Telepathy and Inner Speech (Part III).

“Telepathy, of course. It’s amusing when you stop to think about it — for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists, folks like J.B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time it’s been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe’s Purloined Letter. All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.”

— Stephen King, On Writing, from the chapter, What Writing Is.

III. Anecdotes of Telepathic Transmission & Dialogue.

This incident occurred on October 6, 2007, again as I was at work in my fast food job. Eva, the girl with whom I had this experience, was a younger girl who I had first encountered on MySpace, when she began commenting on my blogs, and eventually came to know in person. On the day in question, she had come in as I was working and sat at one of the tables at the far end of the dining room, and I had gone out there to sit and speak with her, as I found her to be an interesting individual and a remarkably beautiful girl.

“As I continued to talk with Eva, though, and our conversation seemed to get more involved, there seemed to be this intoxicating wave of emotion, or something, in the air. It was as if my mind was penetrating through some kind of membrane. Eventually, I started catching definite things from her — emotions, impressions, potent vibes — just like I do from normal people only the intensity was amazing, the reception crisp and clear. It was like some psychic form of tunnel vision.

There was one point where it almost seemed that I caught a sex vibe from her, which confused me so much I had to look away for a second. She noted it, too — the fact I’d looked away — and seemed to think it was something she had said, but I just told her no, it wasn’t that, there was just too much going on at once. I wasn’t even entirely certain what I meant by that, either, but something strange and wonderful was going on. It was like I was riding the wave of some supernatural high. I had to wonder, though: was I really seeing what was there, or was I throwing that out and was it bouncing back at me like some psychic echo?

As we went on talking, the rapport seemed to get deeper and deeper and ever-more intense. I mean this in no cheesy way, either. It’s not a poetic metaphor or anything of the like. It was literally the experience of some weird, almost psychic bond. I was reading things from her ever-clearer. Just emotions. Just impressions.

At one point I’m looking at her. I don’t think we’re talking, but I’m just gazing at her for a moment, unable to help myself. It wasn’t a particularly naughty gaze, but I think to myself, about her, ”god, you’re sexy,” as I look her way.

It was just internal dialog, but it seemed clearer and louder than usual. Like subjective stereo. Like a psychic echo. Not only that, but I had the distinct impression that she had heard me. That I was in her head, or she was in mine, or we were temporarily fused in some mutual headspace. Maybe it was in her eyes, the way she lifted her head and looked at me. Perhaps it was in her facial expression, or perhaps it was just her vibe. The important thing here is that for some reason her hearing me think did not, at the moment, seem all that unusual.

So then I think, but this time intentionally to her, as a sort of experiment or test, ”You didn’t hear me, did you?” And she shakes her head, as a matter of factly, yes, up and down, up and down. And I eye her suspiciously, almost teasingly. “No you didn’t,” I think to her. She stops a second, as if hesitating, but just a second later she begins to shake her head no, side to side to side to side to side. Satisfied, I slam my hand on the table and say, with a smile — and I say it aloud this time — ”Good,” and casually get up out of the chair and make my exit passed the drink tower.

It was so natural.

Nothing from, ”you didn’t hear me, did you?” to the point that I got up seemed at all unusual or frightening. But as soon as I was halfway passed the drink tower adrenaline shot through me. I try to tell myself I didn’t remember it correctly, but it just happened. I try to tell myself that it didn’t happen, that it’s impossible that it happened, but it just happened.”

Upon arriving home, I messaged her and asked her if anything strange had occurred while we sat across from each other at that table. This was essentially a roundabout way of asking her, yet again — though this time not telepathically, but via the written (or, rather: typed) word — “You didn’t hear me, did you?” She promptly replied, “I already told you.” Subsequent interactions with her seemed to confirm that this incident did, indeed, happen as I experienced it at the time and subsequently recalled it. This was also the first of a few telepathic experiences I had with the girl (though the rest of the experiences fall outside linguistic telepathy), and I’ve often wondered if this might have been spawned by some odd, psychological or energetic similarity that she and I shared. In any case, this particular experience led to my more confident, though still wary, interpretations regarding my subsequent experiences in telepathic reception in this area with Kami and Jamilia.

As profound as my experiences in telepathically sending and receiving inner speech with fellow humans undoubtedly were, mostly due to the fact that they occured in the context of mundane daily life as opposed to my alien encounters, my recollections of enduring telepathic dialogues utilizing inner speech while interacting with Nimi in my youth put all of these personal experiences to shame. Internet research has revealed that such communication has been experienced by others, however, and not only in the context of alien encounters. To the contrary, it’s apparently been human to human.

One such experience was offered by Joni, who posted on November 27, 2018:

“As a young adult, I moved away from my family for several years. Upon my return, I was introduced to a family friend Chance. My cousin and Chance were just carrying on a normal conversation when out of the blue I heard his voice in my head. After the initial shock, I looked puzzled at him and that’s when I realized not only could I [hear him, but] speak to him too. But we were clearly having a private conversation we could both hear and my cousin could not. We have been together for 14 years now. We have never again spoken to each other in our minds. However, one of my most treasured things about my husband is [that] when I have a song stuck in my head, A song I can hear but can’t remember a single word to or can’t even hum a sound I ask him and he is always correct.”

Though I’ve provided above two responses to the post on the aforementioned Interfaith forum, I’ve saved the well-articulated experience provided by the original poster, a user by the name of taijasi, for the very last, as it reminds me in some respects of my incident with Eva. In any case, it is an interesting tale:

“The best, most simple and direct example of one form of telepathy that I have experienced is something that occurred with a good friend of mine about 22 years ago. The two of us were not far from my parents’ house, out for a drive in a borrowed BMW (belonging to my friend’s father), and I was practicing driving. We were in a neighborhood that was under construction, in the early evening after all the workers had gone home, so the place was deserted and offered the perfect opportunity.

It was summer, so we had plenty of daylight, and everything went well. BMWs handle exceptionally well I discovered, though I haven’t had a chance to drive one since. Anyway, evening arrived, it got dark, and my friend and I were sitting motionless, talking for a few minutes before I had to go back home. A lull in the conversation crept up, and no one said a word. It was only natural that a brief pause be left at that juncture, so it was not unusual or awkward, but what happened next was slightly unusual – at least in my book.

The two of us continued our exchange, sharing several sentences with each other, back and forth … and THEN we realized, both pretty much simultaneously as I recall – that neither one of us had spoken since the silence.

We had continued the conversation, but no one had spoken. It was verbal, I did not see or visualize a thing. But the words, the sentences, and the meaning were exchanged nonetheless.

This was, as I say, awkward to say the least. In fact, it almost made me giddy in a sort of sense, but I was somewhat contained once those several sentences were exchanged in silence … because I was not 100% sure we were – “on the same page.” I somehow knew that what I thought had just occurred had just occurred, but I was not certain. I had a flicker of doubt, and perhaps only minor frustration that if I spoke, my friend might feel too awkward or weirded out … and not confirm it. Ah, I should have known him better!

I guess I, too, had a slight hesitation, but I broke the thin layer of ice. It might have thickened, had we hesitated much longer, but within a few moments we had both immediately verified, and certainly confirmed to each other’s satisfaction, what had just occurred (if not quite why or how). It only took a few moments to say, Did that just happen? – and ask, Did you say x? followed by, Uh-huh, and then you said y, and then you asked z, right? Etc.

This left no room for question, no room for doubt, no possibility that either of us – let alone both – had simply imagined it. We knew what was up, and it probably meant – assuming that neither of us forgets it – that indeed, both of our lives had been changed, forever. Never again could either of us, in our right, rational mind, doubt this verified possibility. So, although I haven’t spoken to this friend in years … it doesn’t change things in the least. I’m hoping if I ever get a chance to chat with him again in the flesh, he’d remember and acknowledge this event, as was certainly still the case last time we spoke, some 6 or 7 years ago.

So you see, although this was a very personal experience and exchange, it was all I needed, at 15 or 16 years of age, to know for the rest of my life – that telepathy most certainly exists … although I have since (and even prior) experienced many other types of non-verbal exchanges, and read enough about the subject to know that my experiences only cover a small part of the possible spectrum.”

Others have reported this experience with seeming fellow humans as well. In a post from May 10, 2014, Jan shared the following experience on a website:

“I had an interesting spontaneous telepathic experience at a very crowded goth bar in Cape Town 3 years ago. Upon entering the very crowded bar I was welcomed telepathically by another person standing on the far end of the room – this was completely unexpected as he knew my name and seemed to know everything about me. The contact was very intense and I naturally I was freaked out when greeted on a first name basis without talking to each across a crowded room to a total stranger. I am now open to this sort of thing. From your article I understand most telepathic messaging is between close family and friends which does not apply in this case.”

It would have been interesting if Jan would have provided suggestions on any former telepathic experiences she might have had and more detail regarding this particular experience. Did she merely hear the other person, or was she able to respond and hold a dialogue?

For a long time, I hypothesized that linguistic telepathy was dependent upon close proximity to the individual in question, as that appeared to be the case in the analysis of abduction experiences offered by David Jacobs, my own experiences, and many of the experiences of others that I later found. In the course of writing this, however, I happened upon at least two reports of this kind of telepathy, both apparently human-to-human, that allegedly occurred regardless of distance.

On the Interfaith forum in a thread entitled, “Telepathy – Experiences and Insights,” Brian 815 responded with his own unnerving experience. During his late teens and early twenties, a period in which he confesses he was both drinking heavily and smoking copious amounts of marajuana, he used to have a crush on a girl he worked with who happened to engage in similar practices. Given that he was rather shy and a bit younger, they never really hung out, but there was something enchanting about her and he would often have her in his thoughts. At some point this scaled up in intensity, as he began seeing an image of her in his mind quite frequently, which he explained as being somewhat akin to the afterimage one experiences following staring at a bright light. Sometime thereafter he began to communicate with her in his mind, presumably via the aforementioned afterimage. Whenever he was stoned, and for weeks thereafter, it seemed to intensify. Distance made no difference and it would occur day and night, even when he was dreaming, though he stressed it was never a full-blown, complex dialogue. Instead, it seemed to be based on emotions, occasionally complex themselves, accompanied by an inner voice that expressed itself in “basic sentences or sentence fragments.”

He explained that alongside being rather quiet among people, his inner life was also rather quiet with respect to inner thought, whereas this girl, he quickly came to realize, was more of a chatterbox, and that distinction reinforced his suspicions that the experience was real. In the context of traditional psychology, then, he was someone who utilized symbolic inner speech at best occasionally, whereas with her, it appeared to be a default.

However swayed into believing this telepathic experience was what it seemed, he had remaining skepticism, however, and so decided to attempt a test one day while he was at work with her. He asked her, in his mind, to give him a very specific cue (though he failed to explain the nature of this cue) that would either verify or falsify his suspicions, though part of the deal they made telepathically was that they would not openly discuss it. Within a few minutes they were around each other and she gave him that cue. Faced with apparent confirmation, he said it felt as if time itself was slowing down.

Later, he also added that while it typically only happened with the girl in question, and certainly most intensely in that respect, that it would also “happen with other people in passing or in my general point of view.”

“For years,” he wrote, “and in part to this day I have kept this to myself and have tried to convince myself it was a dream and I was stoned, but you can only hide from yourself for so long. It was a nightmare.” He went on to explain how he eventually became depressed and suicidal, presumably as a direct result of this enduring experience. He went on to see a psychologist and a psychiatrist who considered this experience delusional, and, considering that the source of the experience might constitute something supernatural rather than merely paranormal, he even consulted a priest.

In the end, he added:

“I don’t work with this person anymore, but it’s weird I still feel like her presence is watching me kinda like living with a conjoined twin or something. This person is not very [pleasant,] either. I would find out she was way more emotionally messed up than I could ever imagine and this would always come through telepathically. The intensity is much weaker now after years w/o drugs. It was so bad at one point I couldn’t comprehend conversations with people in my life very well because my attention was so intensely divided with this other world in my mind and the real one.”

It is indeed curious to me that like most of the accounts I came across, this one also involved drugs — though in this case not the emotions elicited when jonesing for drugs, but when actively using the substances in question. Yet again, however, I feel led to the conclusion that drugs do not seem to be necessary, but rather only serve to reliably elicit an emotional component that seems to be conducive to the experience. This is suggested, at the very least, by means of another shared experience, one similar to that of Brian 815’s, but not involving any mentioned drug use. Despite this, the story seemed to follow the same, general pattern. This anecdote was offered by a poster that goes by the name of Wren on a website on May 14, 2015:

“I’m hoping you can help me understand what is happening between a friend and I. We’re sort of dating, sort of not. There has always been very strong chemistry between us, not sexual especially, we are just very drawn to one another. Our lives are very different and a full blown relationship would be a disaster. We have maintained a mostly platonic friendship. We speak on the phone every day though [we] don’t see each other often. Our “real” conversations are superficial and general chat, but I have had full blown conversations with him in my head, it started just at bed time and now occasionally happens during the day. It made me feel like I was crazy, schizophrenic or obsessed with him. I didn’t tell a soul. But often [these] conversations were about how crazy it was we were even having these conversations and in such a conversation we decided to test it out, he asked what it was I liked about him – I answered and we agreed he would ask me again next time we saw one another. It was a couple of weeks later that during a moment alone together he asked me the very same question and I gave him the very same answer. We were both completely freaked out, though relieved we aren’t crazy and it feels really magical and special. Can you explain this? Many of the circumstances described in this post appear to be one offs, we can communicate in this way at will, though we both have to be thinking of one another at the same time. Sometimes we are able to nudge the other into conversation though.”

While Wren’s experience with her friend did not come about through drug use, at least from her side it seemed to begin at bedtime — presumably in the midst of hypnagogia; that “twilight” or “threshold” state of consciousness that resides on the bridge between waking and sleeping, and so in the twilight betwixt what we might call the conscious and unconscious sectors of mind. One can’t help but speculate that this natural, altered state of consciousness and the previous drug-related or drug-induced altered states may provide a similar bridge between individual minds — particularly if there is, in addition, an emotional bond between them — that allows for such telepathic phenomena to occur, at least far more easily than would be the case otherwise.

Perhaps it is the lack of a deep, emotional bond between strangers that necessitates close proximity in order for this form of telepathy to occur in such cases. This suggestion seems to be reinforced by second-hand tales offered to me by a former coworker that I will refer to as Jay.

Jay was the detail maintenance man at the store, a job which I eventually acquired as well. He always came across as happy and naive, and though he wasn’t what one would typically define as intelligent, there was a certain strategic ingeniousness to him that remains difficult for me to define. For a long time, I had dubbed him an expert manipulator, though I think that stemmed from my jealousy over the things he got away with at work and in the greater universe at large. Undeniably, the guy had a certain charm, an almost irritating likability, and he managed to get by in life largely through use of it. He was always juggling multiple women in his life, never short on pussy, and once confessed to me that he had even fooled around with the woman who was the store manager at the time, which explained to me how he got away with keeping his job despite constantly breaking the rules and, often enough, not doing his job at all — and taking credit for things I had done, as a matter of fact. It also explained why, after quitting or getting fired on multiple occasions, she always hired him back, either as a crewperson that worked in the kitchen or as a detail maintenance man yet again. Despite how friendly he always was to me, and to everyone, I was always wary of him, determined not to get caught in his web, and though I think I put up a good fight, the sly motherfucker finally won me over, however begrudgingly I came to accept the fact that I liked him.

While it wasn’t the first step in the process, nor the last, there was an evening we shared that I felt brought me closer to him, that helped me achieve a leap in understanding with respect to him. Though I still held onto my suspicions regarding him, I was ultimately brought to the conclusion that, if nothing else, this guy was interesting and well worth getting to know far better than I previously than I had managed to.

After searching in my journals rather recently, I discovered that this evening occurred near the end of March, 2006, when he and I were tasked with working alone overnight in the store, engaging in deep cleaning for a coming inspection to be conducted by the corporate goons. I learned two things during the evening that I was isolated with him in that store. First, while it took some time for it to happen, when the guy actually did his job, he did it well. Second — which struck me at a far greater depth — was that this guy, aside from being frustratingly likeable, was incredibly interesting as well, at least when you managed to penetrate the surface. And while by no means did it start and end there, the fact that during that evening he told me various stories regarding his childhood was certainly a vital ingredient.

His childhood was replete with seemingly paranormal circumstances, most of which I might have doubted to a far greater degree if I had the slightest suspicion he had done both considerable research on the topic in general and the specific things he was expressing to me in the context of the tales. I’m still convinced this was not the case. He was, in my opinion, being entirely honest with me, spilling things to me he had perhaps not told anyone else before, not only because people in general, even total strangers, for whatever reason have the tendency to do this with respect to me, but because from the moment he started expressing such things he knew I was interested, he knew that he had my complete attention, and I could tell that he knew.

A lot of what he told me was of deep interest to me. I found it absolutely fascinating. The kicker, however, and the whole point of me sharing this all with you, came towards the end of our shift, I think, or at the very least that was the point at which I got him to elaborate.

The story was about his mother, who he had previously referred to as “psychotic” and had later told me had been diagnosed with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She had been subsequently put on an antipsychotic called Zyprexa, which was also the pharmaceutical I had been put on after my car accident during summer school after my senior year. He had opened the story with a question, as I remember it, and though I didn’t quote it in my journal in any precise way, I recall it as him asking me, “Have you ever heard about someone speaking without moving their lips?”

