Ky Dickens: Sometimes I think with a story, it hits you like a lightning bolt, you know? Just like falling in love might. And so I ended up thinking… this—whatever it is—there’s something here and this is what I should be doing next. I started really developing my own relationship with these families, collecting their stories, and seeing that their stories, even though they didn’t know each other, and were often isolated around the world, were the same.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends. Welcome! In this episode of Insights at the Edge, I’m really excited to be speaking with Ky Dickens. Ky is an award-winning filmmaker, a writer and director who is celebrated for creating transformative documentaries that influence public policy and ignite social change. Ky, you’re someone I really admire.
In 2024, Ky created The Telepathy Tapes, which is a podcast, you’ve probably heard of it, exploring Telepathy within the non-speaking community. It’s a podcast that has raised profound questions about the nature of consciousness, also about language, and about how we can best support the non-speaking community.
The series went viral upon its release, and in 2025 it was ranked as the number one podcast in the world. Season two of The Telepathy Tapes is now available, and we’re gonna talk about some of the topics that are covered in season two. And in addition, Ky is releasing—you guessed it—a film about The Telepathy Tapes coming out later this year.
Ky, welcome.
Ky Dickens: Thank you. What an introduction. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Tami Simon: To begin, for those people who they’ve heard of The Telepathy Tapes, maybe they’ve even listened to a little bit, and yet they don’t really know the origin story. How did this documentary filmmaker come to create her very first podcast?
Ky Dickens: Yeah, I mean, it was an accident. Uh, you know, and, and just even covering something like telepathy was not ever on the radar for me. You know, I was a social issue dealing with, you know, things like climate change or LGBTQ rights and faith communities, or equal and affordable access to healthcare and paid family medical leave.
Like totally different world, right? And so, um, I was going through kind of a personal transition between projects and just really, I was going, I had some major deaths of young friends happen, you know, kind of back to back and was searching for my own answers and started really starting to realize I, I didn’t know what I believed anymore.
and started doing a deep dive into consciousness, you know, books and spirituality, um, all sorts of different things. And in that quest of trying to figure out what I believed, I heard an interview. On a podcast with featuring Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, who was a neuroscientist, um, who taught at Harvard, trained at Johns Hopkins, who had been studying claims of telepathy, um, in non-speaking individuals with auto autism or apraxia, which is a mind body disconnect.
I mean, sometimes like I think with a story, it hits you like a lightning bolt, you know, just like falling in love might. And so I ended up, thinking this is whatever it is, there’s something here and this is what I should be doing next. And I started talking to Dr. Diane Hennessy Powell, you know, started zooming, texting, went to go visit her, really started to think there’s a, there, there, and I don’t know what the, there was, I just knew it was something.
and then started working following her, but then meeting so many different families that I started really developing my own relationship with these families, collecting their stories, and seeing that their stories, even though they didn’t know each other, and were often isolated around the world with the same.
were told their child was not in there, they wouldn’t be able to communicate. Um, they weren’t competent or capable of learning. Only to, you know, at some point discover spelling to communicate via pushing, you know, typing letters on a letter board or on a keyboard because that’s a gross motor skill versus speech, which is a fine motor skill.
their kid is in there and then their kid starts telling them that they can read minds or that they speak to angels. I mean, just all sorts of stuff that I think shocked so many of these parents from every major religion or just even atheist, agnostic around the world. Scientists, doctors, parents from every stripe was experiencing this.
And so I thought, well, I’m a documentary filmmaker. I’m gonna pitch this as a show. We did, we put a great deck together. We were working with a really great production company and pitched it to all the, you know, pretty much all the major streamers. Um, one bought it, you know, they told us it was either, you know, it didn’t make sense or it was too out there, or that didn’t have true crime, or it didn’t have a celebrity.
I mean, there was all sorts of problems. I felt really hopeless at that point. ’cause I thought, I don’t have the money to help, you know, orchestrate these scientific tests and these families are all over the world and spanning through decades. And that’s it. And the road for me, really. And I actually, I, I remember going into my bedroom and, you know, saying to God or universe or whoever, whatever you wanna call it, you know, take it back.
I thought this was my, my idea to show Shepherd into the world and I failed big time. So. It’s yours. Take it back, find someone else who can do it. I clearly can’t. And like the next day, I woke up and it was like, oh my gosh, a podcast, I don’t need any money to tell the story. I don’t need anyone to green light it.
I can just put it out there as a podcast. And it was funny ’cause I, I called the scientists and a lot of families and most of them were like, that’s a terrible idea. We’re talking about telepathy, spelling to communicate. It’s things you have to see to believe. But beyond that, your main subjects don’t speak.
How can it be an only audio form? But I could just, it was like, no, no. This is it. This is, this is a way, I think. And so I didn’t know. I’ve never made a podcast but I figured, hey, it’s like making a documentary just without video, you know? And, um, put it together mostly in my bedroom, in a pillow fort. We didn’t have any advertising.
We didn’t have a social media account. We didn’t have anything word of mouth. Um, I think the stories of these individual parents and these individual non…you know, these incredible non-speakers, is what made it take off. It was them and their stories and their triumph really, you know?
Tami Simon: One of the things that’s interesting to me, and I think this is true often for people who are creators, artists, is this trust in the lightning bolt moment, and I wonder if you can say more about that and then the tremendous sense of failure you had and how that might be a teaching for other people who have had lightning bolt moments and then they’ve dropped it.
I mean, maybe listening to your story might actually encourage some people to stay open.
Ky Dickens: Yeah, I think the lightning bolt is really real for a lot of us. And, and I think that for creatives especially, they know this well, inventors, a lot of people. But I think the most common thing we can think about it…it truly is like falling in love. Sometimes you have no idea why you love something or someone you just do, and there’s no rational reason behind it.
It’s just, boom, this is it. And, and I, I think when an idea hits, I mean, sometimes for me they’ll come like fully formed, but other times it is just an idea striking so deeply in this, it’s
like a resonance in my body where I’m like, oh, this is what I’m supposed to be doing now. Like, this is where I’m supposed to be putting my time.
Like this one is, is tapping me right now. And if I don’t take it, someone else will. Sometimes you don’t wanna take it ’cause it doesn’t feel right or you’re not ready or you’re not in the head space. But you know, the lightning bolt moments, what I really considered a lightning bolt is like when you’re ready, idea is ready for you.
