Last night I read from the fragments of a forgotten book about the lost civilization of Theronia of Kalfura under the Black Sun. Then, for a few moments after waking, I lay still on the pallet in my garret. The night breeze carried away the last sounds of the chants of their priests performing the strange rites of their Dark God.
Freud introduced the idea of dream telepathy into psychoanalysis in 1921. Telepathy - Greek: tele - distance + pathos: suffering or intense feeling - is the communication fo thoughts, impressions, and information over distance between people without the normal operation of any known senses. However, he was skeptical of the idea, and having found no evidence either in his own dreams or in those of his patients, he concluded that dream telepathy could neither be proven nor disproven. Overall, he adopted a puerile and often vulgar view of the significance of dreams.
But subsequent decades, Jung and others took a deeper approach to these ideas. Various psychoanalysists have examined patients’ dreams and found evidence for telepathy based on precise details of the time, place, sensory impression, and states of conscousness
One common factor sharted by many of these telepathic patients is that, in early childhood, they had a mother who was emotionally absent. This traumatic loss marked them and their relating to others, and left on them a fixation on a nonverbal, archaic mode of communication. Hence, the telepathic dream embodies an enigmatic, physically 'impossible' extreme of deep-level interconnectedness and unconscious communication.
Indeed, I endured most of my childhood in poverty, both material and emotional. And my parents were not involved in my life. My father was a drunkard who spent most days and nights at bars and other places dedicated to drinking. When home, he was always watching sports on TV while drinking, chain_smoking, having 15 minute long fits of coughing up tar and bits of lung, and farting.
My mother wasnt much better. Her days were used up watching whatever was on TV - we only got 2 or 3 channels, so it was either something like football, bowling, or baseball with my father; or sitting through day after day of inane gossip shows and soap operas when he was not around. In this way she spent most of her life watching TV in her “LayZ-Boy” recliner chair. During her programs, her main activity was to rake through the mangey fur of each of her 15 cats with her hard fingers looking for fleas. When she found one, she would carefully trap it between her finger nails and pick it out of the fur. Then she would crush it between her nails with a tiny click-pop sound and set it in the small pile of fleas, bits of dried skin, and scabby tufts of fur on the one clear spot on the edge of a small table. Other than to scold me, I don’t remember either of them speaking more than a few telegraphic sentences to me at a time in my entire life.
My senses were unusually sharp. The jarring blair of the TV, the rancid drunk stink of my father and his cigarette smoke; the nauseating odor of my morbidly obese mother’s unwashed body and the 1 house dress she wore every day but washed once a year in the spring. The distressing ugliness of a house that was piled floor to ceiling with trash and rotting garbage and only had narrow walkways through the filth. My life overall was so repugnant that my only wish was to escape.
I went to a poor school where there were no resources to fund anything but the basics. Bible Class was considered one of the basics. Science lab was a remote dream. On top of that, I had no friends. I was mostly isolated. Though I was a promising student in that I had good grades and a freakishly high IQ, the sciences and worldly knowledge in general never had a chance to take a strong hold on me. I saw them more as things that stripped away what little beauty could be found by ones dreams and imagination.
I spent my time either in the forest, roaming the hills and mountains, exploring ruined antebellum mansions, or dreaming. Sadly, much of the time I spent in the forest was spoiled by the trauma of the earlier part of the day and the dread of returning home.
As I got older, my days became more grim, it was harder to deal with school and the other students. My parents only got worse as they got older and I began to realize how bad my situation was. My waking life had no appeal for me, and I withdrew as much as I could. I was like a ghost trapped in this world of gentle pain. I slept longer and longer. I sought in my dreams the beauty that was missing from my life. I would enter the dream world and drift though green valleys. speed up dark ravines following fast mountain streams to their source up at the mountain tops, over brilliant blue lakes fed by snow melt, and down again though another valley, across desert, over swamp and ocean, Exploring unkown cities of fantastic beautfiul architecutre and unusual dimensions. Travelling across the void between the stars to other planets... crossing over to other realities.
Recently, I’ve become very fond of ‘Mina.’ I think I mentioned her before. Mina has completely put all other women out of my mind. That's where the dream telepathy comes in.
Mina is a postdoc where I work. I see her every day. We often go out together and do things around Paris. Mina is from Algeria and has gone home for the end of the Ramadan holiday plus a couple of weeks. I can see her but she can’t see me
She is gone, but I still see her and hear her. I even smell her perfume sometimes. She goes about her days and nights at home in Algeria in a house surrounded by gardens on the ocean. I see close details of her house, her family. I even ‘hear’ her thoughts sometimes, word for word. She even thinks about me, but that is not very often. When she does, it isn't ... she doesn't feel anything for me. Sometimes the details are ‘confirmed’ by an email or skype. Doing simple thigns like foldig clothing, eating (always late at night during the holiday. And almost always very happy to the point of being joyful sometimes. Strnagely, seeing this helps my mood and cheers me up a little in a bittersweet way. From watching her in the crystal ball and talking to her in real life, I get the impression she is very close to her family. That's an alien concept to me.
I assume she has no idea I can see her. Of course, I won't ever tell her. Sometimes I see her doing or hear her tinking very intimate and private things. It's like accidently walking in on someone in the bathroom. These are things one shouldn't be seeing, and they are always unexpected. There is no privacy filter. No idea why. I turn it off as soon as it starts happening, honest.
This hasn’t happened at this level of detail for anyone else I’ve ever known. I've tried to make it happen with others but it never did, no matter how close or intimate we were or I wished we were. Ariadne was the last time I tried it with someone. I spent a month or so looking but never found her. I wrote about that in an earlier entry. This time, it happens on its own without my seeking it or wanting it. I don't seek this. The sad part is that she doesn't think or feel anything romantic towards me. I'm left wondering why it's happening since there's no possibility of a close relationship with her.
