I Dream People's Secrets
Are we communicating with each other during our nightly journeys to La-la Land?
The following is a true story. Some identifying details have been changed.
Humans may be impressively evolved and advanced — at least as primates go — but there are huge, glaring gaps in our knowledge base that puzzle me.
Namely, sleep — that one-third of our lives that we’ve been doing for 300,000 years. Why are we still so clueless about the dreaming that occurs during it?
Sleep labs have yielded measurements galore about the physiological and neurochemical processes of sleep that unfold over five cycles defined by different brain waves including alpha, beta, theta, and the rapid eye movement (REM) state during which most dreaming occurs. We know the heart rate rises and drops at various points, the brain’s hippocampus is one of the most active areas, and that neurons race across the brain during some periods and slow down during others.
And thanks to Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others we have at least basic ideas about dream symbolism — according to Freud, for example, a bridge symbolizes “the male organ” as well as transitions, while Jung posited that shadows are parts of our unconscious which we ignore.
But we know little about exactly why we dream — although dreams may (or may not) be key to processing information and preparing for future events.
And we’re particularly short on documented answers to questions like “Do we talk with each other when we sleep?”
I refer to dream telepathy — nonverbally communicating while sleeping — an arena, like precognitive dreams (that foretell real events) prone to stretch credulity and elicit scoffing from mainstream scientists. Freud and Jung said that dream telepathy was possible in theory and at least a few studies, including one in 2014, have indicated it does actually happen as did the famous Maimonides experiments though plenty of water has been thrown on that.
The reason I bring up the topic is that I have empirical proof that dream telepathy and precognitive dreaming occur because they’ve both happened to me.
I’ve dreamt people’s secrets — a nocturnal skill that is both unusual and potentially embarrassing; I’m certainly not trying to do it.
Suburban Telepathy of the Housewife Variety
The first place I encountered dream telepathy was at the kitchen table in my childhood home in Ohio. My mother, who wasn’t at all woo-woo, was the source. One morning, she mentioned a vivid, if mundane, dream she’d had about Phid, our next-door neighbor. “Phid wanted to borrow some dish detergent — but she wanted a special lemon detergent. I told her we didn’t have any lemon detergent, but she kept insisting that we did.”
A half-hour later our neighbor Phid stopped by for coffee. “I had a dream about you last night,” she told my mother, sliding into a chair at the kitchen table. “I wanted to borrow some dish detergent, but you kept insisting I take a lemon detergent, and I kept saying I didn’t want lemon.”
I pointed out that they’d both had the same dream, although who was insistent about the lemon detergent had changed in each version. “You two must be talking while you’re sleeping,” I said, eliciting laughter from both as neither believed in telepathic communication whether awake or dreaming.
Meaningless Dreams about Future Events
Starting in high school, I had dozens of uncanny but equally mundane dreams although they generally weren’t telepathic, instead being precognitive —foreshadowing future events.
In one, for example, I entered Latin class on the first day of junior year. The bell rang and my classmate Michael Dedden ran in, just as a pencil fell. “Never thought I’d see you in Latin class,” Michael said, taking the seat next to mine.
The next day the precise scenario happened, including the falling pencil. Again, boring and mundane, though admittedly unusual. I had dozens of other dreams in this vein.
Dream Telepathy Begins
When I started college, however, my dreams became more detailed and sometimes more disturbing — especially for my acquaintance Felix, as I’ll call him.
I didn’t know him well, but thought the world of Felix since he was smart, older, and handsome. I often told him of assorted precognitive dream experiences I was having, which he invariably discounted.
Felix was studying science in college and if something couldn’t be repeated in a controlled laboratory setting then it wasn’t a real phenomenon. Therefore, all my stories were bs. He wanted to believe my tales, he told me, but simply couldn’t.
Then I started having dreams about Felix.
Neither of the first two dreams I had about him were eerie or spine-tingling. After the first, I called Felix on a Sunday, telling him I dreamt the night before that he’d gone to a party, where he met two guys, one of whom I named. They started talking about forming a jazz trio and hiring Felix as the drummer. He said indeed he’d gone to a party and had exactly that conversation.
But so what? Saturdays were party nights and guys back then were always talking about forming bands.
The next Sunday I called Felix saying I’d dreamt that he’d gone to another party and met a brunette — and she became his girlfriend and he later thought about marrying her. Indeed, he had met a brunette the night before whom he’d asked out.
But so what? Meeting a brunette at a party was nearly predictable — although in fact, she did become his long-term girlfriend and they did talk of getting married.
But it was the third dream I had that floored Felix. And it wasn’t even about him.
That summer, as part of a job, I was living in a Baptist Institute in a tiny village in Kentucky — and was entirely traumatized by my locale.
One week, I planned to drive up to see Felix in Cincinnati on Friday after work.
On Friday morning I awoke feeling immense guilt after having a dream about Jason, a friend of Felix, whom I’d briefly dated and who’d gone on to marry Lucy.
In the very detailed dream, Jason’s band was playing at a Dayton bar called O’Connors. The cover was 50 cents and I gave the doorman a dollar bill, then took it back and gave him two quarters. When I walked into the bar, frat boys were laughing at a long table, but just then a pitcher of beer spilled and one of them yelled, “Bummer, man!” Lucy was screaming out my name and when I approached her, she dropped and broke her glass of beer. She was very drunk and told me she was done with Jason and wanted a divorce. After the show, I looked at my watch — it was 11:55. I approached Jason, who was moving equipment off the stage, and asked what was the deal with Lucy. “She’s an effing bitch,” he said. They were history, he said.
The dream concluded with me going with Jason to his house and having a passionate make-out session on the couch, when suddenly a car pulled up, and we realized it was Lucy, prompting a scramble to readjust our clothes.
The dream haunted me all day, filling me with deep guilt and the fear that I wasn’t over Jason. That evening I drove to Cincinnati and told my dream to Felix. He grew paler and paler with every dream detail I revealed.
“That is seriously weird,” Felix said when I finished describing my dream. He appeared shaken. “There’s no way you could have known.”
He told me that the night before Jason had called out of the blue and invited Felix to come to Dayton and see his band’s gig at O’Connors. The cover was fifty cents, Felix handed the doorman a dollar, but then found two quarters. Frat boys spilled a pitcher of beer when he entered, someone yelling “Bummer, man!” Lucy called to him, then dropped her beer glass. Etc. Etc.
“Every single detail of your dream was what actually happened to me last night,” Felix told me. “Except for one thing. I went home with Lucy and we were making out on the couch when Jason drove up.” He looked at me. “I was never going to tell anybody about that. But you dreamt it.”
A Bizarre Ability
That uncanny ability repeated — including one dream concerning Riccardo, a guy I’d been dating in Italy. I dreamt that he had a wild, spicy night with one of my friends, Mia. The dream included what they’d both said about me, which wasn’t flattering, and included many other details that were equally not fun.
The next morning, I ran into his cousin, who asked me why I seemed troubled. I told him about the dream and the details of things said and done. The cousin told me I was paranoid.
In this case, one might argue that on a subconscious level I was attuned to their attraction and what would play out with Riccardo and Mia. But the details that I dreamt of certainly weren’t predictable.
The cousin called me an hour later. Riccardo had phoned him and vividly painted what happened the evening before, which he’d indeed spent with Mia. The cousin told me that my dream had been right about everything, including all the little details about things said and done. Henceforth the cousin regarded me as a strega — a witch.
Riccardo and Mia ended up having a whirlwind romance, during which Riccardo beat her up and she ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw and smashed ribs. So maybe my dream was a warning for me to get the heck away from that guy.
I developed theories about these telepathic dream occurrences. Foremost, I suspect that we feel supremely guilty about lying, betrayals, and infidelities, so much so that we’re compelled to confess them — at least when we sleep. And for some reason, I attracted those confessions, although I sometimes dreamt them from a skewed perspective — i.e. I was the perpetrator. I also noted that whenever I had those dreams, I was traveling or in a locale that wasn’t home and thus I was not “grounded.”
But my theory — that we talk to each other and confess while we’re sleeping — was challenged the next time I dreamt someone’s secret.
I’d met an English author, Nigel, who is gay, on an overseas press trip. I didn’t know him well, but we occasionally corresponded.
Several years later I was in Thailand writing a book. I dreamed that Nigel rented a villa in Spain to write his next novel. When he arrived, not bringing his boyfriend of many years with him, he was swept up in a torrid affair with the villa’s owner, a woman who was American. In the dream, I was staying at the villa in Spain and drove them both to the airport to take a flight back to New York. They kept imploring me to come with them, but I said I had to finish my book. The last thing Nigel said to me in the dream was “I just wish I’d had a chance to make you my famous cashew chicken!”
Thinking this was hilarious — after all, Nigel is very gay and the farewell line about his famous cashew chicken cracked me up — I emailed him, telling him about the dream. He called me a few minutes later, not at all amused, being instead very upset and demanding to know the basis of my dream. As if I could explain that.
In fact, he was staying in a rented Spanish villa — and over the previous two weeks had been having a torrid affair with the owner, an American woman. He had just returned from the airport where she’d boarded a plane to New York, imploring him to come with her, but he protested that he had to finish his book. Nigel told me that the last thing he’d said to her was “I just wish I’d had a chance to make you my famous cashew chicken!”
But Nigel hadn’t been asleep when I dreamt his secret. So apparently both parties don’t need to be asleep for the telepathy to take place, an idea supported by recent research. However, I continue to believe that infidelity creates a moral trauma that can be picked up by others.
The good news: I haven’t dreamt anyone’s secrets — at least that I know of — for a decade, during which I was in the same apartment, rarely traveling. So fret not: everybody’s secrets are probably safe, at least from me.
Nevertheless, I continue to wish that we’d enhance our understanding of dream telepathy — including by creating a database of dreams and recording under what circumstances these communications occur, which requires people remembering and recording their dreams and talking about them, which many are loathe to do, not to mention people being honest when confronted with information that another person has no way of knowing.
I also wish I could figure out how to use dream telepathy for something more helpful than inadvertently discovering the extramarital affairs of acquaintances.
Sweet dreams!