And you both kind of decide together, okay, we’re gonna bring this into the world. I was so, the most powerful it’s ever been for me with this project and that idea, I mean, tenfold what I’ve ever experienced. And that’s why when it was all rejections, it was like, it kind of threw me into this cognitive dissidence of like, I’ve always so deeply trusted the creative muse this, this energetic thing that I truly believes lives outside of us, you know, that I believe lives outside of us that chooses creators and humans to play with, to bring ideas into the world.
And it’s never failed me. And you know, that experience of. What happened next, you know, with making it to a podcast I think is a huge part of this creative exchange that we to have as creators as humans with this beautiful force that likes to play with us, which is that you get to play with it, you get to enjoy it, you get to experience it, but you don’t get to control it and you also don’t get to control, know, how it does when it gets out there or what form it goes out into the world in.
And that’s where I was so nearsighted, I was convinced has to be a three- or four-part docuseries. It has to be an X, Y, Z streamer. Like myopic and, and where when I said, forget it, take it back and I actually let myself stand outta the way, that’s when it hit me like, oh, I haven’t been listening to it the whole time.
It wants to be a podcast. And I think that like throughout the whole time too, I remember recording all the Zoom calls and phone calls and thinking, this is so weird. Why am I doing this? Like, I’ve never done that before. So it’s almost like I had all the stuff, like the idea, knew the whole time what it wanted. I just wasn’t listening.
And so I think that’s the biggest thing for any creative person is like, you are to play with this beautiful force of creativity it will choose you and it will pass you by and it will choose you most if you’re willing and working ready and creating your own momentum.
it’s like that complete balance of you can’t control it. you have to surrender. You have to surrender to it, but you also have to participate.
And so figuring out that surrender, and I think the big part of that surrender is. Is letting it tell you how it wants to enter the world.
Tami Simon: One of the things I’m curious about is your own process as a rational, skeptical, open-minded skeptic. Coming to the research and how you worked it all out yourself, meaning, I think a lot of times we start with what, and then you went on some kind of journey personally to get to where you are now of being an advocate for the reality of a consciousness primacy in the world versus a materialist viewpoint.
But you had to take a journey to get there. Tell us about your own process.
Ky Dickens: Yeah. And, and I think I’m still going through it, you know, I mean, it was really hard to believe, um, that telepathy would be possible. I can’t, I actually can’t think of like anything more difficult to believe because we value our privacy and secrecy so much. Uh, and our individuality thinking that we have our own little minds and our own little thoughts, and they’re
Tami Simon: I knew you were gonna say that. Yeah.
Ky Dickens: I mean, it’s true.
And you know, I think the first few times I saw it I thought, okay, this might be just like a miraculous aberration or there might be some explanation. And then where it started to become. Really confounding for me was that when I started learning, oh no, there’s teachers going back decades that have been recording this and talking about it and that there are parents all over the world.
And then meeting people all over the world that had, you know, detailed journals and entries. And then I’d meet another family who’s like, oh, well, you know, there’s been books written about this for decades. Look at this one. Listen, this one, this one, you know, eighties, nineties, going back, back, back, back, back, talking about telepathy.
And what parents were saying was a greater slate of even quote unquote spiritual gifts in non-speakers with autism. Um, and to some degrees, many flavors of autism. But certainly though those that feel less attached to their body with apraxia, this mind body disconnect. And so then when I would start meeting families who didn’t know each other.
They were talking about the same struggles, right? Like when I’m doing homework, I really wanna make sure they know the material and they’re not taking it from my mind. So I have to clear my mind or be thinking of a song when they’re doing the math. And I’m like, wow. But then you’re hearing this from family, after family, after family.
So at a certain point, I think, and I like a big reader, I love science. I’ve always been, I think, like pretty nerdy. I prefer nonfiction films. Like, it’s always NPR, the podcast, like, you know, I’m just not a very sensationalist like person. It’s always, like, really grounded. I think when you’re coming from that stature, if you start hearing something from hundreds of people all over the world, throughout different decades, writing books certain point that that’s a legitimate way to start considering science, right?
Like we didn’t, um, discover people, uh, you know, had get, you know, cancer or radiation hoisting from, from all doing experiments where we put people in x-rays and tests. People started reporting problems and we figured it out. So. So for me then the challenge became, well, how do I get people to listen to this?
Because I think they’re telling the truth. These parents aren’t on a mass conspiracy to trick the world into believing telepathy. then the next question was, and how? Like what is happening? Exactly. You know, and there were things that I would talk about with Dr. Diane Hennessy, Powell, other scientists, like, is it possible that like quiet, quiet noises our eyes are making, or something in our cells that like they’re picking up on?
Or could there be subtle queuing or could there be and that? And so then, you know, we would try things just as play, like, okay, let’s put divider, let’s put earphones in, let’s do this, let’s do this. And see if individuals could still get of what their parent or their teacher, whoever they’re telepathic with is looking at.
And they could. And so at a certain point it just became undeniable. And then what happened to me next was a cognitive dissidence around, well, this appears to be true and I can’t explain it. But it does appear to be true. then what else have I dismissed all along that may be true as well? And, and can we approach those things thoughtfully from a really responsible scientific, of corroboration type of way.
And that became season two, where we look at all sorts of stuff from mediumship to energy healing, to the creative process, to savant mind, sight seeing through a blindfold, um, by talking to scientists and talking to people who’ve done it and talking to people who doubted it. And, and try to find the best cases of those who can talk about this thing around the world.
um, you know, it’s, I think what I found through my own process, and I think what I have come to believe from, um, the response to The Telepathy Tapes is that for a long time I think people have felt they had a fall into like. binary camps, right? Like, you either don’t believe in anything, you’re an atheist, you, you know, everything’s material based on materialism.
If you can’t see it or measure it, it’s not real. If you believe in God or this or that, you’re, you know, somehow, um, less educated, you’re less informed, you’re more gullible. Or the other side is like, oh, well they believe in fairies and bigfoot and everything is, you know, this totally sensationalized, extremist silliness.
And I think most of us are somewhere in between where we’re like, I, I, I am really rational and thoughtful, but I also do believe there could be a non-physical world. Can we figure this out together without mocking it? And um, and somehow, accidentally, now that’s what I’m doing.
Tami Simon: One of the things I’m curious about is how your standing up personally amidst the criticism and the mockery. And I say that because in preparing for this interview, I mentioned to some people, I’m gonna be talking to Ky Dickens, the creator of The Telepathy Tapes. And I heard different things like, oh, come on Tami, haven’t you heard that’s been debunked?
Or this or that, or you know, they’re moving the hands of the spellers, the person that, Tami, this is bullshit. Come on, wake up girl. And my attitude actually is what you described as being someplace in the middle, meaning I have an intense. Curiosity, and I’m gonna take this a little bit further ’cause we’re just getting to know each other.
You know, I have this sort of open porousness to a multidimensional way of seeing and being in the world. I’m not only feeling myself or even this conversation on one dimension. Do you know there’s a lot going on? I can feel our listeners, what, how can you, I can, I can sense them, I can sense a heart radiance, uh, actually and connection between you and I Right. here, just newly beginning, that’s sparking.
So there’s a lot of things happening in any given moment. And if somebody tried to reduce that into just physical, measurable actions, I would say, wow, you’ve now put me in a thimble, screw you. But at the same time, as you said, it can get, you know, into silly snake oil really quickly. So I guess my question is though, how do you.
Yourself, stand in this without being like, oh my God, another person lobbed this like horrible critique at me that isn’t even grounded.
Ky Dickens: Yeah. I mean, I think it would be hard if I didn’t think it was truthful, right? I mean, if, if you’re, if you’re, um, exploring something that I think is like rooted in dishonesty and um, trickery, it’d be pretty hard to sleep at night. You know, but if, if, if you think that you’re just caring or, or you know, giving the truth of truly thousands of people who have experienced something and that you’ve seen with your own eyes and, there isn’t trickery and there isn’t anything like that, um, then, then, then it, it just becomes a case of this is hard for people to accept.
People like their privacy, people like the paradigm in which they were raised, the, that makes ’em feel safe. And you bring forth a new idea, um, even though this isn’t new, um, an idea that might feel out of the norm and it can bring forth ridicule, but, you know, that’s not how the world, um, changed.
It’s not how we progressed as humans. You know, if, if no one had left the coast of England to explore ’cause they thought the world was flat. We’d be pretty, we’d be pretty uninformed human beings. You know, we, you know, when people, there’s a whole slew of scientists throughout the course of history been dismissed or mocked or ridiculed for saying something that turned out to be true, that at the time, um, society wasn’t ready to handle.
it’s okay. I’m, I’m okay getting that, that pushback. And I think some of, you know, even just some of the responses you even just said, right, there are clearly people who haven’t listened to the podcast. You know, to know what’s really happening, because many of these individuals are spelling without being touched their hands.
Certainly no one we’ve interviewed has their hands touched. That’s just not even a thing. Um, so, so I think some of it is coming from people who just you know, jump on something, but they, they don’t even know about it. And I think people who are in the world who’ve listened, who’ve done the to like, listen and do their homework, um, it becomes pretty hard to dismiss.
Tami Simon: Now you mentioned that when you discovered that yes, there is truth in telepathic communication happening for non-speaking people, that it made you question. Other ideas that perhaps previously in your life you had not really considered? What, what, what are the things that you now feel open to that five years ago you would’ve been like, no way, Uhuh.
That’s just outside the known for me.
Ky Dickens: Like even now, I would never walk into like a mall psychic or medium or something. I think like that’s probably mostly just snake oil fraud. Fake. I have found there are real, you know, mediums, um, from researching this and meeting the people who test them and who put them through not just double, but triple blind tests and all sorts of stuff like that.
So I think that’s something where I don’t have any doubt now that that’s real.
Tami Simon: So in that you’re talking about mediumship, you’re talking about people who are able to contact individuals who have passed, who are not incarnate, but there’s a soul consciousness that they’re bringing through.
Ky Dickens: And what that is like, I mean, that’s one of the things that we, questions we asked in season two. Like, is it that they’re truly talking with someone’s like soul or someone who’s actually passed on? Or is it like downloading information from a greater informational field? kinda like the edge of a black hole that all, any, anything that goes inside of it, all information is kept on the edge.
Like our, is that kind of our reality too? And all information’s out there, you know, like those are questions we don’t try to answer, we can’t answer yet, but it’s something that we explore. Um, I think another thing was energy healing. You know, that was something where, you know, it just felt like hopeful, and maybe this is just the placebo effect.
Um, we did a deep dive over two episodes into energy healing and covered, um, a team of scientists, that were on the front lines of, um, reducing the growth of pancreatic cancer cells in a Petri dish. But with through energy healing. Um, and people, you know, some, again, cutting edge experiments with reiki of people having, you know, 30% reduction, when they’re having reiki being done.
And they had a fakey group too, you know, fake reiki, people who didn’t, weren’t practicing it, didn’t have an intention for healing, didn’t join the stuff, and Reiki was much more powerful than fakey, um, and the placebo. So, you know, we, we kind of, um, do a deep dive into a lot of this stuff. Um, animal communication, again, like I’ve, I, I would’ve laughed at the thought of someone communicating animals.
And again, I think there’s a lot of people who maybe make money off of stuff that aren’t the real deal. Like our, I have three people on my staff now, and we’re constantly sorting through emails and trying to discern is this person the real one or the fake one. Uh, are they authentic? Are they not? What’s their agenda?
Doing a bunch of research, like really trying to figure out and triangulate who we will talk to. Making double, triple, quadruple. Sure. We’re not putting anything into the world that would be, know, fake. but as far as, uh, the animal communicators, like the people we’ve talked to who’ve worked with governments around the world, have worked with huge, you know, Greenpeace or, you know, um, nas, like that to try to help with, you know, animal life or migration roots and all sorts of stuff.
So, there’s, there’s a lot that I think that, um, you know, people on the front lines of law enforcement, military information, big technology are leaning on that isn’t physical. And that was the big shock to me is, wow, this often they can’t explain it and they don’t know how it works. Maybe, or maybe they do and I just don’t know.
Um, but, but they’re using it and they’re utilizing it as a tool. and that, that was also shocking to me. Remote viewing for one, things like that.
