Thread: Mark Twain and Telepathy

Well, I wasn't interested motivated enough to read the article at first, because of its prose and the mood I'm in mostly, but just shortly after reading the word eureka in the article, of course I received a message from my partner saying exactly that same word. In any case, to me the article read less as "shared dreaming" and more as "synchronicity".

Still, it was an interesting read. Thank you for sharing.

Synchronicity and shared dreaming, such as I've experienced it, seem to me to be the same phenomena.

I don't believe in 'shared dreams' of the type where two people are in a single, coherent dream environment. I think there's an underlying experience that is shared, but that the sounds and images are separate, independent representations of that experience.

That was an interesting read. It reminded me of something I’ve noticed myself sometimes, when I’ve been actively involved in groups of poets – that you often seem to be on the same wavelength as others even without there being a clear connection you can point to. Even in a loosely associated group, people just naturally inspire one another, responding to others’ ideas in their own writing or developing imagery in new directions or the like. It can mostly be accounted for just by people reading one people’s work or by mutual conversations – but not everything. (I remember one occasion when I had decided not to present a particular poem at an open mic, and that evening, there turned out to be two other poems the same theme!)

And then there’s the fact that, weirdly, it’s much easier to write poems that unknowingly echo poems you aren’t familiar with than to unintentionally echo poems you’ve read (i.e., cryptomnesia). This is especially annoying when it’s a relatively well-known one. I have no idea how common such experiences are, but in my own experience, a disproportionate amount of them happen in artistic circles.

Originally Posted by LeaningKarst

That was an interesting read. It reminded me of something I’ve noticed myself sometimes, when I’ve been actively involved in groups of poets – that you often seem to be on the same wavelength as others even without there being a clear connection you can point to. Even in a loosely associated group, people just naturally inspire one another, responding to others’ ideas in their own writing or developing imagery in new directions or the like. It can mostly be accounted for just by people reading one people’s work or by mutual conversations – but not everything. (I remember one occasion when I had decided not to present a particular poem at an open mic, and that evening, there turned out to be two other poems the same theme!)

And then there’s the fact that, weirdly, it’s much easier to write poems that unknowingly echo poems you aren’t familiar with than to unintentionally echo poems you’ve read (i.e., cryptomnesia). This is especially annoying when it’s a relatively well-known one. I have no idea how common such experiences are, but in my own experience, a disproportionate amount of them happen in artistic circles.

It was interesting to read your experience, especially since it feels so different to what mine's been like.

I don't know what it is but my experience as an artist is almost the opposite. Most of the time, I rarely feel I'm on the same creative wavelength as other artists, at least with whom I've had direct interactions with anyway. When I've done stuff within groups of artists, my work often feels divergent from what everyone else is doing. It makes me end up feeling a bit "put to the side" but at the end of the day I make a lot of my art "for myself" in a sense anyway.

As for echoing, I think I maybe do echo things a bit in writing... It tends to be mostly basic associative stuff such as certain words or expressions I've read recently. I'm not intimate enough with poetry to know if there's a different nuance there, but as I said my work often feels divergent, especially in terms of creative motive actually, so in general terms I'm not sure how much I actually echo other works I know of, but my partner has often had this issue when writing music.

Originally Posted by DarkestDarkness

It was interesting to read your experience, especially since it feels so different to what mine's been like.

I don't know what it is but my experience as an artist is almost the opposite. Most of the time, I rarely feel I'm on the same creative wavelength as other artists, at least with whom I've had direct interactions with anyway. When I've done stuff within groups of artists, my work often feels divergent from what everyone else is doing. It makes me end up feeling a bit "put to the side" but at the end of the day I make a lot of my art "for myself" in a sense anyway.

As for echoing, I think I maybe do echo things a bit in writing... It tends to be mostly basic associative stuff such as certain words or expressions I've read recently. I'm not intimate enough with poetry to know if there's a different nuance there, but as I said my work often feels divergent, especially in terms of creative motive actually, so in general terms I'm not sure how much I actually echo other works I know of, but my partner has often had this issue when writing music.

Hm, maybe I shouldn’t have used the word ‘wavelength’ there. In the sense of having similar aims, styles, themes and everything that “creative wavelength” usually implies, I have yet to find anyone I really share one with – which is maybe why it’s so noticeable for me when something does sync up, and I end up deciding to wait on sharing a poem with birds I wrote a year ago because it would be following up on someone else’s poem with birds, and it would really look like I was borrowing from it. And then the same thing happens again a few months later.

It’s mostly little things like that, not big ones. But I just find it fascinating how so few of the cases where a person might reasonably think I was responding to some existing work actually were responses to it. Or (being someone who prefers to fiddle with poems for years at a time before showing them to anybody) how the context they end up in ends up being surprisingly fitting – maybe a little too fitting.

I’m not sure how the nature of the medium fits in with it. For what it’s worth, I’ve always taken it for granted that in writing music, you’re drawing mainly on music that you’ve heard. My experience there is more in improvisation than composition, but it’s been very obvious there. I took to it pretty quickly, so as I was first figuring out how to do it, I was able to practically watch bits and pieces of what I'd already learned become better incorporated into a coherent whole with each subsequent try.

And I don’t think that poetry is essentially different, only you’re drawing on a whole range of associations outside of poetry. And it’s relatively easy to evoke some other poem, or a whole world of ideas, whether intentionally or unintentionally – all it takes are a couple words. And when you’re working on so many different levels at once and but only able to focus on one or two at a time, there’s a lot of room for surprises even when you wrote the thing. Your unconscious choices are always going to outnumber your conscious ones. Maybe more so than for other art forms? Definitely more than prose, in my experience. Maybe not for music, but it’s hard to tell when its elements lose their specific associations more readily than words do.