Thread: Shared Dreaming Debate

^^ Sorry, Shadowofwind, I think I interpreted Rick's comment just fine, as he managed to break the pomposity meter with that last post, eclipsing Mzzkc's (and my) arrogance with ease. And yes, Mzzkc's statements did pose a fairly high bar to clear, didn't they? Trouble is, even that .1% statement is likely grounded in fact, and was made as a perhaps snarky defense to Rick's earlier statements.

I ignored the Phd part, because I don't give a crap about Phd's; I never did. Some of the most moronic and closed-minded people I've met in life have Phd's; given enough time, any idiot can get a Phd. Besides, I understand that sometimes a little resume-citing becomes necessary in a conversation; I've done it myself.

Indeed, I wasn't even asserting that bit about the Phd; nor was I considering his conversation with Mzzkc, even if that was the implied context. No, it was his line saying, essentially, that most of us here at DV are simply too stupid to talk with him at his level, we do not merit his high attentions, and even the exceptions were failing to meet his requirements. That kind of talk is quite irritating, and, honestly, quite telling.

Would you have made a post like that, Shadowofwind? I think not. You are well educated, usually have a better handle on the science or philosophy behind a concept than anyone present. And yet you never announce that you are simply too smart to communicate your deep wisdom with the rabble below... I believe that you both know better than to do so and that you would not do so, because a part of you understands that there is always something to be learned ... even from the swaggering rabble.

No, I did not misinterpret; I think Rick meant exactly what he said, and I have a feeling it was aimed at all of us, not just Mzzkc. That kind of arrogance ought to be called out, I think.

OK, fair enough. In my first comment about Mzzkc's reaction to rrrrocketrick, I said "maybe he smelled something in rrrrocketrick's attitude that he didn't like and went after that". What you're talking about is the same kind of thing I was talking about, and I'm not going to try to tell you what you should or should not find offensive in any case. My point was only that we all stink at least a little bit, and rrrrocketrick never got a chance at the beginning before the skunk tails were all raised. Also Mzzkc said a few things that imply that many people here are not worth his time to talk to, so rick isn't alone in that regard. I was just trying to give the 'reset' button a chance.

Mzzkc, I'm still interested in hearing what your icon means to you, if my own strange take on it didn't scare you off on that subject.

Got a meeting in 30, so this will be brief and very much abridged.


Sageous:

=(

That wasn't very nice. See shadow's post above for why.


shadow:

Had a chance to properly read through your posts.

Good read on the exchange and play-by-play all around.

On the avatar: it doesn't hold a lot of personal meaning for me. Found it recently when going through old images to replace my current avatar with something more fitting with my new signature. It was something I had whipped up a year or two back in reaction to some striking dream imagery a member of this forum shared.

The inherent symbolism, simplicity, and beauty of the design really stuck out, so I just went with it. Can't say for sure what it means to me yet. Don't want to ruin or cloud others' interpretation. =)

On timing: between work, social stuff, other interweb communities, looking for a condo/house/apartment, holidays, intermittent wedding planning, and finding time to just chill--my time is stretched about as far as it will go. I'm sure others have equally time consuming requirements, but I need to pay extra special attention to my time management for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. Let's just say time management one of my many deficiencies. XP

rick:

Taking a few steps back...

So we've got a universe that can best be modeled and described as a dialectical monism. Everything is one, one is everything, and experience serves to distinguish between seemingly dualist notions.

Cool. Now what?

While the model you're presenting is assuredly deep and interesting, I still see no experience-driven practicality here. Though that sentiment may just be the engineer in me, I don't think this criticism is too off-base.