I felt, at the very least, that I immediately knew what he meant, and that he was expressing it the best as he could given that he didn’t know the term designated for the general experience, which was, of course, telepathy. Aside from his ignorance of the word despite the fact that he had managed to provide a pretty effective way of explaining it — after, or so I remember it, I ensured he didn’t mean to suggest ventriloquism — there was the fact that he asked this in such a way that conveyed to me he didn’t find it anywhere nearly as bizarre as the mainstream, scientific community would. Instead, he said it in such a way that suggested to me that he had lived with a mother who had this capability and, in growing up in that environment, while he didn’t know of anyone else who had described it as a common experience, it was, to him, no more weird than growing up with a mother who had a sixth finger on one of her hands.

When I probed him for details, he gave them to me, to the best of his ability. The nature in which he gave me the details reinforced my feelings that he was being sincere, too, as he articulated it to me in the same way you would expect one to if they had merely accepted an experience as a given and had never invested much thought in it at all, let alone subjected it all to the most cursory analysis.

His mother was Wiccan, he explained, and she had two of her friends — also women, as I recall, and also Wiccan — who would on occasion visit the house. When he was around while they were around, he always knew what they were doing, too. He mentioned them holding eye contact, which would imply the involvement of what I’ve called ocular telepathy, or telepathy and eye contact. I don’t recall if this was something that was required initially, however, just to get the telepathic ball rolling, so to speak, or if it had to be sustained — though given my journal entry, despite my lack of noting it, it did not seem to be necessary at all. After all, he explained that he had learned of his mother’s ability because he would often walk in on her “conversations” between her and her two friends — literally walk between them, I believe — and, within his head, he could “hear,” at the very least, his mother.

It was just like she was talking to you, he explained (though in his own words), but it happened solely within the space of the mind.

During these apparent training sessions, and even outside of them, he told me, his mother would always talk to him in this way. On at least one occasion, she said to him, telepathically, “I know you can hear me,” and obviously, indeed he could — but he only laughed. He couldn’t respond, he explained to me. He didn’t know how.

This also seemed to be the case between Eva and I. She didn’t seem to know how.

Jay and I eventually moved onto other things, undoubtedly driven by him, as I’m certain I would not have voluntarily let this particular subject go, but he returned to it later in the night, perhaps because I had gotten the gears grinding in his mind with respect to all of this and he had never considered giving the experiences any degree of thought until that point. He told me how he thought that it wasn’t through Wicca that his mother had gained this power, but that she could do it naturally; that maybe it was just that only his mother knew how to do it, not the other women. In my translation, he said: perhaps his mother could get into their minds, enabling her to not only send her inner voice into their minds but as a consequence hear their inner voices as well, enabling this form of telepathic communication between them, but that these two women couldn’t do this on their own, which is to say with others outside of herself.

At the time, I countered with this: if that was the case, if she could both read and send thoughts and that’s how her and her two Wiccan friends communciated like this, then he would have been just as capable of telepathically communicating with her through his inner voice than those women were. After all, if she could send and receive linguistic thoughts and he could hear her, all he would have to do to “send” to her would be to think in response to the voice as he thought to himself. Yet he had told me earlier that despite her capability to speak to him in his mind, he was apparently unable to respond. So how could this be the case?

In essence, accepting all that he was telling me, my curiosity was: was it possible that some people, perhaps all people, could telepathically receive linguistic transmissions, but not necessarily transmit their own thoughts? How could Eva not know how to respond to me via linguistic telepathy despite the fact that I could transmit my own thoughts to her, and without even knowing what I was doing? Was it that both Eva and Jay thought merely in mentalese, whereas Jay’s mother and I also had the capacity to think, inside our minds — and consequently those of others — in the form of our native language? Or was it because his mother and I were, in a sense, more practiced — her, with her Wiccan sisters, and I, with my alien friends and foes?

What bothers me most about all of this is that I had a golden opportunity to answer some vital questions regarding this, but my profound anxiety got in the way. For while I did subsequently meet his mother, it was at a party and my anxiety was high, so while we talked a bit, there wasn’t the demonstration I had been aching for. This could have been because she could read my thoughts, perhaps even feel my emotional state, and knew that if this demonstration were to take place I just might lose my mind and go entirely insane. It could also be the case that Jay was providing for me nothing but a feast of utter bullshit, but despite my reservations regarding him (though, like most people, I found him to be a frustratingly likable motherfucker), I honestly think he was telling me the truth.

In that light: now, nearly a decade and a half later, I wish I would have been more relaxed and tried a bit harder to get her to show me what she could do. I have countless questions:

When did this capability begin, and what spawned it? Did it involve meditation, ritual, drug use, or any such combination — for that matter, any altered state of consciousness? Or was she born with it?

Does she feel the energy around and within her body resonate with that of the other individual during telepathy? And consider Jay’s stories of walking between her and another as she was engaging in telepathic communication and hearing them, and her accusing Jay of hearing them: this suggests an energy or force between both of you that serves as the medium. Is it all about energy? In her case, does physical proximity matter?

If she can receive thoughts from them, can she also speak into their minds? Does this work with everyone? Are their obstacles with some people, and if so, what are these obstacles? Is she capable of hearing only conscious, deliberate thoughts, or does she also hear those semiconscious, automatic thoughts, typically negative, as well as whatever else is mulling around in the subliminal, unconscious aspects of the mind?

Does she think in English, and do others who speak English always think similarly, and does she telepathically “hear” those who speak foreign languages think in their own native tongue? Is there any experience with telepathy with someone who thinks primarily in mentalese, and if so, how is the experience different?

Does she always hear “words” when receiving from individuals, or with some people does she merely sense the meaning of what another is thinking and then have to translate the mentalese into words?

Can she also feel the emotions of others, and does she have the sense, as I do, that this kind of telepathic empathy may constitute a weaker or novice form of telepathy?

Can she also send and receive mental imagery, and does this include still and animate imagery as well as immersive, shared, lucid dream scenarios?

Are there ways, practices, escersizes, of which she is aware through which I can voluntarily trigger and utilize this ability, and if so, how? Are there ways to block unwanted, telepathic snoops and eavesdroppers?

Truth be known: I am both horrified by this ability and passionately drawn to it. Lingering in me is the fear that there are others out there who have this ability and have disciplined it, and that their aims, their motivations, may not square with my own, and that they may constitute a threat. For example, though I had asked Jason quite bluntly on several occasions, on all such occasions he expressed uncertainty about ”how deep” his mother can go, and whether it was limited to the foreground, conscious, “working memory” area of the mind. A comment he made to me on several occasions (having forgotten each time, so it seemed and felt to me, that he had mentioned it to me before) regarding something his mother said to him, however, made me even more curious and, I must confess, more than a bit apprehensive. She told him, in essence, that the real “trick” is to learn how to ”think” into other people’s minds and have them think that they thought those thoughts themselves. Unfortunately, I’m uncertain as to whether this suggests learning to speak in the other person’s internal voice or influence them at a more subliminal level. In either case, while this could certainly serve to help and heal others, it could also serve to manipulate them in a malicious manner.

To be able to communicate with another human being in the same way Nimi and I communicated with one another would be profoundly liberating, however. At heart, I feel I am an Artist, as Nimi claimed, and this designation has more to do with my essential, psychological nature than it does any activity in which I engage in service to it. I turn to the visual arts and writing because I feel it is, in many cases, a more effective means of expressing myself than verbal language alone. My telepathic communications with Nimi embraced so much that I felt I’d been lacking, and still lack.

Telepathy and Inner Speech (Part II).

“Welcome to Telepathics Anonymous. Don’t bother introducing yourself.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic.

“I can read minds but I still don’t understand women. Or men. Humans. I don’t understand humans.”
― Tade Thompson, Rosewater.

II. Anecdotes of Receptive Linguistic Telepathy.

With my fellow humans, I’ve had three apparent experiences of linguistic telepathy. One, which was entirely convincing to me, involved telepathic transmission on my part, whereas the other two seemed to be experiences of telepathic reception. The first and most convincing circumstance of the two occurred on September 16, 2011, around a half past ten in the evening, as I was at my fast food place of employment and in the process of gathering trash from the front drive thru. Nearby was Kami, a girl I knew only peripherally, who:

“… said not so much to me, yet to some degree for me, that she’s ready to go home because, as she put it, she needs to “spend some money.” I took that as a cue to say something, so I said curiously, “Spend some money on what?” She laughed, and said, “Drugs.” I laughed under my breath in response.

Only I soon realized she didn’t really laugh and say, “Drugs.” Not with her mouth, anyway.

If you can imagine for a moment that the noise around you fades out in volume into a slightly muffled background and her giggling laugh and that single word breaking in softly into the foreground, that’s about as closely as I can describe the experience. As I leaned over to push the trash bags into the empty trash can, I realized the odd nature of it all and was unable to shake it, and I found myself asking aloud to her, “Did you just say ‘drugs’ or did I just think you said it?”

