by Dan Gilhooley
I’m a psychoanalyst who has telepathic and precognitive experiences. Here’s an example. On a Tuesday evening, I dreamt of waking up dead. In fact, my dream of hovering above my dead body commences with the phrase, “I woke up dead.” Later that week, my patient, Frank, reports, “At the beginning of the week, I dreamt I woke up dead.” Frank’s son had died of cancer a month earlier. Nonetheless, this is surprising. My dream of an out-of-body experience and our parallel use of the specific phrase, “I woke up dead,” is very unusual. How could this occur? We didn’t discuss it, but I wondered, “Was it possible that, for that brief period of our two dreams, my patient and I were dreaming the same dream?”
Here’s another example of telepathy emerging in a vivid dream. I live in New York on Long Island. I dreamt that in the middle of the night, my wife and I are called to our local marina for a memorial service for an unnamed friend. The marina is awash, looking like a hurricane had hit it. Stretched out on the pavement, in a crucifixion pose, is the dead body of a Provincetown friend. I know instantly he’s not the person we’ve been called to memorialize who remains unidentified throughout my dream. My wife and I separate as I meet a female personification of death, a Persephone-like figure on her way to a cottage at the water’s edge. This little house is hosting a gathering of the recently deceased who are enjoying a festive get-together. It’s a temporary way-station. I walk over to the empty ferry slip and have a conversation with a dockmaster who is awaiting the arrival of a boat. Then I return to the cottage filled with the newly-dead. Searching for my wife in the crowded building, I climb down some basement stairs and get lost in a labyrinth. Unable to locate my wife, the dream ends with me concluding she’s left without me.
I wake-up and write-up this very elaborate dream. Two days later I learned that an 84-year-old colleague in Provincetown (located 360 miles away) had died in his sleep at the time of my dream. A psychoanalyst and retired minister, his dead body was found the next day, nine hours after my dream. This, of course, is very surprising. I know five people in Provincetown. It seems extraordinarily improbable that I’d coincidentally dream of encountering the dead body of one of them stretched out in the shape of Christ—knowing instantly that he’s not the person I’ve been called to memorialize–when another friend in Provincetown, a retired minister, is actually dying in his sleep. In my dream, the deceased remains unidentified just like my friend’s dead body, which will be discovered nine hours later. The theme of my dream is resurrection. While this dream appears to involve remote perception, because my colleague died in his sleep, I wonder if I’d been dreaming his last dream. Or maybe I was dreaming his life after death (Gilhooley, 2023).
...I wonder if I’d been dreaming his last dream. Or maybe I was dreaming his life after death.
These two examples reveal the most essential quality of telepathy. Living solitary lives in a world characterized by separation and difference, telepathy offers a fleeting sense of intersubjective “oneness,” moments when two individuals appear to share one mind. Symbiosis is a central theme since mid-century in psychoanalysis. Heinrich Racker (1968) termed psychoanalysis “a ‘psychological symbiosis’ between the two personalities” (p. 143). Hyman Spotnitz (1969) identified this shared mental state as narcissistic transference. Harold Searles (1979) called it a necessary therapeutic symbiosis. Margret Mahler (1967) claimed “optimal human symbiosis” is used for individuation and identity formation (p. 746). Contemporary analyst Ofra Eshel (2019) describes the patient/analyst dyad as a “being-in-oneness” (p. 39). Two centuries earlier Franz Mesmer used the word rapport to describe the most intimate of relationships (Chertok & Stengers, 1992). Mesmer and his fellow Animal Magnetists conceived of rapport as the recreation of the intrauterine relationship between fetus and mother. Psychiatric historian Henri Ellenberger (1970) writes, “each cure achieved through animal magnetism goes through the same phases as the yet unborn child in its mother’s womb” (p. 153). For Mesmerists, telepathy was proof of a restoration of intrauterine symbiosis.
