Telepathy! With Friends! My weird workshop at Burning Man 2025

The setting for my telepathy workshop was our small theme camp at Burning Man 2025 called Camp Not a Cult (yes, that is actually the name). The week-long gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, which annually draws upwards of 80,000 people, is a temporary city devoted to art, music, and radical self expression. It was late morning and people started to gather into the dusty camp chairs, finding patches of shade. It was cool to see people excited. The event had been written about in a San Fransisco newspaper as being “one of the weirdest activities at Burning Man 2025” so I had something to live up to, before I had even finalized how the hour would go.

Eight people showed up for Telepathy! With Friends! A few of the attendees were from Not a Cult, and a few were wanderers who had spotted the event in the Burning Man What Where When guidebook. It was the perfect number. Small enough to feel intimate, big enough to create collective energy.

I started with stories or shared experiences, instances where we had felt telepathy (or other kind of psychic abilities) firsthand. I spoke about how sometimes you are thinking of someone, a college friend, a cousin, a person you have not spoken to in years, and suddenly they call you or send you a message. There is also the story of the American author Mark Twain, who once mailed a manuscript across the country only to find days later that his correspondent had mailed him nearly the exact same story on the very same day. Different coasts, no phone lines, just a strange synchronicity that makes you tilt your head and ask: What exactly is going on here?

Science and the immaterial

I eased the group into some scientific research on telepathy, the places where (in my opinion) science has proved some kind of connection between minds.

The first experiments I spoke of were Rupert Sheldrake’s experiments with pets. Dogs knew when their owners were coming home, even when the return was unexpected. Cats who disappeared before their humans pulled out the dreaded carrier for a vet visit, as if they had read the intention directly from their owner’s mind. Sheldrake tried to capture this with time-stamped videos and controlled protocols, building a case for animal telepathy.

Then I told the story of the monkeys in Japan. Not just any monkeys, but the ones on different islands who, as the legend goes, began to learn the same new trick without ever meeting. One troop discovered a way of washing sweet potatoes or cracking nuts, and soon monkeys across the sea, with no physical contact, started doing the very same thing: Consciousness leaping across distance, as if ideas themselves were migratory birds.

Finally, I mentioned the laboratory work. The many CIA experiments that tried (and succeeded?) to measure telepathy in statistical terms. In the Ganzfeld experiments, one person relaxed into a field of sensory reduction with white noise and ping pong ball halves over their eyes while another person in a distant room concentrated on an image or film clip. The receiver then described what they “saw.” Meta analyses sometimes showed results above chance, though critics point to methodological flaws in the study.

Telepathy, Burning Man style

Then it was time to practice telepathy, or, using what I thought was a better term, consciousness sharing.

I split the group into two teams. Each secretly chose a letter: A, B, or C. They settled into a meditative state focusing on the breath. They watched their thoughts drift in and out. They looked with their third-person perspective for the network that exists beneath this reality. The quantum reality through which everything is here and now, connected. Once in this peaceful space, one team began sending, the other receiving. Breaths slowed, the dust swirled, and somewhere not too far away, a mutant vehicle tested its subwoofer .

After the rounds of sending and receiving, each team guessed the other’s secret letter. By pure chance, they should have been correct one out of nine times, or 11.1 percent.

They GOT IT RIGHT!

It was not about proving anything. I wanted to leave it open to interpretation. However, getting it correct on the first try made me laugh out loud. There were some smiles, some dropped jaws. A few people laughed with me.

At the end, I told them about The Telepathy Tapes podcast.

The Telepathy Tapes

This is a podcast project that collects stories and experiments on mind to mind communication, mainly between non-verbal autistic children and their caretakers. These kids often are able to share telepathic communications that science cannot explain. Parents describe moments when their child answers a question before it is asked, or points to the exact picture they are thinking of. The parents say they can never hide candy from the children. Somehow, they always know where it is hidden.

The recordings do not try to prove or disprove. They simply share the stories, many of which are the crew witnessing these abilities first hand. Give them a listen with an open mind. The whole first season of the podcast is a wild ride that I couldn’t give enough praise to in one paragraph!

The “Person in the Center” telepathy exercise

Later in the week long Burning Man 2025, I ran the workshop again with a new twist.

This time one person sat in the center of the circle, holding a secret: they had chosen one of three colors. Their task was to send that color to the group. My instruction started with the intention. Holding love. Opening our energy. Then finding that quantum network, the place where we are all connected. Those on the outside of the circle were instructed to open their energy to receive. The person in the center was instructed to open their energy to send. I then created a visualization for the group.

“Imagine there is a giant dry erase board floating in the center, above this circle. Take your paint, the color you are holding, and place it upon the white board. Draw a few figures. Stop being so careful. Splash your color across it. Pour it, smear it, cover the whole thing. See your color, smell your color, taste it, feel it! The color is everything! Make it impossible for us not to see.”

The rest of us tuned in, waiting for a flash, a whisper, a pulse, an intuitive signal of any kind.

And then, like school kids huddling around a secret, we compared notes. One by one, we said what color we thought it was. The choice was unanimous. The color was strong. The color was red. The person in the center confirmed that this was correct. We realized it was a 1 in 3 chance of getting it correct, so our results were not groundbreaking. However, many of us felt strongly like we did see or feel something. Maybe it was just our imagination, maybe it was something more. No matter what it was, we all felt as if we would like to explore telepathy deeper.

The line between proof and play at Burning Man 2025

Did we prove telepathy? Of course not.

But something happened. A group of dusty strangers, half naked in the desert heat, shared a moment of alignment that felt both playful and profound.

That is what I love about experiments like these: they are equal parts science, mysticism, and comedy. The math says that it was possible to get it right without any telepathy happening. But to get it right on the first try?! Somewhere between Sheldrake’s dogs, the monkeys on faraway islands, and Mark Twain’s uncanny mail exchange, I believe there is a pattern that science has not yet unraveled but humans keep stumbling into.

Maybe telepathy is a fringe illusion. Maybe it is an artifact of probability. Or maybe, just maybe, our minds are less like sealed boxes and more like tuning forks, resonating across a shared field.

Either way, it is worth gathering in a hot dusty tent at Burning Man 2025. I think maybe the best part was the discussions afterward. We talked about how to make telepathy work better, what could be affecting our results, and what it means to trust the invisible connections between us. What we ended up spending a lot of time discussing was our intuition. Training the intuition is the only way to be able to perform telepathy. Without knowing what incoming thoughts and visions are true, it’s impossible to know what is telepathic communication and what is simply our own mind speaking.

Whether or not telepathy exists, the act of trying made us feel more connected. In a world that is divided along political lines, there is real magic in finding connections. I will be back with Telepathy! With Friends! at Burning Man 2026, after I have had another year to work out the kinks. Until then, keep meditating. Learn to trust yourself. Be quiet, be still, listen. You might be more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Bigger Life Adventures is an alcohol-free, recovery focused community where we teach authentic yoga, meditation, and plant-based food. Bigger Life Adventures’ retreats offer exciting and affordable destinations that fill you up while simultaneously pushing you out of your comfort zone.

Camp Not a Cult is a group of alcohol-free Burners who still like to get weird. At Burning Man 2025 we hosted 15 strange and extraordinary events from dance parties, to mocktail communion happy hours. Find us on Instagram or email CampNotACult@gmail.com.We are accepting several new, self-reliant campers for Burning Man 2026!