The Quiet Tongue: On Telepathy, Autism, and the Speech of the Unheard

Some voices are not heard with ears. Some conversations do not need words. In the quiet, in the stillness—there, we speak.

It comes the way knowing does, in the marrow, in the weathered hush between words. It is not speech, but neither is it silence. It is the space between, the undercurrent, the thing that speaks without voice.

Three times in one day, I heard its name: The Telepathy Tapes—a whisper through the mouths of others, the kind of signpost that insists on being read. And so, I listened—not as a skeptic, not as a seeker, but as a remembering. I started at episode three because these things have a way of choosing their own beginning.

It was not a revelation. It was a recognition.

These nonverbal autistic people, their minds braiding together in the air above them, unseen threads crossing a field of knowing—this was no spectacle, no grand unveiling. This was familiar. This was the quiet tongue I had been speaking all my life. The world calls it telepathy. The world calls it impossible. But I, an autistic person, or a more acceptable term - a neurodivergent person, a psychic, a being built for listening to what is unspoken, I call it something simpler: the way things are.

But the way things are is a hard thing for the world to swallow.

I was not always named as I am now. The world first gave me other names: too much, too sensitive, too quiet, too strange. I took them like stones in my pocket, carried them for a time, and then set them down when I understood: these names were never mine. They were given in fear by those who had forgotten the language of listening.

And then, there was the girl.

She was young, twelve or thirteen, her body a husk left from a car accident that took her father and nearly took her. She was called brain-dead, paralyzed, a body without speech. I was sent to her bedside as a craniosacral therapist (circa the early 1990s), though it became clear that was not why I was really there. I stood at the foot of her bed, my hands on her ankles, ‘proprioceptively’ feeling for the outer edges of the tide of cerebrospinal fluid beneath her skin, the silent river that tells the stories the body does not.

And then—something turned its head toward me.

I looked up.

Her eyes were locked onto mine. Awake. Watching.

I did not reach for my voice. That was not the language she spoke. Instead, I reached with my intuitive mind.

Do you want to communicate with me?

A blink. Deliberate. Her CS pulse stilled beneath my fingers, a stillness that was its own kind of reply.

And then, the question that sat in her like a stone at the bottom of a well, rippling outward, pressing against the walls of her body:

Where is my father?

No one had told her. Her body was still healing around the silence, around the absence. But she knew.

I could not answer. It was not mine to give. But she could read me. She could see me in the way that the unseen see each other, and I was laid bare before her.

I promised her I would ask her mother to tell her. I do not know if she ever did.

The sessions went on. She spoke to me in that silent way, not just of herself but of others—of the boy in the next room, asking after his well-being, the people she used to dance with, the friends who had disappeared from her bedside. She was not a body without a mind. She was not a husk. She was alive in a way few people are ever permitted to be.

And yet, when I tried to tell her mother, she was gone before I could speak. When I put it in an email, plain and carefully, what her daughter desperately needed to know, the answer came swift and clear: sessions cancelled.

The door closed. Gutted.

This is the way of things. The world has no language for what does not fit into its measure. What cannot be named in science is called fraud, fantasy, and false hope. It is the old wound of humanity: we only believe in what we can hold in our hands.

But what if we are wrong?

What if the ones we call nonverbal are simply speaking in the voice we have forgotten? What if telepathy is not some grand, mystical rarity but something that has always been waiting for us to be still enough to hear it?

I do not have to prove this. I am not here to convince you. The skeptic will demand measurement, demand proof, demand that I whittle the unseeable down into something small enough to fit in their pocket. I will not.

My task is not to argue. My task is to listen.

And to those who carry this knowing in them, who walk through this world with the quiet tongue on their lips, I say this:

You are not alone.

You never were.

For those willing to sit at the edge of knowing, to lean into the quiet and hear what hums beneath the noise, The Telepathy Tapes podcast hosted by Ky Dickens is an invitation. A doorway. A reckoning with what it means to communicate beyond the boundaries the world has drawn.

Listen. Not just to the voices in the podcast but to what stirs in you as you do. Perhaps you, too, have known this silent language. Perhaps you have carried a gift unspoken, unnamed.

Perhaps it is time to remember.