There was an odd, nervous sort of silence around me after that came out of my mouth and I glanced up and towards her.

“I didn’t say that,” she finally said, with a certain degree of nervous caution, “but I’m not saying that’s not what I’m spending money on.”

“Well,” I said in a lower volume, putting the trash can back and proceeding to get a small cup of coffee, “as long as it’s good shit.”

“Always,” she said, teasingly and yet with what I sensed to be total seriousness.”

Some time later, I told her about this. In excitement, she professed that she believed me and that while she couldn’t be sure, she had most likely been thinking about spending her money on drugs at the time. This didn’t qualify as confirmation to my mind, though it certainly made me feel significantly less weird and potentially insane about it. Essentially the same was the case roughly seven months later, on April 23, 2012, when it seemed to happen again at work, though less convincingly, and this time with another girl:

“As I was cleaning fryers, Jamila was beside me, scooping fries into cartons. I thought I heard her say something, and asked her to repeat herself to ensure that I heard her right, though as soon as I did it dawned on me that it didn’t sound like an external voice, but an internal one. It felt and “sounded” just as it had when it happened with Kami back in September — and she later confirmed that she was indeed thinking the thought at the time, though for all I know she could have been mistaken.

As for Jamila, she paused for a second before turning her eyes towards me and informing me that she hadn’t said anything. “Never mind,” I told her, trying to brush it off.

“What did you think I said?” She asked, curious.

“I’d rather not say,” I told her.
“Why?”

“Because if I just heard your thoughts, I don’t want to know.”

Facing me now, she became more animated and insisted I tell her. I told her I didn’t remember, and though she did not believe me, of course, it suddenly struck me that I honestly didn’t remember. That fact mystified and worried me.

Was I back in the paranormal afterglow that seemed to proceed my encounters with the aliens? I’d developed a painful mark behind my ear in the last day or two, and this bred paranoid thoughts.

A few days later, on April 20, I was with Jamila and two others at a bowling alley, and we were talking. She mentioned that when she was younger she used to make her brother believe that she could read their thoughts, and I laughed, telling her how I had often [done] the exact same thing to my sisters when I was younger. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you could,” she said in a calm, sincere manner.

“What makes you say that?” I said, laughing nervously and looking at her, perplexed.

“I can just see you being able to do that,” she said.

It made me feel strange. Not bad, not good, just strange.”

Subsequent internet research revealed that I was by no means alone; in fact, the reports that I read provided greater suggestive evidence (however anecdotal) for its existence than my own experiences. One account (which I copied and pasted from the net but have, to my endless frustration, been unable to find again) was provided by 16-year-old Aryanna Lockhart on May 12, 2018, who mentions having had other telepathic experiences. In an attempt to experiment with telepathy, she had asked her friend, Ali, to think of something and repeat it over and over again in her mind. After roughly ten minutes, Aryanna yelled out, “Brownie!” Ali shot her a surprised look, and upon questioning her, Ali confirmed she had been right. She had been repeating, “cupcake, brownie, cupcake, brownie,” in her head, and it was at a point when she had landed on “brownie” that Aryanna screamed it aloud. This reminded me a lot of a similar story by Koda in his 2004 book Instant Enlightenment: Metaphysical Fast Food, though in his case he was the “sender” and the experiment involved sending a mere letter.

On a 2011 thread on the site SpritualForums, a user by the name of Sagress tells what, in my opinion, is an even more intriguing story. Though, like Lockhart, he mentions having had a few other seemingly telepathic experiences in the past, he was always able to dismiss them; this most recent experience, however, was far more extreme and has left him rather perplexed.

He described how he would get on the bus every afternoon, wearing his earbuds, music blocking out all sound around him. Once seated, he would put on his sunglasses and gaze out the window until reaching his destination. One day the previous week, he believes it was a Wednesday, he suddenly heard a man yelling at an incredible volume, though with remarkable clarity — all this despite the earbuds, mind you, and despite the fact that whatever this man was screaming was utterly incoherent. It startled him so much that he nearly fell out of his seat.

Confusion set in as he realized that he was hearing the guy far too clearly over the music, so he took his earbuds out and began looking around the bus. No one appeared to be screaming and no one was reacting to the screaming — the screaming he continued to hear, I might add. He also couldn’t ascertain the direction of the angry voice. It then dawned on him that it was not, in fact, a sound from the external world but was rather coming from inside his mind — though it wasn’t his own internal voice. This internal screaming lasted for roughly half a minute until it stopped and the voice began speaking very fast and nervously, and in the midst of it he was able to discern a bit of what it was saying. As he explains:

“I heard it say “I need my fix. Hurry up. Hurry UP!” The words were going so fast that I’m sure no one could have spoken them aloud, but I could still make perfect sense of them. Then a man stood up in the isle and sat on the steps in the centre of the bus. He was shaking and biting his nails, which caught my eye because no one else on the bus looked uncomfortable. I wondered what was wrong with him. Then he got up as the bus stopped and said “bout f@%#in time!” aloud to the bus driver in [the] EXACT same voice I was hearing in my head at the same time. As the bus moved away I felt something quickly ‘hit’ my hand, it was like a sting or an electric zap and then the voice was gone. Just like that.”

There are quite a few interesting observations to be made here. First, as in both my own case and that of Lockhart, Sagress mentioned having had other experiences in the realm of telepathy, and presumably different forms of it. Despite the fact that him and I were both familiar with the telepathic experience, however, it took him thirty seconds to realize it was an “inner voice” he was hearing whereas it only took me, at most, a few seconds. As curious as this is, I don’t even have a poor excuse for a hypothesis to offer as a potential explanation. More importantly, however, much as was the case with “hearing” Kami, the internal voice of the individual in Sangress’s case seemed to match their external voice, which psychological studies into the nature of inner speech tells us is typically the case. In my case it was immediately clear from whom the voice came, which could be considered odd, as while I am particularly sensitive to external sounds (and damned near everything else) I am typically quite poor in determining the source of the sound. Unlike Sangrass, however, I actually knew my transient, telepathic partner to some degree and may have ascertained it was her, despite the fact that I wasn’t looking at her, simply because I knew the sound of her voice (and so her “inner voice”), not to mention the fact that I had just spoken to her verbally. The fact that he didn’t know the guy and, presumably, had not previously heard the guy’s external voice until after he heard the internal one, therefore adds more credibility to his story than my own — particularly when coupled with the fact that the internal voice expressed it’s eagerness for a fix before he witnessed the guy who, based on the external voice which matched the internal one, exhibited behavior certainly befitting one who owned that internal voice.

Also potentially relevant here is that in both this story and my experience with Kami the inner voice heard was one that was clearly and strongly emotionally invested in acquiring drugs — a correlation that made me very curious when I realized it. Though Kami did not, so far as I know, constitute an addict at the time, she was certainly on her way: years later she developed an addiction to meth for which she sought treatment and, based on what she conveyed through social media, was having an understandably rough time with recovery.
This correlation was not simply between the experiences of Sagress and I, either; it continued as I went on with my research, too. On the site Psychic Experiences, in a 2008 post entitled, “I Heard Someone’s Thoughts in my Head,” Denae from Massachusetts shared her own experience, which shares some core qualities with the busride experience of Sangrass and my own experience with Kami, though the drug involved in this case wasn’t an illicit one:

“I was at work, and this guy comes up to my register, and I have never met this guy before. He was looking in the other direction, not talking, and I’m ringing him out. All of a sudden, I HEARD his voice in my head saying “Newports… Newports…” I just looked at him and said “Don’t even bother asking. We’re completely sold out of Newports…” and he looked at me with SHOCK in his eyes. And he goes “Oh… okay well I’ll, I’ll… I’ll have some marlboro menthols…” I ring him out and he HIGHTAILS it out of there. Remember, I had never met this guy, and he was looking in the opposite direction, so he wasn’t glancing at the cigarette shelves.

It took a few minutes for what just happened to sink in. It’s like I heard his thoughts. But not with my ears… Like I heard it in my head. I was completely freaked out. I was even shaking like a leaf for a long time after that.”

In a 2009 response to Denae’s post, a user by the name of Kyrie08 shared a personal experience that, while she did not mention it, clearly related to Denae’s experience, and not only in the sense that it provided another example of linguistic telepathy of the receptive kind:

“This has happened to me before. I was working as a hostest in a restaurant. Two people came to the podium, I asked if it was just the two of them she said yes and I bent down to get menus and silverware for the couple. The couple was completely out of my sight, considering that I was down behind the podium. I heard the lady say “desert” I stood up abrubtly and asked desert menu? She looked puzzled smiled and said shook her head yes. I quickly switched the menus and when I stood back up she asked me how I knew she wanted [dessert] menus. I told her that I heard her say it. She told me that she hadn’t said a word and her boyfriend confirmed that, she said that she had been thinking it and was going to ask her waitress for it. So what I thought I HEARD I apparently hadn’t.”

