A brief scroll down the home page of this site will make it obvious that I believe that dream telepathy and precognitive dreams are not only real, but quite common. It’s my hypothesis based on my own personal experience, the experiences others have shared with me, and various experiments that have been conducted in the last half century (check here and here for some) that we are capable of perceiving data (primarily as images or feelings) across great distances and outside linear time.
So this article is not an attempt to convince you that telepathy and precognition are real. It’s my claim that they are real, and what I would like to suggest is that one evolutionary purpose, perhaps, of dream telepathy, in particular, is to help each of us grow individually as a person, through the experience of a potent kind of empathy.
Empathy is generally defined as the ability to perceive, understand, relate to, or share another person’s experience from their perspective. Humans vary in their capacity for empathy, and it also increases and decreases based on many factors, like stress, loss, grief, and aging.
There also are particular conditions that can affect a person’s “natural” capability for empathy. As one example, some neurodivergent individuals may be better at effective empathy (feeling really deeply what others feel) than neurotypical individuals. Other neurodivergent individuals may struggle with cognitive empathy (understanding what others perceive), though. Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) may also affect a person’s capacity for empathy: sometimes heightening it, sometimes weakening it. Our willingness to be empathetic may increase after a personal tragedy or decrease after someone purposefully harms us.
Sometimes a strong tendency for empathy can make being out in the world among people a challenge. It’s enough to experience our own strong feelings, but to also find ourselves suffering at another person’s suffering or absorbing all the energy inside a crowded room can cause an empathetic person to wish for indifference. It can be overwhelming and exhausting to feel more than the average person feels.
All this is to say that empathy itself is complex. However, it is my belief that empathy is a key to spiritual growth and evolution. Further, I believe that there is a correlation between empathy and telepathy, beyond their shared suffix, which does give us a clue as to the correlation. (The suffix -pathy comes from pathos which can mean “feeling.”) Telepathy and empathy both operate on feeling.
It may be that an excess or deficit of waking life empathy can lead to more dream telepathy. It may also be that dream telepathy can increase our waking life capacity for empathy. This is how dream telepathy can be our teacher.
I’ll say upfront that I understand how dreaming about another person’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings can be unsettling or even disturbing once it becomes plain that it is happening. I write about the topic with some ease now, but when I started realizing I was having precognitive dreams, I was quite confused myself; sometimes excited, sometimes terrified. It took a while for me to acclimate to the reality of my own situation. Deducing that some of my dreams might be telepathic came as less of a shock as a result. My understanding about reality had already shifted.
Nonetheless, dreams that seem to take me outside of “Me” can cause me to feel anxious, frustrated, and unmoored.
It’s no joke when reality breaks.
I have had a number of people reach out to me with suspected telepathic dreams asking how to “turn them off.” I don’t know how to turn them off, though I am currently investigating how they may turn on, what the mechanisms for these types of dreams are, and ways in which our environment may be impacting our dreams in a way that makes us more susceptible on any given night to telepathy and precognition. (More on that soon, but I am most interested in and focusing my own independent research on hemispheric specialization, geomagnetic activity, nervous system regulation, energy medicine, and practical Kabbalah, as they relate to extrasensory perception. Those wanting to read more on some of those topics can start with Iain McGilchrist, Michael Persinger, Stanley Krippner, and Todd Murphy. I also was excited to learn recently about new research being conducted on dreams and solar weather by Ph.D. candidate Annani Kelly.)
Rather than trying to turn telepathic dreams “off,” is there a supportive way to engage with these types of dreams? I believe so. I believe these types of dreams can expand our perspectives, and also show us our emotional blind spots. Sometimes, our dreams have to take us out of ourselves to alert us to how we think, react, and behave toward others. As I assert about even our scariest nightmares, there is an image or encounter in every dream that can help us learn about ourselves, heal, or grow, depending on how we receive it. Dream telepathy can provide you with images and encounters quite different from those you are used to in your every day waking life. You may find yourself inside a dream of a person of a different race, religion, gender, or age. You may find yourself reversing your typical daily role: in waking life you might be the boss, and in a dream, you’re now your employee. In waking life, you might be the overbearing parent. In a dream, you might find yourself inside the adolescent who still seeks his parent’s loving approval.
Those of us who claim we are extremely empathetic in our waking life may be surprised to find out just how shut off we actually are to another person’s suffering once we dream from their perspective. I am thinking about people in your life who you feel anger towards or resentful of. I am thinking of the people who you believe caused you the most harm. I am thinking of the situations you have never been in, but have some kind of righteous indignation about in waking life. Suddenly you find yourself in that very situation in a very vivid dream, and you might reconsider your waking life opinion or “hot take.” A dream could place you inside the first-person perspective of someone you are judging in the hopes of alerting you to information you may not have known or considered about them.
Will one telepathic dream about your ex-wife dissolve your resentment of her? I doubt it. But it could possibly alter your belief enough to impact how you interact with her as it relates to, let’s say, your children. There is so much we don’t know about each other — not even those closest to us. Empathy, via surprising or telepathic dreams, also can cultivate even deeper love and appreciation for those we already love and appreciate.
In addition to educating you about your own interpersonal tendencies, dream telepathy can expand your conscious awareness of life and nature. There are people who have dreams from the perspective of their family pets, for instance. There are people who awaken from a telepathic dream with a new-found desire to serve others or cultivate connections with communities or people they previously had no interest connecting with.
There are many traditions that claim that underlying all life is a Universal Mind, or a divine, pure, or collective consciousness. That we are all One, or part of the One. If this is an element of your own spiritual beliefs or if it is a metaphysical concept you are curious about: What better way to approach this kind of divine oneness than to experience from another person’s perspective? It may be slow-going, and it may take many lifetimes, but both empathy and dream telepathy could be encouraging an approach towards collective oneness.
Or, perhaps, we were once much closer to this oneness and something — evolution, perhaps, or a collective trauma — caused us to separate from this way of experiencing. Dream telepathy and empathy could be a way back to that.
Whatever your philosophical or spiritual beliefs, I do believe that telepathic dreams have something to offer each individual beyond the initial delight (or horror) of discovering that you can “read someone’s mind” sometimes. If you’re interested in working with these types of dreams, please feel free to reach out to me. I am an open and curious listener when it comes to parapsychological experiences, and I work one-on-one with dreamers who are seeking to learn, heal, and grow from these types of dreams.