Tami Simon: Can you tell me more in the animal communication, what you discovered about governments using animal communication?
Ky Dickens: Well, I, I can’t actually totally, because most of the, the two animal communicators that we’ve talked with a lot on the show have told me that their, their agreements with these places are confidential, you know? Um, but like, so that’s, you know, a, a major thing. But certainly, like, there might be something, you know, in, in one of the African countries who’s trying to reduce poaching, right?
And then have to work with, you know, getting elephants to a safe area. And do you do that? Often it’s like a animal communicator who’s good, who’s proven their worth will come in help with that task. And they’re effective. And because they’re effective, they get used again for the next issue and the next problem.
Sure you could say, well, that’s coincidence. It’s just luck. It’s this or that. You know, I don’t know how someone controls, you know, huge beasts that are wild and gets them to do what you want by sitting in, sitting still. But these people have been effective and then they get used again and again and again.
Um, and as we talk about in, in our season two episode on animal communication, I think it’s episode five, there’s also an example of a woman who’s worked with, you know, royal families and Olympians and national riding teams with their horses to try to get the horses to, know, behave or do something or change their behavior and travel.
again, like it’s something I would’ve dismissed. But when you start to talk to Olympians national team riders and royal families and governments who use these people and say, we don’t know why it works, but it works over and over and over again, and there’s something there, and that’s why I’m doing it, you know?
You know, people don’t have to believe it, but is it fun to explore and ask the question? Um, ’cause something’s happening.
Tami Simon: Something’s happening.
The finale of season two, I found pretty…I’ll use the word mind-blowing. I had never heard before and maybe I’m late to the party, about the phenomenon of young children being blindfolded and, you know, under, behind an eye mask, completely sealed off and being able to see numbers and and colors.
And this is what you devote the finale episode of season two. Um, you call it Mindsight. And it took me through the whole process of like, no, this is bullshit to wait a second, Tami. Do a little more research, look online, look at some other YouTube videos, even outside of the finale of season two, and then reading other people who are debunking it.
But I’m not quite sure why. And then wanting to experiment. I like went through the whole, I went through the whole journey, the whole arc. And then this was all like just within an hour, you know? And then wanting to experiment myself. Could I see through a blindfold? If I trained myself to do it, would I be open to that?
I want to try. And then landing in a place of not knowing, but being curious. And I’d love if you could just say more about this phenomenon and where you landed in terms of people having an ability, young children, and why Young children especially to see through a blindfold.
Ky Dickens: Yes. So, you know, when I first was going through my own cognitive dissidence around the telepathy, remember I was still meeting families all the time there was a school in New Jersey and a new mom started, and her son, this comes back to the mindset in a second. Her son, um, was answering questions before the teacher.
Ask the question. Often the question might be like, okay, I’m gonna um, tell you a, you know I’m looking like a picture, you know, and it’s about to come and I want you to point to the same one to see if, could they match? Did they understand what was going on? You know, so it’s like a 4-year-old and the child started pointing to the card before the card was revealed or laid down.
And the mom was like, I think my child is telepathic or seeing the card, or, I don’t know what’s going on. she asked the head of the program at the school, in the school, oh yeah, this is, you know, we talk, this is kind of a private thing in this world, but there’s actually a filmmaker working on it.
You should call her. She might be able to, you know, whatever. So then this mom gets in touch with me. So we start talking and I’m like, yeah, I can connect you to more families and this and this. And she was great ’cause she started doing her own deep dive to figure out what was going on. And she writes back to me like a few weeks later and she’s like, I just found this.
I wonder if this is the same type of thing. These are kids who can see throughout a, you know, with a blindfold on. And I thought, what on earth is this? And I started looking and I just saw a debunk, debunk, debunk, debunk, debunk all over the world. And I kind of didn’t think twice about it. then it came up again a a few more times.
And then I did my first test with this young woman. The first time I ever saw the quote unquote telepathy with my own eyes, one of the things we did is we put a blindfold on her. And it wasn’t even telepathy at that point. She had a, like, stack color popsicle sticks together and that type of thing. And I thought, what is this?
This is even a telepathy. And I thought, oh my goodness, it’s, maybe it’s the same as this video this mom sent. So I, I called the woman who taught this, uh, mind sight or seeing through the blindfold in England. Her name is Nicola Farmer. She’s wonderful. talked to her. And then I thought, I’m gonna go through the teacher training to try to figure out what’s going on.
And I went through the whole teacher training, and it was a few days and it was expensive. And at the end of it, I mean. This woman is like, you know, trying to equip you with tools to teach kids to do this. And I was like, okay, this is not a trick. I mean, there’s there, she’s giving you like the meditations and how to go through this and how to talk to the children and how to, and I thought, okay, so, but they all believe it’s real.
And then I met some teachers who’d gone through it and the teachers were telling me, oh no, it’s real. Like I didn’t even believe I could teach it, but it is real. And I wasn’t going through it to become a teacher. I just wanted to understand. And so in my mind now at this point, I was like, here’s a bucket of something that I need to explore and I don’t understand.
But I wasn’t discounting it anymore. And then when I went to England, I saw this with my own eyes. I brought my dad who’s a materialist and a skeptic, and he’s kind of come up a few times in the celebrity tapes. Um. And it was pretty mind boggling for the whole crew that was there because not only were these children seeing through the blindfold, but um, often they would see from a different area out of their head, like the back of their head or the side of their head.
was confusing and strange. And so when that was all going on, um, I thought, I need to know if this is happening in other places. ’cause it felt pretty. You know, um, reliable. Another thing too is like, you know, we tried on the blindfolds. ’cause you know, I’ve read like, oh, if you squint, light comes in.
Yeah, it does. It doesn’t mean I could read through a blindfold. It doesn’t mean I could play catch or do a puzzle. And that’s what these kids were doing. They were playing catch, doing puzzles, solving Rubik’s cubes, reading, drawing. then I kind of went on a quest to like, who is doing this around the world?
Found out that there’s schools in China that have been really engaged in this for decades. And that it’s a big thing for parents in China to send their kids to these schools to learn these tasks because it makes them better at school. Um, found, you know, schools in America teaching it, schools in India, teaching it, and often with different principles and different modalities.
