Mark Twain’s “Mental Telegraphy”: The Essay He Was Too Afraid to Publish for Thirteen Years

Mark Twain had an odd habit: for years he wrote coincidences down. Not told them over dinner — wrote them down, with dates, names, what had come into his head and what turned out later. Out of that card index grew an essay he wrote in 1878 and then kept in a desk drawer for thirteen years. The story is worth going through honestly, because part of it checks out against his own published texts and part of it cannot be checked at all. I am not going to blur those two halves together.

He coined the term himself

People usually say “telepathy,” and that word is not Twain’s. His own was different. In 1884 he wrote to the Society for Psychical Research in London asking to join, and put it like this: “Thought-transference, as you call it, or mental telegraphy as I have been in the habit of calling it, has been a very strong interest with me.” Eleven years later he repeated it in print, in an 1895 magazine piece: “They seem to come under the head of what I named ‘Mental Telegraphy’ in a paper written seventeen years ago, and published long afterwards.” Note the verb: named. He did not pick up a fashionable word, he minted his own — and used it for decades.

Thirteen years in a drawer

The arithmetic in his own sentence adds up: 1895 minus seventeen is 1878, when the paper was written. He printed it in December 1891 in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine as “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History.” The title is about precisely that delay. The sequel, “Mental Telegraphy Again,” ran in the same magazine in September 1895. The reason for the silence is simple and very human: he was the most famous humorist in America and he genuinely feared being taken for a crank. The man who was not afraid to mock the church, the Congress and whole empires spent thirteen years not daring to publish a piece about his own observations.

The dream about his brother — and why it needs care

The best-known story in this set is the dream about his brother’s death. Henry Clemens worked on the steamboat Pennsylvania; on 13 June 1858 her boilers exploded near Ship Island below Memphis, killing more than two hundred and fifty people. Henry survived the blast itself but his lungs and skin were badly scalded, and he died eight days later, on 21 June 1858, in Memphis. Sam Clemens had left the Pennsylvania some weeks earlier — on 5 June — and was not aboard that day. All of that is documented. The dream account runs like this: some weeks before the disaster he supposedly saw his brother in a metal coffin, dressed in one of Sam’s own suits, with a bouquet on his chest in which a single red rose stood among white ones. And then saw exactly that scene in waking life.

What is verifiable here, and what is not

Here is the line I promised not to blur. The explosion, the dates, Henry’s death, the 1884 letter, the two magazine essays, the term itself — all of that checks out against primary sources. The dream account does not. It was not published in Twain’s lifetime: it appears in Albert Bigelow Paine’s 1912 biography, two years after the writer’s death, and in the autobiography volumes published almost a century later still. What we have is a recollection of an event half a century old, written down by someone else’s hand and issued posthumously. That does not mean Twain invented it; it means we have no proof, and pretending otherwise is not on. Twain, for his part, behaved better here than many: he collected cases, published them, and said plainly that he had no explanation.

Let us be plain: I do not train telepathy

Now the important part, without hedging. Neither thought-transference nor prophetic dreams are part of what I teach, and I am not going to promise you either. A century and a half of systematic attempts has produced no convincing confirmation of telepathy, and Twain’s story does not change that. So if you came here for a way to learn the future, I do not have one — and neither does anybody else. But this story has a second half, and that half works.

One of his habits is worth taking

Look at what Twain actually did, setting aside the question of whether telepathy is real. He noticed, and he wrote it down. An ordinary person catches a coincidence and has forgotten it by the next day. Twain recorded it: when, what exactly, under what circumstances — and years later he had material he could work with. That is the whole trick, and it has nothing to do with mysticism: what is not written down does not exist as far as memory is concerned. This is exactly the difference between someone who “hardly ever dreams” and someone who, by week three, is writing down two or three dreams a night. Everybody dreams, every night; the dreams simply evaporate within minutes of waking.

Where to start

Observation and a journal can help compare your records, but establish neither telepathy nor prediction. Include mismatches rather than selecting only successes. There is no required two-week marker deadline.

How to walk this path with guidance

Twain built his card index alone, without a map and without an explanation, and admitted to the end of his life that he did not understand what he was dealing with. You have an advantage: the same skills — dream recall, observation, awareness inside the dream — are now assembled into a clear sequence you can work through calmly, step by step. If you want to walk it with guidance, explore my method and apply.

Twain’s original Mental Telegraphy in the collected volume includes his account of the 1878 manuscript and fear of ridicule. It establishes his beliefs, not telepathy. The dream before his brother’s death is a separate memoir episode and cannot be verified by this essay alone.