Hi there,
I have been following this thread with interest. Well done guys! A great collection of thoughtful posts. I am hoping that all you Einstein Protégés will soon stop sparing with one another and we can get back to the discussion.
LP

Originally Posted by rrrrocketrick

I have neither time nor opportunity to visit this page every day, and I shouldn't visit it as often as I do. I've just skimmed (lightly skimmed) recent postings, however, and I see that people are discussing the recent "exchange" between Mzzkc and I. I don't like to do this, but I feel pushed at this point to say that I'm a PhD writing from my field of expertise. I offered what I believe is a very deep point in my post. Mzzkc appeared to me not to grasp the substance of it, I consequently found his dismissal of my post uninformed and arrogant, and I found it outrageous that he was suggesting I might just be a "hypocrite" (a hypocrite?) right off the bat (his first post in response to me!), so I opted to disengage. I'm reluctant to post on dreamviews anyway, because the level of discussion is too often low and because there's way too much shouting, arrogant swagger, and superficial engagement to deal with. It's thanks to certain significant exceptions to that rule that I took a chance.

I'll be back later--perhaps later today--to take a closer look at what's been posted recently. Perhaps I'll re-engage. Or maybe I'll just go back to lurking.

You shouldn't allow the big bully, Mzzkc, to pick on you. You should stand up for yourself more. Explain how intelligent you are (outside of internet postings), how you're unable to find intelligent life sources elsewhere on the interwebs, and fight the label of hypocrite. Then if all that fails, threaten the minions with your departure.

Really though, seriously?

If you can't handle the heat, get outta the internet. Most online communities will bring your opinions under a magnifying glass and if you make outrageous declarations expect some fine toothed combing. If you can't handle defending your ideas, it might be best you return to lurking. On the other hand, you've managed to bring the best two of DV's tag team to life. I find you rather entertaining for that. Thanks

Originally Posted by Mzzkc

So we've got a universe that can best be modeled and described as a dialectical monism. Everything is one, one is everything, and experience serves to distinguish between seemingly dualist notions.

I'm not much of a philosopher, but I've fortified myself with some basic definitions, so I'll say a few things to try to stimulate the discussion....

It seems to me that any philosophy that can't be at least loosely lumped in with dialectical monism wouldn't make sense. Pure monism would make no sense. Pure dualism would make no sense. Neither would accommodate either experience or logic. And the wikipedia page on positivism has this quote by Heisenberg, which seems to me to be on target:

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

I recognize that our ways of thinking about the world are important in deciding what we are able to experience. And I think that our present ways of thinking are limiting our experience a lot, even for people who don't care about philosophy. Whether we realize it or not we're all tapping into the same collective pool of ideas, even though we're not all drawing on quite the same part of it. So I think it is important that people who are cut out for it think about this sort of thing, even if the modern philosophical approach is not quite my cup of tea personally.

I'm not sure what the best words are to describe this, but one of the things that I've tried to do, which seems to have been beneficial, is to weigh my beliefs with an appropriate measure of confidence depending on how much evidence I really have. If I'm about 2/3 sure of something, its a mistake to guess and call it a belief, its better to leave it at about 2/3, as a working hypothesis. I think that even if we had all possible knowledge we'd still need to do this, some things are just inherently ambiguous. Its sort of like in chemistry, where if you could nail down the position of every particle exactly, you'd have nothing. Freedom and interaction depends on a degree of vagueness, it adds substance or thickness to experience that wouldn't be there otherwise.

For a lot of things this seems fairly easy and obvious, but it gets hard where there are stronger passions involved. We shy away from the right thought because we're afraid to judge too hard, or we're afraid of what will happen if we don't judge decisively enough. It happens so fast we hardly notice, but in an instant the thought is collapsed from something beautiful to something more distorted and limited than it would be otherwise. And when we get an insight, we're so excited by the thrill of it, the feeling of understanding, that we grasp too hard and stunt it before it is fully formed. Or we get so carried away by the feeling of wisdom that we forget how to think. A thousand times a day this happens. It reminds me somewhat of the song, which I guess is plagiarized from a poem, that goes "when a man lies he murders some part of the word. These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives." Every thought seems to me to be like that, a little bit. Though of course a person can choose to emphasize the positive of it instead of the negative, since every thought contains an element of truth also.

About 15 years ago, by grace, apparently, I had a blissful experience that lasted a couple of hours, where it seemed as if I could feel and see some of the underlying unity in things. The thing I tried to tell myself to remember, before the experience slipped away, was "don't decide anything". I don't think it would be a good idea to interpret that as "don't think" or "don't exercise any discernment", because both are essential to progress. But maybe if the judgment is done with more temperance, it loosens those myriad mental knots a little bit, and gives us more mental and emotional freedom to see what we wouldn't be able to see otherwise.