And then I met a, a neuropsychiatrist who was trying to debunk it and was going through, you know, meeting all sorts of people doing her own tests. And she became so convinced that it’s real, that now she’s opening a school. And one of the most fascinating things that she told me is she said, look. I know that you’ve been looking at all these places around the world doing this.
She’s like, I think the only thing that’s kind of BS is it doesn’t have to take weeks or months. And she’s like, I think they believe it does. I think their modalities tell them it does, but I think most young kids can start to do it within minutes. And I thought, come on. And so I put my kids to the test.
I was like, can you come to the tele tapes office? My crew will watch. There are, I hire, you know, very critical minded skeptics. They’re always racking through things like, you know, so I was like, let’s have you do it. is, he does not wanna ever be fooled. He just can’t. He hates it. and so he put the blindfold on and I’d say within minutes was able to tell you the colors.
And I wasn’t as impressed with that. ’cause I was like, well again, if light leaks in, maybe the color is bleeding through the light that I can explain. No problem. But then when he started reading through it or telling you UNO cards and numbers and shapes. It, was pretty mind boggling. then my daughter, who’s 11, and I thought she was too old, and I kind of told her, I’m like, I know you want to be able to do this, and I don’t know if you can.
it took her longer, but she started seeing cut. And then after many times, like maybe doing it four or five times, she was able to start seeing cards and, read through the blindfold. so I don’t have no idea. And I’ve talked to a few scientists who were like, you know, maybe there’s some sort of, um, you know, optical sensors in our skin.
know, we actually see with our brain, not our eyes, right? Our eyes are letting in light and letting in, you know, information and, and detail. But could that be entering our body through other ways? not? Or is it something more, much more, you know, woo woo, like you’re seeing with your soul, uh, you know, what is it?
Who knows? But, um. it’s pretty mind boggling. And I think, course, something like this, just like telepathy is gonna be debunked and railed on and hit from all angles. But what I encourage people to do, it’s not, it’s not, there’s no, there’s no gimmick here. Just try it yourself to put your own kids through a, through the test.
for the most part though, I think what I’ve heard from everyone is that it’s way easier to read. I mean, learn before the age of 12 and the younger, the better 5, 6, 7
Tami Simon: And, and what’s the thinking behind that Why that’s so?
Ky Dickens: You know, the scientific logical brain hasn’t kicked in yet. You know, you’re not overriding all the information that comes to you from other ways.
you’re not believing and telling yourself all the time that we’re separate and, and things are impossible, and that there’s, you know, uh, you still believe. In, in so many things at when you’re younger. And I, and I don’t think the filters that that work to help us succeed in the world, which keep us apart, are fully locked.
And I think it really just has to do with, know, kids being more, um, more open and yeah,
Tami Simon: Is it possible without going, without going too deep down this, uh, rabbit hole, but just a little further, is it possible to say briefly what the training involves, like how your son got up to speed so fast on doing it?
Ky Dickens: Yeah. That, that’s what was remarkable. It was like, and De La was the woman teaching him and I, she has a new, organization, nonprofit called Mind Sea to help kids do this. she put a blindfold on and I tested it and I was like, really? I was like, if he’s gonna do this, I want to be, you know, you know, so I kept looking at her and make sure there’s no things, and if it came up a little, I’d push it back down.
And so it was pretty. Blocked. And so, okay. She’d put that on and then she would do, she’d kind of feel around his, his, eyes just to get him familiar with his eyes. So like, just imagine with your fingers. And then she had me do, do it too to see what she was doing. So she might be, okay, follow my fingers.
They’re up here on the top. Okay, now follow my fingers this way. So he’d be hopefully looking at wherever the fingers were and just kind of activating, you know, those muscles of the eyes, making sure. And then, um, you know, she would usually do some sort of meditation, like, you know, you’re safe and you’re loved and you can do this, and you’re so much, there’s so much more that you can do than you know, and, you know, very affirmative.
And then it was just like instant, like putting up a color card. What card is this? A lot of positive affirmation. Okay. That was close. It was this one. How about this card? You know? And I’d say after like two or three misses, it was like getting it and that was it. it was quick. Seamless and actually unexplainable.
I have NI, I’m baffled by it, but at the point now where something frustrated by that confusion. It’s just something I can marvel at, you know?
Tami Simon: Would you say you’ve made peace in some way with the mystery of consciousness, that there’s some mystery here that perhaps we’re not gonna be able to nail down and define in every way that we want? Or are you on a search to get answers to how some of these things work or both?
Ky Dickens: I think it’s both. I mean, I, I do, I do fully believe now that consciousness is fundamental. Um, we’ve grown up in a paradigm which is materialism, which says that what is real can be measured and observed. And I think we did a huge disservice to ourselves of human beings when we cut off from the belief that the non-physical world is active and real in our lives.
And if you look back at a lot of native folks from all over the world, that was part and parcel of existence. And um, and it was helpful. It was quite helpful. So I think understand and, and how does this stuff become possible, you know, is if, if consciousness is fundamental, and if that sounds like, what does that mean?
You know, this idea, the materialist world, a lot of it’s right. A lot of it is right. You know, but basically it’s at these, these building blocks of our world, which are, physics and math and biology and psychology. And at the, to be, to be top of that is consciousness and all those other things created consciousness.
And you know, our brain created it. And every little layer of the pyramid there for materialism, I think is pretty correct. You know, we don’t wanna toss out the textbooks, but if you take that tippy, tippy top of consciousness and it on the bottom of the triangle, then consciousness becomes fundamental.
Consciousness is the baseline that everything else is built upon. And it’s not that hard to think about if you actually just start thinking that every single thing in your room, in my room, your body, your home, started as a thought first. here. It was all thought first. Everything in our physical reality, wifi, any of it a thought first.
The only thing that wasn’t is the earth that we’re standing on, unless that was someone else’s thought. If consciousness is fundamental, then it’s not hard to believe that our bodies are dividing up our little singular, unified things of consciousness into little beings that can operate and explore the world, but really at, you know, at when all said and done, we’re all part, it’s like we’re drops in an ocean kind of, and this ocean is consciousness and that, um, that would make something like telepathy or clairvoyance or remote viewing possible because we can operate or seeing through a blindfold possible.
