page 58 he writes “there is, for example, the phenomenon of thought transference which is closely allied to telepathy and, indeed, can be identified with it without much difficulty. It is held that psychological processes, ideas, states of excitement, volition, which occur in the mind of one person can be transferred through space to another, without the usual means of communication (word or sign) being employed.”

The word telepathy was originally coined by F. W. H. Myers in 1882 and he defined it as “transmission of thought independently of the recognised channels of sense.” For the purpose of this paper this is my definition of telepathy with one amplification: transmission of feeling falls in the same category.

The chief contribution of Freud's paper to the study of telepathy is that by dream interpretation we can discover telepathic events which otherwise would not be recognised as such. In want of sufficient data, he hastened to qualify his finding by saying, “in spite of this, dream interpretation has said nothing about the objective truth of telepathic phenomena. It may only be an appearance which can be explained in some other way.” He was, however, much more positive regarding telepathic phenomena in the waking state, quoting several instances in which fortune tellers or mediums seemed to sense the secret wishes of their clients and clot