While it may sound like a stretch to some, one must accept that dessert menus contain ingredients such as sugar and caffeine, which studies have revealed affect the brain in a manner similar to certain drugs. Though I should be clear here that I don’t think the common denominator here is drugs, at least not directly, addiction to them certainly arouses an intensity of emotion in the user with respect to acquiring them, and even if you don’t consider “the dessert menu” as equivalent to drug addiction, it certainly arouses a similar emotional intensity, and it seems clear to me that it played a role in all the above anecdotes — save for perhaps my apparent experience with Jamila, as I don’t remember what I “heard,” and perhaps for Lockhart’s experience with her friend Ali — though I’d argue that the emotional intensity involved in her determination to verify telepathy through personal experiment may have provided the sufficient emotional element, one that is more easily and therefore more frequently elicited in fiending for drugs.

Parapsychological studies have suggested that emotional intensity is conducive to telepathy. My own experience in which I feel that, through an energy in and around the bodies of people, I can feel the emotions of others, and have subsequent emotional reactions to those received feelings — what might be called telepathic empathy or emotive telepathy — suggest to me that such empathy is a lesser form of telepathy, and that given sufficient emotional intensity inner speech can “piggyback” these emotions. I am not of the opinion, I feel I should make clear, that even emotional intensity is required for telepathy, or even this particular type of telepathy, to occur, though again, such intense emotional states clearly seem to be conducive to these experiences.

At least at this point in time, I look at this form as telepathy as being an internal analogue to the external equivalent. For instance, if you can hear someone from a good distance away, it might be due to the fact that you have relatively good ears (you have telepathic sensitivity, at least in terms of telepathic receptivity) coupled with the fact that the person in question was screaming (their internal speech was associated with remarkably intense emotions). This is my way of making sense out of the aforementioned examples. Instead, you might be able to hear someone a good distance away, even if they’re whispering (there are no intense emotions fueling their thoughts) simply because you have good ears and a highly disciplined ability to hear (you are talented and/or disciplined in telepathic receptivity), much as is the case with a close friend of mine, who is a remarkably talented musician.

This brings us to a story regarding an evidently gifted telepathic receiver — one who seemed to have a particularly sensitive and/or well-disciplined mind’s ear. On the Interfaith forum in a thread entitled, “Telepathy – Experiences and Insights,” MJG responded to share their story, though it is from the perspective not of the receiver, but of someone who had evidently read, or rather “listened” to, their mind:

“I was washing dishes while a friend of mine cooked in our college dormitory kitchen.

My friend’s food started to burn. I remembered how another girl named Paula, who had lived in our dorm over 18 months ago, used to burn herself occasionally while cooking. Neither my friend nor I had spoken of Paula in nearly a year.

As soon as I had had the thought, my friend said, out loud: “Yeah, but Paula never burnt any of the actual food she made.”

I’m convinced that the statistical probability of my friend accurately guessing what I was thinking is negligible. And, on top of this, over the course of the next year this girl did several other things that made my friends and I all suspicious (and a little uncomfortable at times) that occasionally she was privy to more than just our spoken words.”

This brings us to another such experience, formerly referenced, which was documented by Koda in his 2004 book, Instant Enlightenment: Metaphysical Fast Food, where he explains his first attempts at telepathy in the 1970s. Chuck, a friend of his, was alone with him in a car, smoking hashish, when they decided to experiment. Chuck was to try to remain receptive as Koda attempted to focus and “send” a letter to him. After visualizing the letter “R” for roughly five minutes using a variety of techniques, his frustration grew until, in inner speech and not by use of his mouth, he “screamed” the letter R, at which time Chuck screamed it verbally. Again, it seems as though intense emotion — in this case, frustration — provided the necessary conductivity. Though they tried several times to replicate their apparent accomplishment, they ultimately met with failure; regardless, this experience enhanced Koda’s interest and spawned subsequent experiments in this and many other areas of the paranormal.

This is like most of the transmission cases that I have found, which are to say they are typically the result of a deliberate attempt to do so, very unlike most reception accounts, which seem to suggest that sending is as unintentional as the ability to receive in such cases.

It strikes me as strange that while I’ve come across many cases in which people experience linguistic telepathy of the receptive kind, there are far fewer reported cases of linguistic telepathic transmission, in which an individual either deliberately or unintentionally “sends” their inner voice into the working memory of another. It could be argued, of course, that all the above cases clearly involved both telepathic reception and transmission, but given that the majority of such “reception” cases involve individuals who report having had other telepathic experiences, the implication appears to be that the experience came about due to their receptive talents as opposed to the other person being a talented, telepathic transmitter. Given this, it may be the case that there are fewer recorded instances of transmission or “sending” than receiving because the unintentional sender was not doing anything differently, and certainly not deliberately transmitting, they just happened to come across someone sensitive enough to receive their thoughts at a time when their thoughts were being fueled by emotional intensity. As a consequence, the receiver may not speak about it to the sender, or even react in an obvious way, and so the unintentional sender would never know. At best, then, you might get a report of telepathic reception

My own, singular experience with unintentional linguistic telepathic transmission — my most intense, human, telepathic experience in this area, which is to say my aforementioned experience with Eva — makes this difficult for me to believe, however, as I immediately sensed that the individual in question “heard” me and this subsequently inspired a desire to verify I wasn’t going batshit insane.

Telepathy and Inner Speech (Part I).

I. Linguistic Telepathy, Aliens, & The Incommensurability Problem.

“Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project’s idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea–if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t exist with a system which doesn’t work.”

― Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl.

“In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could telepathically send them to anyone, but rational thinking is so closely tied to language that it is very unlikely that complex thoughts could be sent across language barriers. Words will still be sent telepathically in their original language.” 

― Michio Kaku, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind.

While largely ignored by the scientific community, even within the realm of parapsychology, what we might call “linguistic telepathy” is a form of telepathy fairly popular in fiction, and it involves what traditional psychologists often call inner speech. It was present, for instance, in Stephen King’s 1977 book and disappointing miniseries, The Shining, which aired two decades after the novel — and, of course, also featured in Stanley Kurbick’s epic yet not altogether faithful 1980 film adaptation. It was again present in King’s novel Doctor Sleep, a sequel to The Shining, and in the film adaptation. The character Matt Parkman had the ability in the television series, Heroes, and it also featured in the first episode of the second season of the 2019 reboot of The Twilight Zone, entitled “Meet in the Middle.” As I’ve recently been enlightened to, as I finally got around to reading the book, it was also present in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land

Despite the ignorance or disinterest of parapsychologists, however, experiences of this type are by no means confined to the realm of fiction: there are indeed anecdotal accounts. One area of the unknown (and at least partially paranormal) in which telepathy involving inner speech has played a consistent role is in reports of alien encounters and alien abduction — which I can personally attest to, for what that’s worth. The issue is that in the alien abduction literature, all telepathy typically functions as a barely-noticeable backdrop, an unspoken given that is hardly acknowledged, much less examined by researchers, no doubt due to the cornucopia of grander weirdness offered by this aspect of the UFO phenomenon. One abduction investigator who stands out in this regard is David Jacobs, who has spent some time studying and contemplating this issue. He wrote about it in his book, Walking Among Us, and in his paper, “Telepathy and Emotion in Alien Society,” though his most relevant insight came in his 1992 book, Secret Life: Firsthand Accounts of UFO Abductions, his first book on the abduction phenomenon, where he made an interesting observation about how telepathy functions within that context:

During the entire abduction experience, communication between aliens and abductees is telepathic. The abductee either “hears” the communication or receives an impression in her mind. … Usually the abductee receives only an “impression” of what the Beings are communicating and has difficulty repeating specific words and sentences, although some people “hear” sentences in their minds and can recall not only the sense of the communication but the words as well.


This I’ve always found interesting, for while there was at least one occasion I recall in which I received “impressions” from one of the creatures, I would typically “hear” sentences during this kind of direct telepathic communication despite the fact that, as reported by Jacobs, this is apparently a relatively uncommon experience. This distinction in the experience of telepathy during abductions and encounters only began to make sense to me when I learned about studies into inner speech in mainstream psychology. While scientific studies into inner speech is currently in its infancy, it is currently believed that everyone experiences what we could call inner speech, at least in a sense, it’s just that they experience it in two main fashions: through symbolic and non-symbolic language. 