Like telepathy, premonitions are inexplicable. Telepathic experiences stimulate my curiosity. They’re simple, discrete experiences that bring me a pleasurable feeling of unity. I believe I’m glimpsing the secret structure of nature. By contrast, premonitions are disturbing. It’s not the content of a premonition that bothers me; it’s the idea that I could know the future that’s unsettling. Many of my precognitive experiences occur in dreams in which I’m living a future event. When I have a precognitive experience in waking life, knowledge of that future event arrives as a voice in my mind, delivering a simple though cryptic message. Subjectively speaking, I experience this voice as someone else. It’s not me.
Here’s an example of a premonitory voice in my head. For 25 years, each Friday morning, I’d leave my home in Bellport and make a 40-minute drive to Babylon to catch a 5:12 train to Manhattan. On this particular December morning, as I step onto my porch, I hear a voice in my mind say, “flat tire.” This is an unusual, unexpected thought. In the dark I check the tires on my car. I don’t have a flat and I head off to the train station. There aren’t many cars on the road at 4:30. On my way, doing about 45mph around a turn connecting two highways, I encounter a car immediately to my left. Perhaps half-asleep, the driver doesn’t move over to allow me to merge. I consider accelerating, but then I see the flashing taillights of a vehicle parked at the edge of the turn about 50 feet ahead. I step hard on the brake, tuck in behind the other car, and in an instant, I’m passing a guy kneeling down, changing his car’s left rear tire. There’s no shoulder on the turn, so his body is sticking out onto the highway. In the darkness, I hadn’t seen him and barely missed hitting him. I think, “what a terrible place to change a tire.” I’m shaken by the realization that I’d come within five feet of killing him.
I’m also shaken by the fact that 30 minutes earlier, out of the blue, I’d thought, “flat tire,” and now I just missed hitting this guy changing a flat tire. How could I make sense of this coincidence? Did my unconscious mind exist in the future? Maybe my unconscious had already made this drive and was warning my conscious mind, rooted in the present, about the danger ahead. Was that voice-in-my-head my future-self speaking to my present-self? That’s how it seems. Or maybe, in an unconscious form of remote viewing, when I stepped onto my porch in Bellport I was simultaneously in Babylon witnessing this flat tire. In fact, if my unconscious mind is untethered in time, where is it spatially? Surely, hearing the words “flat tire” in my mind primed my behavior, causing me to respond more quickly to a surprising event that would occur a half-hour later. But that would mean my knowledge of the future altered my behavior in the present. And that reverses the order of causality. So, this ”flat-tire” experience contradicted several of my fundamental assumptions about reality.
This event also challenged my sense of self. I wondered, where am “I” in this event? I’d always thought of “me” as a mind/body composite located at a single point in space and time. But now it appears my mind and body were split. My body and conscious mind were located at a specific spot, but my unconscious mind seemed to be in another space and time. Borrowing a concept from quantum physics, consciousness looked to be local, but my unconscious mind seemed both indeterminant and “nonlocal.” I recalled reading a statement by physicist Max Tegmark (2007): “Because you are made of atoms, then if atoms can be in two places at once, so can you” (p. 24). Now, Tegmark’s remark stopped me dead in my tracks. In the quantum world, our most accurate scientific account of nature, the possibility of being simultaneously in two places at once is commonplace.
I was captivated by this notion of nonlocality (Aczel, 2001; Musser, 2015; Nadeau & Kafatos, 1999). I decided to stop thinking of myself as contained by my skin and tried to consider “me” as a spatial/temporal field, more like a cloud than a solid thing. It’s disorienting to imagine yourself as a vaporous cloud with undefined edges, spread across past, present, and future in multiple locations simultaneously. Try it. Just try thinking of yourself in this way. It isn’t easy. It was a struggle for me. Eventually my solid bodily-sense-of-self dissolved like cream in coffee. But then I wondered, “If I’m not contained by my skin, where do ‘I’ begin and end?” All these questions became a preoccupation playing in the background of my life. Waiting at a stoplight or standing in line at the grocery checkout, I’d find myself returning to them, leaving me with a widening uncertainty about fundamental aspects of “me.” This flat-tire experience really shook-up my conception of myself in the world. Again it was this idea of nonlocality: of being in two places, or in two times simultaneously. But this was just the beginning. Things were about to become even weirder.