I don’t, I, I don’t think that we have the wise yet, but I think we will just like, we couldn’t explain what a rainbow was for years. It was a promise from God, and then we could explain it. I think many of these things that feel mystical and magical, we find out how they operate and how they work. Um, the other thing that’s really interesting is, um, amount of, I think, high profile individuals who are much smarter than I, who’ve been, who you know, really on the cutting edge of technology and things like that, science have been telling me about some of the stuff they’re pondering and questioning.
And one of these individuals, I know he’s funded Consciousness Labs all over the world. Um, big in tech, big in funding consciousness research. And he’s got a theory that we’re trying to have him on the talk track, but he is pretty private. The talk tracks is our Between Seasons show, where we kinda unpack things that, um, that s which is a, you know, uh, quote, we talk about that in telepathy.
PS PSIP si, which might be clairvoyance or telepathy or, you know, psychokinesis or remote viewing. Some of these abilities, you know, he thinks they’re kind of shy and he doesn’t know if they’re, they’re built that way. But often, like when you see ’em out of the gate, it’s really repetitive and powerful and promising.
And sometimes they wane if you’re asked to do them or capture them or test them, you know, through the tele film film we have successfully captured. It’s gonna be in the film, you know, like. Telepathy happening in a very controlled setting, which is exciting, um, through comp triple blind trials with a whole team of scientists, you know, all sorts of stuff like that, which is great.
But when you try to capture and, and document this stuff too much, it can kind of get a little, difficult to do. And man, uh, believes that that’s part of the nature of it, that it, it, it kind of keeps the mystery alive. Like we have to have a little bit about that in our world. So who knows? Um, but we’re gonna keep exploring it.
Tami Simon: You mentioned that in our human history previously, people who lived closer to the earth would naturally have some of these capacities of being in an alive world, sensing the living power of nature and listening to precognitive dreams, that kind of thing that we could look back and how in modern left brain focused times that can be shut down.
And one of my curiosities is not just seeing that these are latent abilities that were in us and expressed previously, but where we’re going, that there’s that we’re in a very interesting moment. Right now and your work as a filmmaker at the intersection with social change, you’ve moved forward, if you will, this conversation in a really powerful way that there’s some future that’s coming.
And I, I think it’s not that far away actually. Uh, this is really my feeling that we’re in a sort of breakthrough period, and I might even say a breakthrough couple of decades here, where there is going to be, uh, a shift in our recognition of our human capacities. And I wonder if you see that.
Ky Dickens: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think that again, the best thing that I’ve seen in the past year was that my hope all along. Was just the science and research would start putting more time and money into this stuff. You know, it shouldn’t be, the owner shouldn’t be on the average person or a storyteller to figure out that, you know, it should be on the scientists.
And I think for a long time, the spirit of inquiry has been taken away from scientists. You couldn’t even ask questions about the non-physical world and be taken seriously. You’d be mocked, be ridiculed, you couldn’t find funding for it, you know, and forget tenure. You couldn’t get published if, even if you were doing incredible research that was peer reviewed and airtight.
And that’s really unfortunate because the spirit of inquiry should be what is lifeline of science. I’ve seen that with the telepathy too. I mean, this is like, it is documented all over the world from so many different sources. Like, you know, it was as thorough an effort as it could be and someone will still try to, you know, uh, discount it, debunk it, and that’s okay.
That’s okay. But what I wanted was that for science, just to unleash some money or some freedom to let scientists look at this. over the past year, it’s been wonderful because I’ve been hearing from of researchers, again showing that energy healing is working. It’s stopping the spread of pancreatic cancer when nothing else that we know of can stop pancreatic cancer.
At least that I know of. it’s one of the hardest cancers to reduce, diminish, reverse. here in a lab, energy healing is working on pancreatic cells and petri dishes. That is remarkable. That is groundbreaking news. what does that mean? the heck does that mean? know, the fact that scientists found something in our body, you know, some people could even call it an organ that we didn’t know what was there before, called the interstitium, which seems to bring information around to all the different cells in our body, which seems to map the, the meridians and money of the points that acupuncturists have been talking about for thousands of years.
And you know, acupuncture certainly by western scientists was mocked and saw silly and whatever. Well, here we have a wonderful system in our body that was accidentally discovered, by scientists in New York that is very real and shows that there’s electromagnetism in our body that creates what is equivalent of to chakras throughout us.
I mean, that’s remarkable, you know? And then. know about the telepathy research being done, and it’s pretty astounding because now when you talk to the scientists on the front cutting edge of it, don’t ask if it’s happening. They’re saying how many different types, because it doesn’t seem to be one type.
It seems to be two types. There seems to be this close proximity telepathy that might be more, um, a way of survival when your other senses are failing. You of like the non-speakers with the praxia I have. And there also seems to be this more common telepathy, which happens due to extreme need or love or closeness from a far, far, far apart distance.
and it’s involuntary. You can’t control when it happens. It’s usually happening because someone you love is in peril or needs you. there’s, that’s been reported throughout hundreds of years. And then the scientists are thinking, but maybe that’s too. types of telepathy maybe the, the first one, the one that happens in close proximity, maybe that’s happening through bio photons.
These little bits of light in our cells, you know, um, through that happen, through the mitochondria. And, and then you look over to the energy healing world and they’re talking about the same thing. We think there might be two different types of energy healing. One has to do with energy close up. Maybe it has to do with bio photons.
We’re looking into that. The other type seems to be different. It goes over a distance. It often requires it’s based on need. We don’t know yet how that’s working. Maybe it’s scalor waves. We don’t know. There’s a lot of controversial, strange thing fri things that seem fringe right now that could out to be real later.
so what’s interesting to me is that watching that the scientists in these different realms, studying different things are coming up with the same problems, the same questions, the same, um, um, you know, kind of running into the same things which make you wonder what the heck are we dealing with if it’s operating the same ways, you know.
And again, I think it’s the, the fundamental layer of consciousness.
Tami Simon: I wanna pick up on just one, uh, comment you made because I’ve never heard of the interstitium. I’ve never heard of that before. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Ky Dickens: Yeah. So I think if people are very interested, they should look, look into, um, the tapes Season two, I think it’s episodes eight and nine, um, which is where we look into the interstitium. Um, it was discovered by a group of scientists in New York. Um, they were testing a, um, basically a camera, you know, and people for a long time thought that there was just cracks inside of cells because when you them outta your body, it was collagen and collagen dries and oops, there’s the crack.