Symbolic language is what we naturally associate with inner speech, and this is an umbrella term for the agreed-upon verbal and written languages we develop as a culture in order to communicate with other members of our cultural tribe. We grow up within the confines of a particular culture and therefore within its characteristic linguistic context, and as a result of that come to use it to communicate with others externally; as a result of that, some of us ultimately internalize it as an additional means by which we can communicate with ourselves. After all, it is far more economical to think within our shared, linguistic context than outside of it, as in doing so we save the time and energy we would otherwise be wasting in our efforts to translate when communicating our thoughts to others.

In the context of symbolic language, then, inner speech refers to the monologues or dialogues many of us have with ourselves within the presumed privacy of our own minds, where we “speak” to ourselves without making corresponding noises with our mouths. Despite this, our inner voice tends to echo the accent, tones, and inflections of our external voice — though not always. I have found that when I’ve been listening to quite a bit of a single comedian, a narrative voice in a documentary, or even a specific YouTuber, my inner voice will for a short time afterward take on their own.

While some experience this inner speech primarily in the form of monologues, many, such as myself, also engage in internal dialogues in which they have a back-and-forth with themselves. Ordinarily, the person experiences themselves as being at both ends of the conversation, though occasionally they imagine talking with others, sometimes even in “imagined interactions.” These are occasions in which the inner voice can be utilized in tandem with other internal experiences, such as emotions, simulated sensations, as well as still and animate imagery. This experience appears to be synonymous with what is typically referred to as daydreaming. These are simulated scenarios we generate in our minds, for instance, when we think of the perfect line or perfect thing to do in a situation in retrospect — “the spirit of the stairway,” as it’s been called. We may also imagine a potential future scenario, rehearsing what we’ll say and do. Last but not least, we can, of course, imagine entirely fictitious scenarios as well 

To my surprise, I discovered that not only do people experience inner speech in different fashions, as suggested above, but also with varying degrees of frequency. 

It was only in mid-to-late 2019 when I saw a meme circling around on a social media site that alleged that not all people had the capacity to think in one’s native language, and when I also discovered, to my surprise, that I knew someone like this, I knew I had to engage in some research and reevaluate many of my former assumptions. So I did some research, and indeed, I found recent studies which suggest that while, like me, some people think predominantly within the context of their native language, almost as a default, others do so only occasionally. And much like there are those with aphasia, which is to say those who cannot generate mental imagery, there are also those who claim they are psychologically mute, having never experienced an internal voice at all. 

When not thinking within the context of symbolic thought, it turns out that people can still think, it’s just that their “inner speech” comes in the form of a non-symbolic language, or what the “language of thought” hypothesis refers to as “mentalese” — an underlying, innate, non-symbolic, language-like mode of thinking we all share from the dawn of our consciousness. In the midst of my research, I suddenly recalled that Chomsky had spoken of this as well — of a basic grammar underlying all language that is innate to our species and serves as a basic template that all of our specific, native languages conform to. Put another way, Chomsky suggested that the process of learning our native language as a child is actually the process of learning to translate our innate mentalese into our native language.

As evidence of mentalese, particularly with respect to those of us that think in symbolic language as a default, it is important to realize that even we all get a taste of it here and there, specifically during those occasions in which we can’t think of a word yet know exactly what it means — clearly, as despite having lost the word we nonetheless know what we desire to communicate, as if that were not the case it wouldn’t be so goddamn frustrating. These are known as tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTS), and studies evidently suggest that this happens about once a week for most of us and increases with frequency as we age until it happens roughly once a day. In the most frustrating cases, TOTS also involve what are commonly referred to as “blockers,” or “ugly sisters,” which are things associated with the desired word. I think it goes even deeper than this, however, for on far too many occasions I’ve also struggled to convey something for which I had not the words and ultimately had to accept the fact that such words, at least in my native language, simply didn’t exist. I’ve also had the experience when I find myself staring into space yet upon reflection found myself unable to recall or at the very least explain what I’d been thinking during that period. 

This seemed to provide some clarity with respect to linguistic telepathy, as it appeared to be supported by what Jacobs had to say about the nature of telepathy during the abduction experience. To recap that which was quoted earlier, he stated that a relatively small percentage of abductees could either literally “hear ” what the aliens were saying inside their minds, which, given my updated context, would imply linguistic telepathy involving symbolic inner speech, but that a greater percentage merely received impressions that they then had to translate into their native language, at least when expressing those impressions to others. 

Assuming the aliens in question communicate in telepathic mentalese, it would make sense that abductees who think in mentalese themselves would immediately understand the telepathic impressions of the aliens but that they would have to translate it into their native language before expressing it to other humans. Abductees who think symbolically, however, would have to translate the telepathic impressions into their native language in realtime, as if they did not do so they would be unable to consciously comprehend what was being communicated.

Assuming that the aliens in question communicate telepathically in one’s own native language, however, it would make sense that those who by default think within the context of their own native language would understand them at an immediate and specific, but to a nonetheless limited degree, as there is always something lost in translation — be it from mentalese to symbolic language, or from one symbolic language to a foreign Other. If permitted, questions expressed due to a need for greater detail and discrimination would likely result from such a communication.

What about linguistic telepathic experiences between those who spoke one native language and those who spoke another, relatively foreign language, however? Imagine, for instance, that I, a symbolic thinker who only knows English, were to have an experience of linguistic telepathy with a symbolic thinker who only knows Chinese: would they hear English when I communicate to them, and would I hear Chinese when they spoke to me, thereby rendering our communications as useless as it would have been had we spoken verbally? Or would the underlying, shared, nonsymbolic language of mentalese be transmitted as well, either allowing us to understand one another despite the foreign languages we were using to communicate one another or automatically and unconsciously translating that mentalese into inner speech, overriding the foreign mental tongue?

It also helped make more sense of tales I had researched long ago, both of which emerged out of Catholicism — specifically the cases of Padre Pio and Maria de Jesus de Agreda, “The Lady in Blue,” both of whom were venerated by the Catholic Church. Both were evidently rather adept at the out-of-body experience (OBE), too, it would seem, and allegedly capable of other astounding feats of psi, even if taken solely within the context of OBEs. While their stories — which are intriguing, to say the least — deserve to be detailed in a paper dedicated to that subject, I mention both here because they both exhibited apparent telepathy in a similar fashion that always fascinated me and now makes some sense in the context of what is known regarding mentalese. 

First is one of the countless peculiar stories regarding the abilities of Padre Pio, this one from the era of World War II. The tale comes to us from Benardo Rosini, a general of the Italian Air Force. During a search for a secret storehouse of weapons hidden in the Nazi territory of San Giovanni, several allied pilots reported seeing a monk with upheld hands floating in the sky. They also described some strange sort of resistance around the monk, making them unable to fly over the target — or drop their bombs for that matter, as the mechanism seemed to be jammed. The first mission to encounter this problem returned to base, more than a little embarrassed to report what had occurred. They tried again and again, but try as they might, mission after mission returned to the base at Bari, Italy, reporting a hovering monk in the sky over San Giovanni. What first seemed like a joke soon bred into fear, so the US Commanding General took up a squadron under his own command — but he met with the same result. Situation what-the-fuck: big floating monk. Bombs were dropped and obliterated the surrounding area, but not one was to fall on San Giovanni. After the war, the American General, along with a few pilots, went to the town and sought out the monk with the superpowers that was known to live there. When he entered the Capuchin monastery, he recognized, in a group of friars, the hovering, supernatural monk he’d seen during the war: Padre Pio. It was Pio that went towards him right away, however, putting his hand upon the General’s shoulder and saying: ”So it is you, the one who wanted to do away with us all.”

Interestingly, though Padre Pio had spoken this in his Benevento dialect, the general was convinced he had spoken in English. In a few renditions of this account, it was explained as one of his many “talents”. I also found a similar account in the story of Maria de Jesus de Agreda (“Sister Mary of Jesus”), also known as The Lady in Blue.

There was Catholic mission known as the Isolita Mission, which took place in 1622 in the area now known as New Mexico in order to convert some of the native tribes to Christianity. There had been, from the Christian perspective, failures and successes, but with respect to some tribes, it seemed, there was no job to be done at all. Case in point: in 1629, Father Alonzo de Benavides had been approached by a group of some fifty natives of an unknown tribe who asked that their missionaries be sent to them. This native tribe, known as the Jamanos, claimed they were sent by a mysterious, young and beautiful Lady in Blue who had been teaching them the ways of Christianity. And this, to put it mildly, was more than a little odd.

Nonetheless, two missionaries were sent back with the tribe, who had evidently traveled the lengthy distance from Texas to the priests by means of directions that had been given to them by the Lady in Blue. Upon investigation, it was found that though these native peoples had never met any of the Spanish or French and no official missionary had yet reached them, they knew things they should not, and by all logical reasoning could not have known. For instance, they carried crosses, had altars, knew Roman Catholic rituals and liturgy — and all in their native language. The missionaries then went about baptizing the entire tribe.