So to try to bring this back to the topic at hand....A scientific mindset which tries to decompose every cause into "physical necessity" and "random chance" is inadequate, and tends to be destructive of experiences like shared dreaming. Its too limited and brittle, and leaves out too much of our emotional and intuitive intelligence. At the same time, a mindset which doesn't value forming hypotheses and checking them rigorously against experience quickly devolves into superstition. The scientific approach is essential to mental hygiene. So somehow we have to accommodate both. If we can make progress at this philosophically, then shared dreaming will be open to more people, because people won't be jamming their conscious and subconscious self-expression into materialist or mystic paradigms that can't accommodate such things as well.

I feel a little silly following such a post with this small thought, but I felt it needed mentioning:

Monism and dualism are both debatable perspectives in waking life, but in dreams, especially of the lucid variety, there is only monism -- the entire world in which you reside is you, and yours. So a non-dualistic* approach in waking life would certainly help get you in the right place in dreams (*sorry, "monistic" just sounds too holy, or, worse, like a kissing disease symptom).

And with regard to shared dreaming -- that's why we're here, right? -- a non-dualistic mindset might allow you to be more aware when something or someone appears in your dream that shouldn't be there; something here is not you, in other words, and deserves attention. Also, lets say there is some energy or dimensional stuff attached to dreaming and shared-dreaming: if so, a non-dualistic dreamer might be able to expand her, say, field of influence to make herself a better target to other dreamers, or perhaps to draw others into her influence.

So monism works well, in dreams. In waking life, the debate continues.

Originally Posted by Sageous

in dreams, especially of the lucid variety, there is only monism -- the entire world in which you reside is you, and yours.

I thought that in a shared dream some aspects of the world in which you reside are not you. Otherwise it wouldn't even be identifiable as a shared dream.

Granted, your awareness and acceptance of your 'oneness' with the other person is probably essential to creating the dream. This is definitely how it works for me, and this is an example of where pure dualism doesn't make sense or agree with experience. But pure monism wouldn't work either: as you extended your personal sense of self to include other people, your sense of power and place in relation to them would be ballooning out of control. Increasingly you'd be thinking of yourself as a god. It seems essential to me to maintain an awareness of the distinctness of 'other' identity, and its right to freedom from unwanted manipulation. And that involves a degree of dualism.

It seems like you've made a good argument though for why something like dialectical monism is essential for shared dreaming. I think it also casts some light on the kind of ego and power-lust problems that psychically adept people tend to have: its difficult to draw that internal line between 'me' and 'you' in the right way.

One other minor point....In the last two posts we we've been talking about monism and dualism only in relation to identity. There are many other kinds of dualism in a lucid dream also.

I thought your comment was quite worth making though, it gets more to the heart of the issue than what I had posted previously.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I thought that in a shared dream some aspects of the world in which you reside are not you. Otherwise it wouldn't even be identifiable as a shared dream.

Granted, your awareness and acceptance of your 'oneness' with the other person is probably essential to creating the dream. This is definitely how it works for me, and this is an example of where pure dualism doesn't make sense or agree with experience. But pure monism wouldn't work either: as you extended your personal sense of self to include other people, your sense of power and place in relation to them would be ballooning out of control. Increasingly you'd be thinking of yourself as a god. It seems essential to me to maintain an awareness of the distinctness of 'other' identity, and its right to freedom from unwanted manipulation. And that involves a degree of dualism.

Yeah. I left that little conflict out, didn't I? I guess the best way I can come to terms with this (and also come to terms with shared-dreaming itself) is to say that perhaps shared-dreaming is a merging of dreamworlds, a counter-intuitive event in which yes, you are still seeing your dream world from a non-dualistic perspective, but are simultaneously viewing bits of someone else's world as it overlaps your own. Indeed, perhaps as the other person's aspects wander in (and yours to his), you are adapting them to your world, making them yours, and making the "sharing" all the more intimate -- and difficult, because you must recognize the immigrant thoughts as they enter your world, before you assimilate them. Hmm.

