Telepathy, Mind Reading, Mind Melds, Telepathic Dreams, Neural Interface enabled Telepathy / Mind Melds, and Holy Rolling Tongues and Prophecy
I think telepathy between best friends or close family would be cool. Other forms of telepathy outside of strict useful use of telerecieve and telesend would be like the medical insurance world of screw or be screwed (or likely both if everybody could indiscriminately mind-read). Most RPGs mostly just give modest skill bonuses for close relationships, although GURPs 4th edition adds a mindlink, which is a essentially a permanent or a guaranteed connection telepathic link with one or more people (point cost varies with number - from freakish best friends to a illuminati conspiracy organization like the MIB). Vulcan mind-melds are form of telepathy. Contact-only range, but extremely high bandwidth enough for a two-way full neural-interface level telepathic connection. Most RPGs do not have systems to measure bandwidth, although that would be limited to telepathy and ESP though. Just skill/accuracy and power/range (many have only 1 combined scale). In GURPs, power determines range for ESP, psycoportation, and Telepathy, but for Psychokinesis, its weight, or temperature change rate. Skill determines connectivity for telepathy and overall control for all power categories. There is no mention of bandwidth. I guess a house rule could be made that it would be a function of power and skill and how much of those capacities are being used.
I’ve seen limited uses of holy-spirit assisted telepathy, mostly in the form of prophecy or message verification/repetition, though this is easy to fraud (training/coordination/pre-organized act), and also tongues interpretation is completely unverifiable by nonbelievers, while plain-english or multilingual verification has limited verification capability. But I’m pretty sure the 2-key security system (when ICBMs were manually launched before the mid-80s) for launching nuclear weapons (at least in the USA) and verification / seconding of prophecy have at least slight correlation beyond coincidence, especially since God’s most used communication channels is direct through emotion infested analog human brains and also that drugs and other hallucination-enhancing situations would make one more sensitive to such messages, from any source including your own brain. So I think it probably would be good for God to do extreme messages (voices, images, and especially fully audiovisual and possibly interactive things like angels) between two close friends with holy-ghost assisted telepathy (or high-bandwidth mind-meld) and in situations free of hallucinatory enhancer (extreme heat, LSD, Marijuana, other drugs, extreme hunger/thirst, high blood loss, major depression, severe stress / trauma, etc…). If you think you see an angel or have a strange dream that suggests the end of the world, or tells you to do something radical, then if it ain’t like the telepathic dreams of Explorers (the mid-80s movie) or Vulcan mind-melds (3-way actually w/ god as the 3rd party) with somebody you really trust, I’d ignore it because you might be going looney or just really desperately want something. I think telepathic dreams would be really cool. I know only two movies that cover it, - Explorers and Nightmare on Elm Street 3-4 (Explorers shows it far better).
Another thing that would be cool, if and when the technology is developed, is machine-interface enabled telepathy or even mind meld! Go get your chick, partner, or best friend, or best-friend equivalent family member (likely identical twins), plug-in, and download minds to each other (which is why normal friends, acquaintances, and strangers probably wouldn’t want to do such a thing)! Just simply sharing thoughts directly without any keyboard or mouse would be pretty cool. Apserger people and some HFA, and even normal people would probably really tripp off of it, including me. And you can control the computer and plug in or unplug whenever you want, which is better than other methods (I only seen limited telepathy in holy-roller environments unfortunately), especially drug assisted ones. The only machine-assisted ‘telepathy’ you can get today, in the here and now, is to plug two or more people into conventional networked audio/visual VR systems to get voice-only virtual telepathy, but no direct image communication or voice+images. MMORPGs like World of Worldcraft or Star Wars Galaxies or Everquest is the closest to remote-telepathy that the average joe-smoe will get to in the next few years.
February 14th, 2007 at 8:50 am
my best friend and i think we are closer twins. we r always saying things at the same time even if not on that subject at the moment. is this kind of friendship documented? it’s a little too weird sometimes. and we always seem to know when one needs the other.