Dream Telepathy - History

History

The notion and speculation of communication via dreaming was first mooted in psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud in 1921. He produced a model to express his ideas about telepathic dreaming. His 1922 paper Dreams and Telepathy is reproduced in Devereux 1953., and was intended to be a lecture to the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, although he never delivered it. Freud considered that a connection between telepathy and dreams could be neither proven nor disproven. He was distinctly suspicious of the whole idea, noting that he himself had never had a telepathic dream. (His two dreams that were potentially telepathic, where he dreamed of the deaths of a son and of a sister-in-law, he labelled as "purely subjective anticipations".) His ideas were not widely accepted at the time, but he continued to publically express his interest and findings about telepathic dreaming. He also observed that he had not encountered any evidence of dream telepathy in his patients.Freud started to collect telepathic experiences from second hand sources to gather more information in order to further his research and complete many writings on the subject. Other researchers have since expanded Freud’s findings.

Ellis regarded the conclusions of Eisenbud, Pederson-Krag, and Fodor to have been based upon flimsy evidence, and that they could be better explained by bias and coincidence than by dream telepathy. He also accused them of an emotional involvement in the notion, resulting in their observations and judgement being clouded. They, in their turn, asserted that Ellis was dismissing the idea because it did not fit with his preconceived notions of what dream telepathy was, rather than treating the evidence before him with an open mind.

According to Jungian psychotherapy, Jung considered telepathic dreams (communications between individuals within an unconscious state) fit within the concepts of dream transference.