I think it also casts some light on the kind of ego and power-lust problems that psychically adept people tend to have: its difficult to draw that internal line between 'me' and 'you' in the right way.

Very true, especially because, if you nominate yourself god of your dream realm, with all the accompanying delusions of perfection and power, you will certainly not be able to recognize it should your dreamworld overlap with another's (much less be able to properly explore your own dream world with real humility and curiosity).

[Full disclosure: I think that last paragraph runs counter to probably a hundred of my DV posts that confirm that you are god of your dreamworld -- I am speaking in a different context here, one of identity and awareness, rather than the dream control context I was using in those threads. Just thought it worth mentioning, and I hope it doesn't make me a hypocrite.]

I know I keep saying this, but maybe its worth pointing out again that in both dream and in waking life, your sensate experience is projected by your imagination, incorporating information that has come from your thought and/or through your senses. So you are lord of your own world at that level both in waking life and in dream, sort of, even though the process of projection is largely involuntary, and even though the content is more immediate and concretely collective during waking life.

This highlights a difference between my dreams now and my dreams of a couple of years ago, and makes it clearer to me. Then, the process of forming the story and images was often controlled by something "other" than "me", and which was clearly drawing on a lot more than my own personal memory and subconscious thought process. Now, there's still a common element to the content, but the imaginative process is left a lot more to "me", and I neglect it so my dreams are a lot more muddled. Or if I'm still letting fate/muse/"kin" drive it, the identity of that mind is a lot more complex and spread out, not focused into a single intelligent will like it had been. In other words, the line that separates "me" from "not me" isn't fixed to a special internal boundary in my imaginative process, it can move and change. So though we speak generally of things like dream control vs awareness, these distinctions are a bit different for different people, which accounts for our different lucid experiences.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

One other minor point....In the last two posts we we've been talking about monism and dualism only in relation to identity. There are many other kinds of dualism in a lucid dream also.

Not so minor, I think, because it might indicate that identity (and self-awareness, though here the two are the same to me) is key to shared-dreaming, as it is key to truly understanding the significance of "You," and potentially others, in a dream. The other kinds of dualism, I think, fall more into the "tools" category, like needing a little dualism to put your dream body to work for you, or to get a proper rush from the roller-coaster you just conjured; and perhaps into a "challenges" category of misconceptions, like "this place is real, and outside of me," that must be overcome or at least accepted as naturally unavoidable.

Since I just noticed I stepped on your last post:

I know I keep saying this, but maybe its worth pointing out again that in both dream and in waking life, your sensate experience is projected by your imagination, incorporating information that has come from your thought and/or through your senses. So you are lord of your own world at that level both in waking life and in dream, sort of, even though the process of projection is largely involuntary, and even though the content is more immediate and concretely collective during waking life.

This is true, but keep in mind that there is no significant physical sensate experience in a dream. You are not just interpreting the world you encounter with your imagination, as in waking life, you are creating it. I think the difference is significant, especially when it's time to put your mind into a place that's receptive to events like shared-dreaming.

Originally Posted by rrrrocketrick

Is there anyone out there with more philosophical acumen who'd like to engage what I posted? Shadowofwind? Sivason?

It has been five days now since you said that.

Originally Posted by rrrrocketrick

I'll be back later--perhaps later today--to take a closer look at what's been posted recently.

And two days since you said that.

You specifically asked me to engage with you, so I did, as well as I could. I also argued extensively that Mzzkc did not give you a fair shake and should have. He accepted that criticism without reservations, and subsequently went out of his way to open a new door for you.

I realize that you have a life outside of internet posting, but you found the time to try to justify yourself further. A lower priority, apparently, was responding to the engagement you asked for, or acknowledging our gestures and time spent on your behalf, or apologizing for being unable to do so. Mzzkc came out looking pretty good from the exchange in my opinion. You, at least at the present moment, not so much.

Originally Posted by Mzzkc

So we've got a universe that can best be modeled and described as a dialectical monism. Everything is one, one is everything, and experience serves to distinguish between seemingly dualist notions.