Naturally, the question arises: just who the fuck was this Lady in Blue? ”She came down from the heights to us,” the natives had said to him, ”she taught us the new religion, she stayed among us for a time, she told us you would come and to make you welcome, and then she went away. That’s all we know.”

Father Benavides knew that the nuns of the Poor Clare order wore blue habits, and so he found a painting of one of them — of one Sister Louisa Carrion, to be exact — and showed it to the Jamanos. He asked if this was the woman, and they said that while that was certainly the outfit, it wasn’t the woman herself. The woman in the painting, they said, was too elderly and chubby; the woman they’d seen had been beautiful and young. So the lady was a Poor Clare nun, it seemed, though evidently not the one he’d revealed to them in the painting. This actually didn’t help in the manner of an explanation, Benavides knew, because from the day they took their vows and onward to the grave these nuns never left their convents, much less journeyed far distances on unofficial missions to fucking Mexico.

More than a little confused, Father Benavides wrote to King Philip IV of Spain and Pope Urban VIII in order to get to the bottom of this. He told them about what was going on and asked for their help in solving the mystery. He wanted to discover who had been there before him and, as it seemed, beaten him to the punch. The response from both of them was that no one had been sent before Benavides at all.

They decided to investigate, however, and soon enough they found her. In the Poor Clare convent in Agreda, Spain, they found Maria de Jesus de Agreda, the superior of the convent. This woman, now 29 years of age, was a mystic and had experienced many “visions” over the course of her life which fed her writing. And even prior to her questioning due to Father Benavides inquiry, she had openly admitted to visiting and converting the Natives of North America. When she was presented with the argument that this was impossible, as she’d never left the convent, she responded by saying she had visited them ”not in body, but in spirit.”

In more modern terminology, she had visited them in a non-corporeal form during an out-of-body experience.

So a letter was sent to Father Benavides in Spain, informing him that he’d better come meet with the nun, as something was certainly amiss — and this he did that year of 1631. Upon meeting her, he discovered that between 1620 and 1631, she often lapsed into these cataleptic trances during which she had strange dreams, or visions, of being carried to strange lands occupied by strange people, to whom she taught her religion. It is claimed that she visited various tribes in the American Southwest some 500 times, sometimes four times a day, to whom she was variously known as the Blue Lady.

As proof of her seemingly impossible disembodied journeys, she was able to provide details about the natives such as their customs, clothes and appearance. She could describe the climate. She gave names of tribes the father either had already known about or later on found to be accurate. She knew things that had just been recently discovered by the Europeans, as a matter of fact, and which it was either impossible or highly unlikely for her to know. As impossible as it seemed that this woman was traveling out of body, it equally seemed indisputable that this nun had been to this distant land and mingled with the tribes.

Most relevant is how they understood her, and her them, as she had no way to know their language. She explained that she had simply spoken to them in her disembodied form and that her supposed deity had let them understand one another, which makes about as much sense as explaining Padre Pio’s indistinguishable ability (though his stories suggest he could also accomplish this while within his physical form) as “one of his talents.”

While this may not suggest telepathy to some, it’s been the only way these incidents, assuming they truly happened, could ever hope to make any sense to me. In present terminology, my hypothesis on the Padre Pio incident could be articulated in this way: as he spoke in his own dialect, he simultaneously communicated the message in mentalese, which the general’s mind automatically interpreted into his own language. With respect to the Lady in Blue, her means of communicating to the tribe in a disembodied form makes the telepathy hypothesis a bit more digestible, as there was no spoken word to contend with. The Blue Lady’s explanation that her deity permitted them to understand one another could be easily explained as a theological rationalization of two-way mentalese telepathy.

Mentalese would prove to be invaluable with respect to linguistic telepathy, particularly if you are alien to the culture and the associated language in question. Its true that in the process of communicating non-symbolically that much may be lost in translation, or at least left uncomfortably vague, but it would constitute a truly universal language, it would provide a common ground for all life, or at least all intelligent life, and this common ground may not be exclusive to those who evolved on earth, but all life — or intelligent life — throughout the cosmos.

In other words, this may constitute an answer to what those involved with SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) have come to refer to as the Incommensurability Problem. This refers to the anticipated cognitive mismatch between humans and an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). They may have developed under entirely different conditions from within a truly alien ecosystem on an exoplanet radically different than our own. They may have evolved distinct sense organs and instincts and even have a far longer lifespan than the oldest human that has ever lived. All these variables would certainly influence their understanding of the world and, to get to the core of the problem, influence how they think and communicate. If that were the case, how could we effectively communicate with each other? Where is our analogue to the Rosetta Stone? Would our divergent histories breed divergent cognition, making mutual understanding entirely impossible? Even if we could communicate with one another, could we really understand one another? This has spawned a search for a “universal language.”

Carl Sagan logically deduced that any ETI capable of creating technology that would enable them to communicate with us through, for instance, radio, regardless as to the specifics of its origins or the circumstances of its development, must be well versed in math and science. It was based on the assumption that these were external things we’d all see, logical conclusions we’d all come to, regardless of planetary or cultural context, simply by virtue that we emerged in the same universe, with the same governing laws. So he elected math and science as the universal language, and it was under the guidance of this logic that he pushed for the golden records on the Pioneer Probes and something else. He also scoffed at UFO sightings, abductions, and anything paranormal or parapsychological, however, so would have naturally dismissed telepathy as a likely candidate for a universal language. 

Exploiting telepathy with inner speech at the non-symbolic, mentalese level would in effect answer the incommensurability problem, however, as mentalese would constitute a language shared by all forms of life, cutting across all categories, be it regional or planetary. In this context the differences Jacobs identified between what abductees experience in the realm of telepathy involving inner speech during abduction experiences make a great deal more sense. 

If the bulk of UFO and alien encounters and particularly alien abductions are to be believed, they utilize telepathy as their central mode of communication. I assume this is even the case outside encounters and abductions, as aliens, for instance, often communicate telepathically to one another during abductions and abductees can sometimes “tap into” their conversation. If the aliens predominantly communicated verbally, for instance, they would likely use this when speaking to one another during abductions for the same reason my parents used to spell out words when they were trying to hide from us what they were talking about when we were kids. They don’t, however, and if they’re an interstellar species that has come into contact with other forms of intelligent life, this actually makes a good deal of sense, especially in the light of how telepathic mentalese functions. There is no need for a Rosetta Stone, as it overcomes the language barrier, just as it did with Padre Pio, The Lady in Blue, and presumably countless abductees. 

Assuming we’re not the first ETI they’ve interacted with, telepathy in the form of mentalese is probably their basic means of telepathic communication. Those abductees who think predominantly in mentalese would receive “impressions” during their telepathic communications with aliens which their minds would then have to translate into symbolic language, at least when expressing those conversations to others, thereby serving the role as an interpreter, whereas those who think predominantly in symbolic language would only have to engage in transcription, playing the role of a stenographer. 

Many of the aliens, or at the very least those who have been cast in roles that require extensive, long-form communication, have probably studied our native languages, however, and may, on top of their mentalese capabilities, communicate to us through our familiar, linguistic context. What would be the benefit of this? Those abductees who thought symbolically would hear and potentially have a telepathic dialogue with them through inner speech that parallels the way human beings verbally communicate to one another, but those abductees who thought in mentalese: what of them? 

Being someone who thinks predominantly in symbolic language myself, this makes a good deal of sense with respect to my alien encounters that involved linguistic telepathy. In my flashback concerning the creature who called himself the Doctor, which I detailed in my blog post Ancestral Interstellar Supervillains, I know that I at least initially received impressions and associated imagery when he telepathically communicated with me — no inner speech was involved:

Upon meeting his eyes, we were suddenly communicating mind-to-mind. Any sense I had of my external environment vanished as I became absorbed in the content occupying the mental bond we now shared. He had commandeered my psyche and, judging from the high-speed picture-show flashing before my inner eye like a flipbook composed of random images, proceeded to explore it with as much speed and thoroughness as his little henchmen had been exploring the room. It was as if he was working the switches of my mind yet leaving me there to witness the process as a passive passenger. Ultimately he communicated to me in what seemed to be a form of internal yet interpersonal dialogue. They were Scientists, he told me, and he was The Doctor. He was very old, very wise, and in some way served as a grandfather to me.

Though I explained this as “a form of internal yet interpersonal dialogue,” it was much unlike my telepathic conversations with Nimi. They seemed to be expressed initially as simple meanings, with subsequent symbols spawning in my mind as a result. Though I’ve never expressed it in writing, I specifically recall that when he communicated the fact that he was The Doctor to me I didn’t “hear” that fact internally but rather saw it visually, as an image in my mind, displayed as if the text, written on the old, worn page of a book, was viewed from an angle. Still, this image seemed attached to impressions, so it was predominantly mentalese. 

With the creature called the Leader — who I encountered in the toy room of my childhood friend Jimmy when him, his brother, and I were “camping out” there — I know that we argued telepathically, and though I feel that we exchanged words of the “inner dialogue” order, I’ve been unable to recall the details of the conversation, so I have little of substance to offer with respect to this circumstance.

Nimi and I often had extensive conversations, however, which involved exchanges in inner speech, often in tandem with associated still and animate imagery in such a way that the inner speech served as a kind of internal voiceover. In the group of flashbacks I had concerning her, I can recall particular sentences and even specific chunks of dialogue we had between one another telepathically. The nature of our extensive interactions and two-way communications is, in fact, one of the few central reasons why my memories of her remain  far more difficult for me to dismiss in my most self-doubting moments than my interactions with the other creatures. I simply cannot convince myself that our meetings merely constitute dialogues I had with some hallucinogenic externalization of my unconscious during my childhood or that these memories are in fact false memories obscuring a real-time interaction with some dissociated aspect of my psyche or autonomous subpersonality. She felt too real, undeniably real, as if I were truly dealing with a separate entity. 

While all of my encounters with her suggest linguistic telepathy was involved, in at least two encounters I had with her sometime between the ages of five and eleven, both experiences that I’ve written of elsewhere, there was additional suggestion that this was the case.

I wrote about one such conversation in my post Aliens, Auras, and the Indigo Children:

In the midst of what seemed to be a more casual conversation than those which we usually had, I remember revealing to Nimi how I had recently decided that I wanted to be either a scientist or a chef when I grew up. We were, at the time, both standing in my room in the area opposite the bed, with her beside me, far taller than me. Curious as to what she did for a living, I asked her what she was, and she said she was a Teacher. I pondered on whether I might one day be a teacher as well. In response, she said that I was an Artist, that it was “my work.” Curious, I asked her how she knew it would be my job. She said that she did not mean that kind of work, at least not necessarily. Instead, she explained, by “work” she meant that it was a talent I had developed over the course of many lifetimes and would most likely continue developing in this one.


The other experience I wrote about in a post entitled Nimi’s Planes:

She had been beside my loft bed in the darkness when, in the midst of our conversation, I confessed to her that I had always felt as if I had a foot in two worlds. As I told her this, I imagined my body wedged between a paper-thin membrane separating two realities, involuntarily painting a mental picture for her to go along with my telepathic voice-over just as she so often did with me. She responded with a soft, “in a way, that is true,” which made me immediately suspicious. I feared from her mental tone that perhaps it was just the all-too-typical adult’s way of humoring a child, but she then did what adults characteristically failed to do after casting out those words: she actually explained to me just in what way that it was true. 

This was when we came to share the same dreamscape, floating beside one another. At some distance in the blue-black space before us, I saw four or five flat, rectangular boards hovering slightly above one another. She told me that there were “planes of existence” and that some people could function better on one plane than on others. Despite the fact that I have no recollection of it, she must have indicated that each plane was a “world,” using that word specifically, as I remembered turning to her in confusion. My understanding, I told her, was that the world was round, not flat. Her response seemed to clear things up for me at the time, and though I cannot recall with certainty what it was that she said, I believe that she explained to me that it was a metaphor, an indirect way of explaining something.

In both cases I became confused regarding a word which she used — “work” in the first example; “world” in the next — that I then questioned, and which she then had to go on to explain. If it were the case that she was telepathically communicating to me through mere “impressions,” my mind would have presumably received the meaning or intent of her impressions and then proceeded to automatically and unconsciously translate it into my native language. There would have been no confusion over any words, no need for her to define the words and reframe my understanding.

Given that telepathically communicating through impressions would have presumably been possible, as I believe that’s what I experienced at least to some degree in the Doctor flashback, and that it may have been easier in this respect, as I would have presumably immediately understood the concepts she was attempting to convey, I must wonder why she elected to communicate to me through linguistic telepathy, whereas the Doctor and Goblin Man didn’t seem to. After some contemplation I’ve come to wonder if it may have come down to her role, or her “work,” as she might put it. In the Doctor flashback, the impressions and images I received from him brought me to understand that he was The Doctor and that the rest of his team were Scientists and that they were just here to give me a check-up, perhaps spawned by his curiosity regarding the fact that I was wearing leg braces (which, whether he knew it or not, was due to Leggs-Calves-Perthes Disease). In other words, his role or work may not typically require long-form telepathic conversations with (relatively) alien entities such as myself, so mentalese may have been his natural default when unexpectedly coming upon me hiding beneath that bed as they raided the bedroom. Nimi, on the other hand, identified herself as The Teacher — a role that, given it would presumably involve understanding a wide variety of concepts as well as alien cultures, as it apparently involved teaching lessons to alien entities such as myself — would likely also require mastering diverse native languages and employing that through her telepathic communication with her students so she would be able to customise her lessons in a way best suited to the student in question. She identified me as an Artist, so perhaps that was why she chose to communicate me most often in what I’ve since come to call documentary-style telepathy — telepathically-transmitted still or animate imagery with telepathic, linguistic voiceover. 

A subsequent experience I had in 2011 reinforced this notion of a customized telepathic experience among aliens playing a particular role, or pursuing specific “work,” though I must confess the experience was not nearly as convincing as my encounters with Nimi. Though all of what I consider to be the telltale signs of an abduction or alien encounter took place, I neither remember seeing a UFO or encountering an alien being. I have also written of this previously, in a post entitled The Conversation:

I can’t be sure, but I think it was a man with whom I spoke. The subject matter of the conversation should have made me remember the individual with whom I had the conversation, too, because it dealt with the abduction phenomenon and my studies, speculations and theories regarding it. These are not topics I discuss with just anyone. At some point in the conversation I remember explaining why I thought the Grays were “insectival,” but then, doubting the word was appropriate, stuttered in embarrassment and then said “insectoid” instead. I often do this kind of thing when I’m talking with someone about things and using words I’ve read and thought about but haven’t spoken about. I tend to do this most often with people I consider a lot more intelligent or that bear a far better vocabulary than I do, for while I could use a word fleetingly among some people (who wouldn’t be likely to know the correct word or word pronunciation anyway), among others I might come across as a dumbass trying to talk over their head but instead just doing a shitty job of talking over my own head. I might end up looking like a jackass trying to hide his lack of intelligence beneath big words, like some kid pretending he’s on the same level as some genius he’s talking to. So whoever I was talking to I trusted and considered intelligent. Two more very good reasons I should remember who the hell it was.

The person also seemed to catch my embarrassment and was quick to soften my fall and brush it off by revealing he knew what I meant.

I remember explaining that the Small Grays seemed, in abduction reports, to be in a subordinate position to the Tall Grays, who in turn also seemed to have an authority: taller, slender beings in cloaks or robes that are often said to look like a Praying Mantis. The person said “Praying Mantis” just before I said it, which indicated to me — with great excitement and enthusiasm on my part at the time, I might add, forcing me to smile and give a little laugh — that they were actually listening to me, taking it all in, on the same page as me and, even better, were apparently well-read on the subject. It went beyond that at the time, however. I remember thinking just after the person said that how weird it was, because it seemed as though he had read my mind. I went on to say that the Mantis species we know on earth have young that do not always look like miniature versions of Mantises, but instead often look like ants, so it was my theory that the Grays were merely the younger versions, the “nymphs” of the taller Mantis beings. They were basically an advanced insect species. I then explained how they also seemed to be part of a “hive mind” like bees, and this is where the person again interjected, this time to express a difference of opinion, feeling that the “bee” analogy was insufficient or misleading.

My hesitation over using the word “insectival,” and the fact that I then stuttered as I attempted to say “insectoid,” as well as the mystery individual saying the word “praying mantis” just before I was able to say it myself, both would seem to suggest that if this was a telepathic conversation with an alien, as I believed it was, it was clearly one of linguistic telepathy of the symbolic kind.

My telepathic experiences of this nature therefore were in good company with respect to my encounters with Nimi and the other presumably alien creatures, but when I began having such experiences, however limited, with my fellow human beings, I inevitably felt that I was the rarest of weirdos. It took some time, experience, and deep-Googling research for me to discover, to my great relief, that I was by no means alone in having this experience with my fellow humans. Indeed, there are scattered reports of individuals who either report “hearing,” with their mind’s ear, the thoughts of another, which we’ll call telepathic reception; report someone else heard their thoughts with their mind’s ear, which we’ll call telepathic transmission; or report that they even held a back-and-forth with one another mind-to-mind in this fashion, which we’ll call telepathic dialogue. I myself have experienced all three — though again, I’ve only held telepathic linguistic, telepathic dialogue with apparently nonhuman entities. Among my fellow humans, I can only claim that I’ve received and transmitted such subjective messages, never engaged in an active back-and-forth.

To do so has been an interest of mine for some time…