Well, it turned out, no, there’s a system of like. Of basically like fluid connecting all the cells and organs and systems in our body. And that system is bigger than our cardiovascular system, and it’s called interstitial. And it was a big deal in the world of medicine. And you know, when the doctors who kind of discovered this were taking it around and saying, Hey, this is amazing, and here’s our research and here’s the data.
You know, in, in, um, in the eastern world, were saying, yes, we’ve been talking about that for thousands of years, 2000, 3000, 4,000 years. We, we know that system’s there. Like, yes, now you see it and you can talk about it and you have proof of it, we, we’ve known it was there all along. Um, and so I, I highly encourage people to listen to our two part energy healing epi, you know, episodes in season two to learn more because the scientists will do a much better job explaining it than, than I will, but it’s, um.
It’s a huge breakthrough and it really changes what the, the conversation around how something like energy healing could be possible.
Tami Simon: If you had your dream list for the type of research that would embody the spirit of inquiry about consciousness as primary, what would it be? Just in brief, like if they could do this and this kind of research, that would be game changing.
Ky Dickens: Yeah, I mean, I think the telepathy tests that, um, that we documented, um, this past July in Chicago and August, that stuff being re um, done by another team of scientists would be amazing. Um, you know, we had individuals not just in different rooms, but often in different states, um, and. An individual, in one example, was able to tell the scientist in Oregon what he was looking at in his screen.
And this was a young man in Chicago with a teacher or his spelling communication partner, who neither one knew what was on that screen in Oregon. And he spelled it out exactly, spelled out the word that was flashing across the screen it was right. And the likelihood of that happening is trillions to one.
what was so beautiful about that team of scientists and what makes this difficult to do is that they really had to get the trust of the teacher. You know, the speech pathologist involved, the parents, the non-speakers of infiltrate spend time, this is what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna, okay, we’re gonna practice it, we’re gonna turn it into a game.
It’s gonna be fun. You know, and like really get the buy-in and the excitement of everyone to do it and the trust, you know, and, and, and then the were able to happen. So, so it needs to take enough money and wherewithal and time for another team of scientists to, to replicate that with diff a different group of kids.
I, I can’t wait for that to get replicated because it was astounding. Um, so, but you know, I think about Jane Goodall, right? Like she didn’t just like grab a bunch of, you know, animals and, you know, gorillas and throw ’em into a lab and say, okay, like, show me what it is. How do you love each other?
How do you raise your children? How do you do this? Like, she really spent the time earning trust, being there, observing, herself part of the community. that’s how you’re gonna see I think, the most unbelievable truths about whatever group you’re studying. of course, non-speakers are individuals.
They’re human beings with many diverse needs and wants and making sure they’re engaged and wanna be part of a study. Some don’t, some do and they’ll tell you as will their parents. And so, um, I think getting the scientists were patient enough to be that loving and present and persistent and open. Um.
We’ll have a very interesting paper to write when they’re, when they’re on the other side of that work.
Tami Simon: And then just to ask another question, Ky, about. How has the work you’ve done has changed you? Do you, do you feel different in how you experience the world? Meaning like, do you treat your dreams differently? Do you feel more spaciousness around you? Do you feel different yourself as a result of everything you’ve seen and gone through in the creation of The Telepathy Tapes?
Ky Dickens: Yeah, I mean, I think I used to be I know a lot of people like pretty afraid of death and I don’t feel afraid of death at, at all anymore. Um, I don’t fear that consciousness doesn’t survive at all. Um. I I people ask all the time, are you practicing stuff? No. You know, I wanna report on it. I wanna stay fair and level.
But I think what’s wonderful is the openness to the fact that I think there’s so much more that was possible than I ever believed before. And that invites beautiful conversations with other people, which become pretty deep and rich when you’ve a lot of people at a cocktail party telling you their stories about, you know, the dream they had when their mom was dying, you know, and just really beautiful stuff that again, like it’s kind of the same stories you hear over and over again, which make you wonder, you know, how is this stuff happening?
Um, so, you know, I feel much more certain that there’s a non-physical world that is extremely real and I feel much more certain that it doesn’t have to be all taken on faith. can really try to study this stuff and make sense of it and capture it through corroborated stories. To me, there’s a great piece in that, that faith isn’t necessarily a huge leap, you know?
And I think if anyone just dug their heads on down and just started reading about this stuff, checking out on your own, put your own kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews through mind site training, adults can try it too blind. Have the blind have done it and learned to do it. Um, for it. Be persistent.
I, and you know, or if you wanna work with a non-speaker, get trained in spelling, become infiltrated in their lives. Like any of these things that we’re talking about in the T tapes, you can go see yourself. I think that was my biggest fear when it first came out, is like, oh gosh, what if like people do start studying this or people do so and then no one else is seeing it, but the parents I’ve talked to, or the teachers I’ve talked to, or me, shit, you know, and that wasn’t the case.
You know, we’re getting emails all the time from people learning to spell, working with non speakers. Everything you guys said was true. This was my experience as well. This was my experience. This was my experience coming in every day from all over the world, you know, and saying with the mine site. Um, so that’s what’s so exciting is it doesn’t known us take our our word for it.
You know? Just go play with this stuff and think your life will become so much more marvelous.
Tami Simon: You mentioned in the beginning when you were talking about the origin story of The Telepathy Tapes that you suffered, the loss, the death of some people that were close to you, and that you were asking big questions in your life of, you know, what can, what can I do to contribute to knowing why we’re here, what’s really going on and where we’re going?
And I wonder when you look at those questions now, like why we’re here, do you, where we’re going? How do you answer those questions for yourself?
Ky Dickens: Yeah, I mean I think there is a baseline from which we start and return, and I think people could call that universal consciousness. You could call it the information field. You can call it God, you can call it heaven. I, I do think it’s all talking about the same thing, and I think that is very real. Um. I think Earth is an incredible school of learning.