Cool. Now what?

While the model you're presenting is assuredly deep and interesting, I still see no experience-driven practicality here. Though that sentiment may just be the engineer in me, I don't think this criticism is too off-base.

I'll take a further crack at this then, since I've got a couple of hours to burn. I hear what you're saying about time management on your end though.

My main difficulty with rick's 'model' is I think I don't actually understand what it is. From a distance it looks a bit like "scientific thinking is inadequate" + "handwaving". By way of comparison, Marx made a fairly valid critique of capitalism, but provided almost no detail about what could replace it. So Lenin and Mao filled that in by going straight to a corrupt state monopoly, which ironically resembles the degenerate end point of capitalism, in a slightly different form. It was just supposed to work automatically. Once we decide that the distinction between dreams and reality is "non sharp", how does that give us shared dreaming? Because we just made it up? Then what keeps us from making it up however we want to? I could describe at length how "shadow people" have the power to imprison people's souls. And I could make a pretty good business pretending to teach people how to protect themselves, if the burden of proof is always on my critics who deny the phenomena I claim. How are we going to sort out what's real and what's not? I don't think my hypothetical example is very far fetched, we've seen a lot of this sort of thing.

Maybe its better just to say what we've got, namely, that scientific thinking is inadequate, but we don't have an adequate extension or replacement of it, yet, besides sketching out some vague ideas.

I guess this didn't turn out to be much of a response, I just rehashed what you said in different words. I was going to emphasize how awareness of the inadequacy of science creates an opening for new experience like shared dreaming, which in itself is of significant value. But maybe we already covered that enough.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

It has been five days now since you said that.



And two days since you said that.

You specifically asked me to engage with you, so I did, as well as I could. I also argued extensively that Mzzkc did not give you a fair shake and should have. He accepted that criticism without reservations, and subsequently went out of his way to open a new door for you.

I realize that you have a life outside of internet posting, but you found the time to try to justify yourself further. A lower priority, apparently, was responding to the engagement you asked for, or acknowledging our gestures and time spent on your behalf, or apologizing for being unable to do so. Mzzkc came out looking pretty good from the exchange in my opinion. You, at least at the present moment, not so much.

Hi Shadowofwind,

This is the first I've been able to return to this forum since my last post. I very much appreciate your consistently sympathetic reading of everyone on this forum, and I'd like to respond to your more-thoughtful-than-most response to what I wrote, but not on here, sorry.

Originally Posted by rrrrocketrick

I'd like to respond to your more-thoughtful-than-most response to what I wrote, but not on here, sorry.

If the forum environment was the issue, you could have sent a private message. If the primary issue was that you misjudged your amount of available time when you called for engagement, I think you would have acknowledged that differently in your post from three days ago. I suspect that your main difficulty now is that you don't have a response to the substance of our criticisms, and that this has become the primary source of your sensitivity. But this is another example of an area where I can't know for sure and a hard judgment isn't necessary. We can just leave it non-sharp.


Moving on....Here's a point that was made earlier by rick and others, but which might be worth saying again in a different way. Something that makes shared dreaming and similar phenomena difficult to deal with scientifically, besides being difficult to control, is that there isn't a clear dividing line between subjective and objective. What you think about shared dreaming has a huge effect on how it behaves. There is of course has an analogous problem in physics, with the way a measurement affects a system. But in that case, the limitation is very clearly defined and well understood, at least in one narrow context. Here, the relationships between our ideas and beliefs and our objective paranormal experiences are a lot more difficult. If I dream of someone, is the dream about them, or a part of myself? The answer is both, but what this means varies a lot depending on the situation and the people involved. Likewise, for comparison, the 'spirits' that we encounter in lucid astral experiences are neither objectively real nor solely the product of our own imagination. This kind of statement would drive a materialist skeptic nuts, they want to be able to nail things down. From their standpoint, it sounds like we're just making excuses for why our claims never seem to pan out publicly. And of course with mystics and psychics there has been more than a little bit of that going on. Its not a topic that lends itself at all well to black and white thinking. It requires a degree of firm objectivity, to cut through the bullshit. Hence the aggressive manner of myself and Mzzkc, perhaps. But it also requires a light touch, and a degree of comfort with ambiguity. Hence the sensitivity of rick perhaps, and the emphasis on distinctions being non-sharp.

