Inside an Exo-Intelligent Mind (Space Alien) ?

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I recently developed an increased appreciation of what it might be like to communicate with beings from other planets.  Let me lower expectations before I begin.  My source for this was in a very unusual dream (okay, go ahead and have a good laugh).  But bear with me on this, you may be glad you did.

Science fiction movies (and illustrations) seem to do a fairly good job of depicting what space creatures may look like (if indeed there are any, which is not a given).  But after this dream, I question whether we can even approximate what exo-intelligent beings may think like.  Their thoughts may be as alien to us as is their variety of (supposed) shapes.  If so, the difficulty of communication with them may be vastly greater than merely translating from one dictionary to another.  Not only might the languages be exceedingly different, the very structure of their thoughts might be utterly unlike ours, or anything we imagine.

Now on to the dream concept.  Let me segue into this with a science fiction short story that I remember from decades ago (1950s?).  In that story, a man (Jim) is visited by a friend who brings along with him his new fiancée.  He invites them inside, and offers them drinks.  During the visit, Jim gets dizzy, and suddenly finds himself in a very strange world.  It is like a sort of cartoonish world, in which there is little detail.  The grass is green but mushy, like a sponge.  Trees are vague shapes with brown trunks and green tops, but as with the grass, there are no leaves, just mush.  However, every once in a while, among crowds of people, a man’s face comes into sharp contrast, always handsome.  A woman’s dress comes into focus, very stylish. Likewise, with shoes that some women are wearing.  Fortunately, Jim snaps out of it in time to bid his guests farewell.

Later on, Jim theorizes as to what happened.  He thinks that in some science-fictiony way, he briefly entered the mind of the fiancée.  He saw the world as does she, interested in only a very few things:  handsome men, stylish clothes and the like.  In her world, she never notices blades of grass, or birds, or any normal detail.  Jim feels sorry for his friend, who does not realize how shallow his fiancée is.

With that setup, humor me while I describe my own dream.  Well, that is just the point—I can’t.  Have you ever had a dream which seemed perfectly ordinary at the time, but when you awoke, you realized was silly—flying cats, ocean going railroad trains, buildings that transformed into mountains—you get the idea.  When you awoke, you could remember the dream, express it, and know how silly it was.

My dream was not silly, not at all.  It made perfectly good sense, so good in fact, that it made too much sense to be a dream.  When I awoke, I could remember the dream, but then, to my astonishment, I realized that I could not express it in words.  Sadly, as I struggled to find words, the dream soon faded—not, I think, because of a problem with remembering it, but because I had nothing to compare it to.  I still remember part of it, the sense that it was all ordinary and logical.  That part stays with me.

After some time, it occurred to me that I had had a glimpse—whether real or imaginary is for you to decide—of what it is like to be inside the mind of an intelligent creature on a faraway planet.

When (if ever) humans encounter intelligent space aliens, we may well find that decrypting their language (if we can even call it a language) will defy all our linguistic abilities.  If communication is at all possible, it may require something like direct brain-to-brain (oh, this is getting silly) interaction.

As a footnote, I saw a televised case history of a man who, through age-regression psychotherapy, believes he had experienced a transfer of thought—from an American sailor who died on a submarine in World War 2.  He supplied explicit details of names, places and dates, all of which were later confirmed, including details of the interior of the house in which the sailor had lived.

As an evangelical Christian, I cannot relate any of this to my religious beliefs, but as I said in other posts, my search for truth is open minded.

I will, however, note that according to Jewish tradition, some very few angels, but apparently not all of them, are able to communicate with humans.  This might possibly be because most of the angelic beings do not have what we humans would recognize as anything we could call a language with structure like our own.

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