Dream transference

Dream telepathy is the name for telepathic communication with another person whilst one is dreaming. In the 1940s it was the subject of the Eisenbud-Pederson-Krag-Fodor-Ellis controversy, the full detailed history of which can be found in . The controversy is named after the preeminent psychoanalysts of the time who were involved in it: Jule Eisenbud, Geraldine Pederson-Krag, Nandor Fodor, and Albert Ellis.
History
The notion of dream telepathy was first mooted in psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud in 1921. His 1922 paper Dreams and Telepathy is reproduced in ., 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".) He also observed that he had not encountered any evidence of dream telepathy in his patients.
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.
Examples
Author, Jeffry Palmer, recalls a very vivid example in which he shared an identical dream with his grandmother and a best friend about being in a park type environment that felt very artificial and foreboding. He believes that shared dreams of this type might be much more common than some believe.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu