Paternal Telepathy

[myrthman]

My wife and I are expecting our third son, so many of my recent ponderings and ideas have that origin. I've been communicating with my unborn son through pushes and pokes and decidedly one-way conversations. He responds to the pokes with a kick or two; I imagine his responses to my talking. It's been fun and thought provoking.

What if telepathy were real, but extremely limited in scope? It only works when a baby is in the womb and then only between Baby and Dad. Mom and baby already experience food and maybe even emotions together. Why not Dad? The only thing is, since Baby and Dad aren't physically connected, it only happens through telepathy.

The dads who are aware of this use it to teach their children about what to expect after they're born, the love of God through Jesus, and maybe even to plant some sort of suggested career path or artistic passion. Maybe the story is that this secret has been leaked to the world and now everyone wants to exploit this connection. I don't know where the story would go from here, but I'm sure there are many possibilities. What do you think?

Many of the Renaissance and Reformation writers wrote their thoughts in the form of dialogues between themselves and some other thinker from the past (Petrarch spoke with St. Augustine on problems and solutions in the Church, e.g.). What would such a "conversation" between Dad-to-be and Preborn-baby look like?

[Kessie]

That's a very interesting idea. Kind of like in the Temeraire books, how the dragons are in the eggs for years, but they're constantly learning from the chatter going on outside the egg. Temeraire hatches knowing French, English and Chinese.

In later books they go to Africa. African dragons are considered to be sort of reborn elders, and are told this the whole time they're in the egg. So they hatch convinced they're an elder of the tribe, and take it on themselves to guard and lead the tribe wisely.

[myrthman]

Sounds interesting. Who's the author?

[Kessie]

Naomi Novik. They're alternate history fantasy, so the Napoleonic wars with dragons. Everybody has a dragon air force. Our heroes, naturally, are British. :-) The first one, his Majesty's Dragon, comes up for free on Amazon all the time. Also they're all at the library. They're fantastic.

[newburydave]

I just bought it, not that I love all things Draconic or anything

As to telepathy, I think we were created with it. It is one of the things Adam and Eve "shut down" so they could rebel against God. First they had to stop "talking to Him" and close off the channel of His voice to their hearts.

We regain it in a measure in salvation when we begin to hear his voice again in our hearts after we make peace with him through Jesus atonement.

IMHO, when we shut out God's voice (stopped listening to him, hardened our hearts against his reproof and instruction) we damaged our own souls so we can't communicate with anyone else or any other of the creatures either.

That's dave's theology of telepathic communication.

Now dragons, since they are Elemental Spirits not just part of animal life, have the power to stretch our blindness and force their thoughts on us. They are in a sense Material Angels and Angels can still communicate with us telepathically just as God can if he really forces himself on us. Face it, our puny will's can't shut out the will of the Sovereign will of the universe.

The reason more people don't hear him is that he is offended by our rejection and doesn't reveal himself to us until we open up to him.

Oh well, now you all know I'm over the edge. This is a theme I develop in one of my story universes; I also happen to believe it is true IRL.

SGD
dave

[Kessie]

Dave: Heh, I've always kind of thought the same thing about telepathy. I think the same thing about teleportation. You know when Philip was caught up by the spirit and relocated across the country? I think we used to be able to do that.

My theory is that before the fall, we could have populated all the planets in the universe that way, simply by teleporting to them. But when man sinned, that was closed to us and all the other planets became wastelands.

Again, no way to prove it, but fun to think about. :-)

There was this old game my brother played years ago called Battlezone 2, where you fight aliens on various moons across the solar system. The Jovian moons were wonderful, because the sky was the stripes and detail of Jupiter. It was fun to take a peek at what it might have been like to live on a world like that.