Dream Telepathy on Running a Writing Retreat

Here’s example of long-range telepathy at work between a dreaming and a waking mind that involves the writing process.
   I kept vampire hours that night, mining old journals for material for new writing. I paused from time to time to look at plans for my writing retreat, “Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming”.
    I was ready to go to bed when I received an email from my friend Ana Maria Stefanescu, who hosts my workshops in the mountains of Romania. She reported that she had just awakened from a dream in which I gave her ideas and exercises she could use in a creative writing workshop she was planning to lead in Romania the following month. She woke up very excited, but still tired. Certain that she would be able to remember what she had learned, she allowed herself to drift back to sleep, then woke again to find that most of the content was gone.
     She requested me to show up in her dreams again and repeat the instructions!
     I countered with the following suggestion: "Maybe you can go back inside your dream and get Dream Robert to give you those ideas and exercises again!"
     Ana Maria agreed to try. An hour later, she reported her conversation with Dream Robert. “You gave me a wonderful exercise. You told me to take participants in my writing workshop on a journey to the place from which their truest words come.”
     Unknown to Ana Maria, I had actually led an exercise along these lines in my own writing retreats and had been looking over notes about that while she was dreaming. Such exploration inspired my poem, “A Place to Write From (Red Ink)”.

Write from the place that is raw
from the night when you lost your skin.

The episode reminded me of Mark Twain's experience of what he called "mental telegraphy" in the case The Great Bonanza book.

One afternoon, he was seized with the passionate conviction that a great book could be written about the silver bonanza in Nevada. He felt his old newspaper colleague William Wright (better known under his pen-name “Dan De Quille”) was the man to do it. But Mark Twain was so possessed by the idea that he roughed out a book outline and sample chapters to get his old friend started, in a blue haze of cigar smoke in the billiard room of his Hartford house. He was preparing to mail all this material to Wright when he received a package in the mail. Before opening the package, Mark Twain told the people with him that he was going to deliver a "prophecy"; he declared that the package contained a letter from his old friend Dan De Quille, with his drafts for a book on the Great Bonanza. And so it did.

This incident convinced Mark Twain not only that mental telegraphy is real, but that it can be strong enough to transport the complete content of a book across a continent. When he studied the exact chronology of the crossed letters, Mark Twain concluded that “mesmeric currents” had streamed from west to east. “It was your mesmeric current that flowed across the mountains & deserts three thousand miles & acted upon me.”

     Minds resonate with each other, and in doing this transfer ideas and messages, back and forth. When we send out our best thoughts,the results can be wonderfully creative, whichever way the currents are blowing. 

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Writing as a State of Conscious Dreaming is one of my favorite workshops, I am leading this five-day residential adventure at two locations this year: at magical Mosswood Hollow,in a red cedar forest 45 minutes from Seattle in May, and on a beautiful country estate at Ryzmburk near Česká Skalice in northern Bohemia, where I took the photo above, in August. Ana Maria is hosting a new four day workshop for me on magical dreaming and kairomancy at a lovely villa near Bran in Romania.

For a full account of Mark Twain's experiments in mental telegraphy, please see The Secret History of Dreaming.