I decided to stop thinking of myself as contained by my skin and tried to consider “me” as a spatial/temporal field, more like a cloud than a solid thing.
This near-miss was a life-altering experience, which I only discussed with my wife and a couple of psychoanalysts. I never mentioned it to any of my patients. But here’s the uncanny way it came to appear in a story being written by my patient, Frank. Remember Frank, the guy with whom I dreamt of “waking up dead?” Trying to recover from the death of his son, Frank had begun writing creatively, employing a free associative approach akin to “automatic writing.” He’d never done any creative writing before. He’d had a technical career. But now he’d sit down and write whatever popped into his head. He had no plan for how a narrative would evolve, what characters would emerge, what they’d do, or how they’d change. And he never re-wrote anything. Frank preferred to have his stories write themselves. After working in this way for about six months and reading aloud handwritten bits in sessions, Frank gave me typed copies of his first two tales. At home, I read his second story, “Convergence,” a science fiction adventure in which a mathematician and his double (living in another space and time) both publish a revolutionary essay demonstrating the existence of parallel universes. In his fiction, the mathematician, while driving on a dimly lit road, accidentally sideswipes and kills a young man who is changing the left rear tire of his disabled car. This event dramatically alters the mathematician’s life, leading to a mental breakdown followed by years of psychoanalytic treatment. In Frank’s chronicle, the accident is chalked up to “twilight, poor visibility, and too small a shoulder,” all attributes of my near-miss.
During our next session I asked Frank when he wrote this story. He began writing it in late-August and finished it in October, a couple of months before my flat-tire experience. So, Frank wrote about a life-altering experience with a flat tire in a fiction involving a revolutionary reconception of our place in space and time two months before I had my near-miss involving a flat tire—a near-miss that caused me to seriously reconsider my place in space and time. In Frank’s tale, the mathematician and his double both publish the same revolutionary paper. In a drama about doppelgangers, the parallels between my flat-tire experience and Frank’s account were compelling.
This sure was a weird form of convergence. Frank appears to write about an experience two months before I have it. Was his story a premonition of my premonitory experience? It looks that way. In Frank’s “Convergence” chronicle, telepathy and premonition appear to combine. Was Frank’s imaginative story based on a telepathically received memory from my future traveling backward in time? I know this sounds impossible, but let’s take a closer look at this question.
My exceptional experiences had led me to three conclusions: First, our mutual waking-up-dead dreams caused me to conclude that, occasionally, Frank and I have a telepathic connection where slivers of my mind appear in his mind and vice versa. Second, my flat-tire experience led me to conclude that my unconscious mind possesses knowledge of my future. And third, this knowledge of the future altered my behavior in the present, reversing the traditional order of causality. Now, combining these three conclusions, I asked, “Is it possible that my unconscious knowledge of my future, telepathically received by Frank, influenced his creative writing?” Everything I’ve learned about the nature of reality insists this is impossible. Nevertheless, this is what seems to have happened. Any reasonable person would ask, “How could Frank even have knowledge about your future, a future you’ve yet to live?” On the other hand, if I presume that within our symbiotic state of rapport Frank has telepathic access to my unconscious, and if I find evidence of my future showing up in his “automatic writing,” then doesn’t that prove my future exists within my unconscious? It looks that way. If Frank didn’t get knowledge of my future from my mind, where’d he get it?