Since rick is bowing out, I guess I'll reply to shadow.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I'll take a further crack at this then, since I've got a couple of hours to burn. I hear what you're saying about time management on your end though.

My main difficulty with rick's 'model' is I think I don't actually understand what it is. From a distance it looks a bit like "scientific thinking is inadequate" + "handwaving". By way of comparison, Marx made a fairly valid critique of capitalism, but provided almost no detail about what could replace it. So Lenin and Mao filled that in by going straight to a corrupt state monopoly, which ironically resembles the degenerate end point of capitalism, in a slightly different form. It was just supposed to work automatically. Once we decide that the distinction between dreams and reality is "non sharp", how does that give us shared dreaming? Because we just made it up? Then what keeps us from making it up however we want to? I could describe at length how "shadow people" have the power to imprison people's souls. And I could make a pretty good business pretending to teach people how to protect themselves, if the burden of proof is always on my critics who deny the phenomena I claim. How are we going to sort out what's real and what's not? I don't think my hypothetical example is very far fetched, we've seen a lot of this sort of thing.

Maybe its better just to say what we've got, namely, that scientific thinking is inadequate, but we don't have an adequate extension or replacement of it, yet, besides sketching out some vague ideas.

I guess this didn't turn out to be much of a response, I just rehashed what you said in different words. I was going to emphasize how awareness of the inadequacy of science creates an opening for new experience like shared dreaming, which in itself is of significant value. But maybe we already covered that enough.

I've been trying to give rick the benefit of the doubt, looking for some sort of reasonable connection which might make the model (as we currently understand it) useful for more than approaching experiential phenomena with an "everything is true" bias, but I keep coming back to these critiques.

Ultimately, I think the model may be superseded by rick's more important point (as I see it):

Originally Posted by rick

Conceptual issues take priority here...The empirical question (Is shared dreaming actual or not?) can be rationally pursued only within a conceptual system that doesn't entail either its affirmation or its denial.

And with this I mostly agree. Hence why my personal conceptual system requires I remain agnostic to all things. I neither believe, nor disbelieve any phenomena; I simply consider, experiment, and weigh likelihoods accordingly.

Taken to a slightly lesser extreme, what rick suggests here seems--at least to me--the exact basis from which the scientific method works its magic. Indeed, it is the path of moderation (where nothing is assumed) that provides the foundation required for the empirical study of shared dreams.

In this context, rick's model seems to lie at one extreme (where shared dreaming is affirmed as fact through metaphysical 'handwaving'), while a more dualist/physical model (where shared dreaming cannot be affirmed due to an exclusion of unknown or poorly understood natural laws) lies at the other. But again, focusing on rick's model brings us back to the question of its practicality...and I still don't see how it might be usefully applied outside of discourse or debate.

Originally Posted by Mzzkc

I neither believe, nor disbelieve any phenomena; I simply consider, experiment, and weigh likelihoods accordingly.

I see faith as being the confidence to actively follow through on a working hypothesis. If the hypothesis is false, often you find out after having made a sort of contrapositive proof with your own life. This can be more effective than thought experiments, you learn the lesson at a deeper level. A downside of course it that when the hypothesis itself is an idea that falsely interprets negative feedback, you're mostly screwed. All religious cults work this way. Drug abuse can work that way, though the 'lie' involved is largely chemical. You escape because it kills you off, or because the pain becomes so accurate that it forces you to "tunnel through" the belief system and step outside of it even though nearly everything you think you know is telling you that's the wrong response. Unfortunately, natural selection is not a perfect arbiter of truth and justice, so certain types of delusions persist.

