Mark Twain's "Mental Telegraphy" - Awareness of Psychic Events

Interesting how I was reading Mark Twain's essays and came upon his account of experiences with telepathy at the very same time I received notification for this topic through a favorite subscription!

The topic on this particular day is about dreams, and how they function. Ascribed to a right brain function, dreams release the left-brain from its prattle of decoding "conscious" events and activities.

In his essay, Twain questions, and gives examples of how people come up with the same ideas at the same time. He cites author's publications that are published within days of each other, and too close together to be plagiarism. Of course that was long before the millisecond world of computing came along.

In an added post script he goes on to say that dreaming can happen when a person is standing up and awake. His experience with that was when he saw a man walking down the sidewalk who suddenly disappeared in thin air.

At first, Twain concluded that it was an apparition. In the end, Twain had to conclude that he had clocked out and had gone off into a dream state, as he found the man he believed was an apparition just a moment later.

The state of mind Twain describes is now recognized as a phenomenon called lucid dreaming. This is a state of being awake and asleep at the same time. Some people believe that the different reality of lucid dreaming carries a message, or something to learn that ultimately brings higher consciousness.

In a different part of this collection of Mark Twain's works, he talks about people getting the same ideas at the same time. He decided that whenever he was ready to send someone a letter, he would wait a few days, first.

The sensitive observation was that, more often than not, he would be sending his post at the same time the intended recipient would be sending one to him. By the time things crossed in the mail, Twain's post would already be old. Then he'd have to send another right away to respond to the letter that had crossed in transport.

The title of this particular short story was "Mental Telegraphy." He coined his own term to describe the uncanny coincidences he had observed. I'm sure there were séances, and metaphysical groups around at the time.

These other worldly events were described through observations he had made on his own, and named on his own.

Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, was born on a day when the Haley's comet passed over the earth in 1835. He had always predicted that he would pass away when the famous comet was transiting again, and he did - the day after - April 10th, 1910.