You know, we have to learn to love and to sacrifice. If you’re doing things right, you learn those things. and it’s all the same lessons. I mean, the non-speakers talk about it too, right? Without any agenda, without any need to prove themselves. They, they’re not for the most part, or haven’t historically been able to become social media stars or TV celebrities or great authors or writers because of limitations that have been forced upon them.
But non-speakers will all say it’s about that we’re one that each other. We’re not separate. you know, how you make people feel matter matters. That’s so I think all those things from the greatest religions in the world are true, and that that’s why we’re here to learn them. And, um, and it can be brutal along the way, but that.
This is a gift to be here and learning, um, to love and to be more present and, you know, um, to experience the world fully. Um, but your body is a temporary package in which consciousness will animate itself. And one thing we’re gonna look at in season three is reincarnation and that squares with world religions, what we know has been studied around it, what hasn’t been studied.
What, when little kids really have memories from their life, what does that mean? And do we reincarnate, I mean, I guess we’ll find out in season three, right? But, um, but yeah, I, I, I don’t, I, I don’t think this is just a quick temporary, uh, dark that we come and die. I think that we are, um, uh.
We’re growing and learning a lot as we’re here, and it’s doing wild benefits for the non-physical part of ourselves, which you could call soul or you could call it a droplet of the universal consciousness.
Tami Simon: Okay. I just have two final questions for you, Ky. Tell us about the film coming out this year. What can we expect?
Ky Dickens: Yeah. Okay. So, uh, the started as a film became podcast and now it’s finishing itself as a film. Um, we are done. Shooting. Um, we filmed an independent film, a team of scientists that had nothing to do with Dr. Powell, um, in August doing a series of telepathy tests. Those will be in the film. Um, gonna be about two and a half hours long.
We plan on finishing it. We run out of money by May, so it will be done by May. And, um, and at that point we hope to release it on a, you know, an international streamer, um, where it can be viewed in languages all over the world, you know, and, and prior to that, hopefully, you know, premier, at a big festival, like our plans and announcements for that are still forthcoming.
Um, but you know, as soon as we have a set date and set information about where people can see it, we will certainly let everyone know.
Tami Simon: And finally. You’re not just a storyteller, but when I tune in, you are an advocate. You’re an advocate. I mentioned this in the introduction for the dignity and respect for non-speaking individuals and for their lives and for their rights, if you will. And I wonder if we could end on that note. For example, I heard that you’re have even hired some non-speaking individuals to be part of the crew on the film.
Ky Dickens: Yeah, so we hired five non-speakers to be on the film. There’s two helping with story two, um, consulting on graphics and one consulting on science. Um, Anthony, who’s our non-speaking science advisor, has been on all the scientific phone calls with the science team that was working in Chicago. the GFX graphics non-speaking team has helped us with what the hill should look like, that type of thing.
Um, so, you know, they are essential. It’s their, their stories, their lives and I think that is the biggest thing I would like people to walk away with is, you know, even in the autism world, I think non-speakers often ha get the shortest end of the stick. There are schools for people that are, um, on the spectrum or neurodiverse in some way that even non-speakers aren’t able to go to apraxia is so difficult.
You have a hard time controlling your body, speaking, doing what you want your body to do. You are fully. Aware of what’s going on. You’re extremely as intelligent as you should be for your age, if not even more so. you just cannot communicate it. then through spelling. Which is an incredible tool that can take months or years to learn.
Um, but once you learn the motor control to be able to spell, I’ve watched many non-speakers learn to spell independently into an iPad, into a Cordy keyboard. fully be able to spell. But you often need a communication regulation partner just to help keep your body intact, to tap you when you look, forget where your body’s at, you know, help you refocus if you lose sight of the board.
There’s all that stuff. right now, spelling is not taught in schools. It’s expensive to have a communication regulation partner in a classroom with a non-speaker that needs to change. Every single non-speaker needs a CRP with them so that they can gauge in society and life and work and education.
that’s the biggest thing. Like you might be interested in telepathy or, you know, whatever we talk about in The Telepathy Tapes that they’re, these individuals aren’t magical. We all have those gifts. We should be in, in all of each other. This is a human capacity dating thousands of years back that we just need to reconnect with.
And I think the non-speakers who say they have this gift, because like so often happens, your other senses aren’t working as well or betrayed you in some way they don’t feel as in touch with their bodies. So of course they’re maybe more in touch with the field of consciousness and um, and as many people as can that can advocate for non speakers, have a space in schools and regular classrooms in the workforce, but most importantly have a CRP with them.
’cause they can’t really function without a CRP. That’s important. And, um, I know there’s a lot of, uh, we haven’t, we used to start a nonprofit foundation called the TTT Education Impact, we plan to start granting money to families so they can learn to spell, but also once a film is out, bring the film with spelling workshops around the country so that hopefully we can get more kids on the boards.
Because the biggest tragedy, like the thing that keeps me up at night is that there are thousands of non-speakers that still are trapped inside their bodies that cannot communicate either because people don’t believe spelling is real and won’t help them get access to it. Or because it’s too expensive and unaffordable and inaccessible for family members to gain knowledge of how to do that all needs to change.
And, um, and if, if, if for any reason at all, people who haven’t listened to health tape should listen to it, just to get to know these individuals and their minds and how beautiful they are.
Tami Simon: In preparing Ky for our conversation, I thought of this quote that I learned when I interviewed Krista Tippett a long time ago. She said, Tami, you know, change happens from the margins. It doesn’t happen from the center, it happens from the edges. And I thought of that in the work that you’re doing. How from the margins, you have contributed to be a great change maker in our world.
And as I said, I really admire you.
Ky Dickens. Thank you. So much. Thanks friends, for being with us. Telepathy tapes, season two is out and the film and season three are yet to come.
Ky Dickens: Thank you.
Tami Simon: Also friends, one quick note. Ky and I talked about energy healing, something she explores in season two of The Telepathy Tapes, and I wanna mention that the Sounds True Podcast Network is in production right now on a series exploring this very same subject of energy healing in collaboration with some of the same people that Ky spoke with.
The new podcast is called Phenomena, and you can learn more about it in its three-part docuseries companion at phenomenahealing.com. It’s part of a shared mission to raise awareness about energy healing’s potential to ease human suffering, and connect us back to healing methods that are both ancient and emerging anew right now.
Again, that’s phenomenahealing.com. Thanks for listening.