Every approach has holes though, including your agnostic approach, which as I understand it is much like what I described earlier as "not deciding" and being comfortable with ambiguity. I think this is one reason it often helps to talk to different kinds of people. You may be right about something and everyone else may be wrong, but sometimes interacting with them will still highlight something that wouldn't have been as clear to you otherwise. That's how it works for me anyway. Sometimes I gain a lot more benefit this way from dysfunctional fights than I do from successfully sharing ideas. And this is one reason I don't shy away, it can be counterproductive often, but sometimes essential. In my experience its a major tool that fate has for pulling us out of the perceptual traps we fall into. Often there's a time just to leave things alone though, and that's a lesson I'm still a long way from learning completely.

Greetings, I would like to begin by saying that I am no master debater, nor do I care to get into a long drawn out argument. That out of the way, If you guys are anything like me, then you wont believe in shared dreaming until you both experience it and confirm the experience. In my experience SDing is not very easy to pull off nor control. It is something that people can prove to themselves, but may require a good bit of training. Fortunately, even skeptics can have confirmed SDs.

I doubt that SD will be proven or dis-proven as a result of some enlightening conversation, not that the conversation couldn't be enlightening in other ways. The how and why SD works for example, would be interesting to learn, as I have no idea how or why it works.

So anyways, I am working to do something which may not even be possible, just like when I first got into SD not thinking it likely that SD was possible. I want to induce mass shared dreaming. If that could be done, then perhaps SD could be more easily proven to greater numbers of people, through experience instead of debate.

So I guess that's about all I wanted to say. Have fun guys n gals.

Edit:
Also, just my 2 cents, but I do not think, at least in this case, that burden of proof lies on either the believer or non-believer to prove or disprove. Instead I think the burden lies on those who wish to take it upon themselves to prove or disprove. So prove or disprove if you want and can, or don't if you don't. lol

Peace out.

A few practical issues have been nagging at me, primarily the issue of shared dream security.
As with any metaphysical communication, we want to validate the source of the incoming message. Perhaps some kind of psychic TLS (Transport Layer Security) is needed. I expect if the defences of the inner sanctum are not adequately maintained, the dreamscape could potentially become a schizophrenic orgy with long term negative repercussions to mental stability. To maintain sanity the mind has evolved a protective firewall that repels intrusion with the default security setting at maximum. For those who haven’t attained cognitive administrator status and can’t change the subconscious permissions it will be difficult to grant a network connection and thus limit the probability of participating in a shared dream. For those of you that have overcome this hurdle I would be interested to hear your methodology.

Originally Posted by Mylynes

I want to induce mass shared dreaming.

I think if you or I had that kind of power, we would certainly abuse it. Best case outcome, fate would kill or cripple us somehow for our own protection.

Originally Posted by Lucidpotential

A few practical issues have been nagging at me, primarily the issue of shared dream security.
As with any metaphysical communication, we want to validate the source of the incoming message. Perhaps some kind of psychic TLS (Transport Layer Security) is needed. I expect if the defences of the inner sanctum are not adequately maintained, the dreamscape could potentially become a schizophrenic orgy with long term negative repercussions to mental stability. To maintain sanity the mind has evolved a protective firewall that repels intrusion with the default security setting at maximum. For those who haven’t attained cognitive administrator status and can’t change the subconscious permissions it will be difficult to grant a network connection and thus limit the probability of participating in a shared dream. For those of you that have overcome this hurdle I would be interested to hear your methodology.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I think if you or I had that kind of power, we would certainly abuse it. Best case outcome, fate would kill or cripple us somehow for our own protection.

A lot of what my goals and ultimate goals could lead to if possible brings up all kinds of security and moral questions. I have always trained mostly for training's sake, just to expand on the limits of what I perceive to be impossible or near-impossible. I honestly do not know what I would do with such insane abilities if I ever were to aquire them.

It could potentially be used for great good or great evil. Humans could potentially evolve in a way that drastically improves quality and length of human life. On the other hand, it could also give birth to new forms of terrorism. Gives lot to think about. There is already some interesting discussion on this topic going on here: http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...ming-club.html if you would like to check it out sometime.

Nup

In practice it is subtle

Better felt than telt.

I can onlt encourage you to join in Waking Nomads 50 week rv thread. It will induce accidental share dreams. And in time accidental mass sharr dreams for participants.