Thread: Is sharing a Lucid Dream possible?

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

So, seeing that it's obviously impossible for it to be coincidence, either we are
1) lying
2) the same person
3) or telling the truth.

There are no other possibilities.

4) Convincing yourselves that questionable experiences count as 'hits' - not necessarily lying, but cherry-picking through experiences and dismissing the ones that argue against the possibility of shared dreaming (perhaps subconsciously); creating similar dream experiences through discussion of like topics (aka 'incubation', possibly even subconsciously); and perhaps skewing fuzzy memories toward the direction of something that promotes shared dreaming (maybe not maliciously, or even purposely, but through a joyful bias).

Remember, our minds are just as good at fooling ourselves as they are at fooling other people. While I remain an open-minded skeptic, I don't assert that any of you aren't telling the truth, but there are other possibilities than the ones you listed. You must at least be aware of them, before placing your faith into any phenomenon.

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

4) Convincing yourselves that questionable experiences count as 'hits' - not necessarily lying, but cherry-picking through experiences and dismissing the ones that argue against the possibility of shared dreaming (perhaps subconsciously); creating similar dream experiences through discussion of like topics (aka 'incubation', possibly even subconsciously); and perhaps skewing fuzzy memories toward the direction of something that promotes shared dreaming (maybe not maliciously, or even purposely, but through a joyful bias).

Remember, our minds are just as good at fooling ourselves as they are at fooling other people. While I remain an open-minded skeptic, I don't assert that any of you aren't telling the truth, but there are other possibilities than the ones you listed. You must at least be aware of them, before placing your faith into any phenomenon.

Convincing yourselves that questionable experiences count as 'hits'

That's a possibility. Thanks for bringing that up. But, that would not really be something the dreamers are doing, but the reader. What I mean by that is this: It's obvious that the above entry is a shared dream, if we are telling the truth. But, other times we have logged dreams that were not confirmed shared dreams in the DJ because of similarities. As we have found, when people begin to sync up, the similarities between dreams increases more and more.

cherry-picking through experiences and dismissing the ones that argue against the possibility of shared dreaming (perhaps subconsciously)

No. That is not a possibility, because if you look at the individual journals of people in the shared dream journals, we often dream of each other without it being a confirmed shared dream, so we have a lot of "misses," but we don't put those in the shared dream DJ, because that's not what it's for. We have a lot more "misses" than "hits" though, pretty sure.

creating similar dream experiences through discussion of like topics (aka 'incubation', possibly even subconsciously)

Good point. We do this deliberately sometimes, but there are always many random elements and fine details which would've been impossible to incubate. Once I realized the possibility of this perception, I began posting our plans for the dream. I think I only did it in the last one or two dreams. For example, Raven and I did not plan for Jack Sparrow to say that we would need gills tentacles, or fins. I would love for a mathematician to work out the probabilities of all this stuff. We did not plan on a fairy being there, we did not know what the treasure was going to be. I assumed it was going to be cheesy fake gold, but it wasn't.
In the beginning, we often just said, "Let's meet in a dream," which was not so difficult as "let's meet on the Moon." Then, we found that because of The Cool Factor, we had to create more elaborate things for our dream selves to do, because simply meeting on the Moon had become commonplace, and therefore boring.

and perhaps skewing fuzzy memories toward the direction of something that promotes shared dreaming

another good point. There is no way to prove we are not doing this.