Okay, let me ask, “Does anyone feel crazy right now?” Well, you certainly should! Thinking like this makes everyone’s head spin, including mine. This experience violates many of our basic assumptions about reality. To begin with, symbiosis threatens our sense of personal integrity as separate, unique individuals. We’re each born with one body and one mind, and, together, they’re located at one point in space and time. Premonition alters our place in time, and time is the basis for our belief in a continuous, cohesive, and unitary self (Hartocollis, 1983). It’s the paradigm through which we organize experience. The idea that our futures already exist is anathema to everyone. Personally, I hate the idea. Then, to reverse our understanding of causality is simply too much. We insist, “The past creates the present! How could the future influence the present when it hasn’t even happened yet?” Wouldn’t anyone reasonably declare, “This is madness!” I agree. It sure sounds crazy to me. Of course, this is my problem. When I tell people stories like this, it upsets them. Everyone feels crazy when my stories challenge their fundamental assumptions about reality. So, naturally, they think I’m nuts. Who can blame them? Regrettably, my stories are considered “anti-social.”
Each of these exceptional experiences occurred in the context of death. Our mutual dreams of waking up dead happened after Frank’s son’s death. He identified this dream as a turning point in his mourning. My dream of encountering the dead body of a friend stretched out coincided with my religious colleague dying in his sleep. And my flat-tire premonition primed me to avoid killing a fellow changing a tire. In each instance, death itself appears to be a stimulus for these experiences. The notion of two minds blended together at the time of death was studied by Frederic Myers and his colleagues Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore (1886/2011) in Phantasms of the Living, a thirteen-hundred-page research project published in 1886 which became the masterpiece of the British Society of Psychical Research. They presented over seven hundred cases of dreams and visions of family members and friends apparently communicating with loved ones at the time of death. The central thesis of Phantasms of the Living is that these “crisis apparitions…are best interpreted as hallucinations generated in the percipient by the receipt of a telepathic ‘message’ from the dying” (Gauld, 1968, p. 162). My dreams appear to be crisis apparitions like those they researched.
Aczel, A. (2001). Entanglement. Penguin.
Chertok, L., & Stengers, I. (1992). A critique of psychoanalytic reason: Hypnosis as a scientific problem from Lavoisier to Lacan. Stanford University Press.
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. Basic Books.
Eshel, O. (2019). Two-in-oneness: Transformations of O. In Emergence of analytic oneness (pp. 27-43). Routledge.
Gauld, A. (1968). The founders of psychical research. Schocken Books.
Gilhooley, D. (2023). Peter’s last dream: A model of dream consciousness. Modern Psychoanalysis, 47(2), 172-213.
Gilhooley, D., & Toich, F. (2020). Psychoanalysis, intersubjective writing, and a post-materialist model of mind: I woke up dead. Routledge.
Gurney, E., Myers, F., & Podmore, F. (2011). Phantasms of the living. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1886)
Hartocollis, P. (1983). Time and timelessness. International Universities Press.
Mahler, M. (1967). On human symbiosis and the vicissitudes of individuation. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 15, 740-763.
Musser, G. (2015). Spooky action at a distance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Nadeau, R., & Kafatos, M. (1999). The non-local universe. Oxford University Press.
Racker, H. (1968). The meaning and uses of countertransference. In Transference and countertransference (pp. 127-173). International Universities Press.
Searles, H. (1979). Concerning therapeutic symbiosis. In Countertransference and related subjects ( pp.172-191). International Universities Press.
Spotnitz, H. (1969). Modern psychoanalysis of the schizophrenic patient. Human Sciences Press.
Tegmark, M. (2007). Many lives in many worlds. Nature, 448(5), 23-24.
In this issue of Mindfield, the contributors examine the theme of “Dark Tourism and Legend Tripping.” In his first column as PA President, Gerhard Mayer suggests that despite declining institutional support, parapsychology remains a vital and evolving field grounded in tradition, renewed by qualitative research, global perspectives, and emerging consciousness studies. Leo Ruickbie details how academic …
