Thread: Is it Possible to dream with someone?

Sageous,

What markets get created by proven shared dreaming, if any, is irrelevant to my argument. What matters is whether a particular potential researcher can likely harness it for their own benefit. What are they going to do, patent shared dreaming so that anyone who wants to do it has to pay them royalties? Almost nobody studies anything unless a successful result puts them on top of some kind of personal pyramid. The researcher who demonstrates shared dreaming can't attach their name to anything other than being the messenger who reported the initial result. That has little more than novelty value once other people have repeated it. And its a ball and chain if others fail to repeat it. The situation would be different if the researcher created some useful theory or explanation for the phenomena, then other people would cite that in all their research. But the would-be shared dreaming researcher has no way to develop such a theory.

Although its true that new physics would be required to explain shared dreaming, the study of shared dreaming provides no means of developing such physics. Suppose you demonstrate a statistically non-negligible shared dreaming effect. Once you rule out electromagnetics as the mechanism, then what? Conventional physics involves phenomena that can be produced and controlled with instrumentation, which produce results that can be modeled with mathematical equations. How do you model that? You can't.

A further related issue is the "practical", in "proven, practical dream-sharing". I don't see what's practical about it. As I've mentioned before, we already have a shared dream of sorts that works really, really well, called waking life, and I don't see that adding another type that works badly does much to facilitate the things that most people care about, even if they did have some way to get proprietary control over it. If the goal is to squander DARPA money, there are easier, proven ways to do that. And a person also has to ask themselves about the morality of what DARPA wants to do with it, which is why I don't work on those kinds of contracts any more.

Another hurdle is that if trying to demonstrate shared dreaming, a person can't just start with a random selection of subjects. They have to find some people who are good at it, to have a chance of demonstrating anything. Then how are other researchers going to reproduce their results? By studying the same group of people? Who then are the stars of this process, the original researchers, or the stars of the study? The original researchers are marginal to the process, which brings us back to why its not worth the risk for them.

Finally, there's the issue of how people's motives and desires affect the outcomes. Very many people are opposed to demonstrated shared dreaming, whether they're conscious of that or not. Its against the interests of the major religions, which want a monopoly over all things supernatural. Its against the interests of scientists, who would be opening up a can of worms they can't control. Many other people are just scared of it. Maybe we'd be supported by stoners and psychic hotline con artists. Is that enough to overcome the tide of desire for it to fail? Maybe, but I doubt it. I'm not even sure I want it to succeed, given the way people try to take everything and twist it towards some kind of abuse of power.

There is a test of all this of course, what I'm alleging about the motives and realities of scientific research. Contact dream researchers with a proposal to do something with shared dreaming and see how far you get. I've gotten nowhere with that, haven't even gotten an e-mail returned.

In any case, I think we're about 90% in agreement here. The stance you initially took with skeptic is pretty much the same one I'm taking. And I don't disagree with your second point, that demonstrating shared dreaming is obviously problematic. I'm just trying to sketch out some of the reasons why its problematic.

I've had shared dreams with a buddy from school, i remember that dream, it was a big city and we were two entities like gods flying all over and watching our friends from school and watching their futures, even our own futures and then we were watching the future of my friend and he got scared of it and he screamed so loud that woke him up from his dream and even i woke up from that scream, then it began to become weird, i had another dream and stuff but what woke me up was the sound of somebody in my ear saying something like "durabdimo duwar remember it" and woke up, then when i got to school i asked my friend how about his dream, and he told me exactly everything we did in it. Then like 3 or 4 hours later i heard what he thought, it's weird but kinda like telepathy. i'm not trolling or something like that if you don't want to believe it's ok but it was pretty scary that day

Shadowofwind:

First, I must say it is a very good thing you weren't in touch over the centuries with folks like Copernicus, Da Vinci, Watt, Clermont, Tesla, Edison, Bell, Benz, Wright, Marconi, Gates and Jobs, because we wouldn't have a modern world at all with that kind of reasoning! I'm thinking about "truths" that were spoken during times of great invention or discovery, like "The world is flat, period, Mr. Columbus, there is no point in financing your adventure," "What is the use of an automobile? It will never replace the horse," "If man were meant to fly, he'd have wings," "Who the hell would ever want a computer on their desk? What on earth would they do with them?" and so on. To dismiss practical applications of the potential physics that would be required for dream-sharing based purely on current attitudes toward dream-sharing as it exists today is to overlook the people who see real value in discovering, defining, and exploiting world-changing knowledge; people who don't give a crap about religions, social norms, current science, or anything else -- only the potential.

Yes, the lower-level researchers might see, correctly, no future in doing research that proves dream-sharing. But that doesn't mean that someone with an eye to the future and a lot of ambition -- plus access to money -- wouldn't take an interest in discovering the physics behind dream-sharing, simply because they imply the rarest of rare things in human experience: a powerful, untapped conduit for invention and exploration. The world doesn't turn on the actions of researchers, it turns on the actions of the guys who tell them what to research. And if the research is as simple as the experiment I described earlier then yeah, a visionary would find a way to get it done.

Also, when I later talked about the "what if's?" I was assuming that the basic stuff -- reproducible results, supporting theory, and some practical application -- has already occurred. That's a hell of an assumption that I'm not confident would ever be actual fact, but it's much more fun to think about; mostly because dream-sharing itself to me is kind of an uninteresting process (I have to deal with enough people during the day, why would I want to talk to them in my sleep, too?), but the novel forces and physical laws that lurk behind the process seem filled with potential. So yeah, an internal combustion engine just sitting there on a table would seem really dull to most folks, but look what its existence has done to the world thanks to people who saw beyond its initial appearance and performance. The same goes for PC's, and many more things that seemed utterly useless upon invention, or "proof of existence."

So I guess I don't really care here that proving shared dreaming is problematic -- every Big Thing was problematic at some point. Indeed, proving the existence of dream-sharing still seems pretty simple to me. In that first post I was hinting that, if proof can be had so simply, why hasn't anyone done it? Not even a high-school science project? What I was trying to ask in that second post was why, if dreaming-sharing were real, hasn't anyone done something with it? It is human nature to exploit things like this, and I would have thought that, were dream-sharing real, its components would have been exploited by now. Your points are good ones, and all true I think, but I also think they're simply not reaching far enough -- pioneers have done much more with much less, if they truly believed that something had enormous potential. And the simple experiment above should have been enough to get one of them to believe.

It just seems odd that no one bothers, even on their own time.

Damn. I can't believe I got myself sucked into another dream-sharing conversation...

I think the main reason shared dreaming is so debatable is simply because there hasn't been a lot of scientific research into it. More accurately is its not high on the priority list for science, say compared to stem cell research or what scientists deem as "important" which is very subjective. There are scientists who study it, but I think waking nomad said there are only like 3 dream labs in all of north America.

spoken during times of great invention

Originally Posted by Sageous

Shadowofwind:

First, I must say it is a very good thing you weren't in touch over the centuries with folks like Copernicus, Da Vinci, Watt, Clermont, Tesla, Edison, Bell, Benz, Wright, Marconi, Gates and Jobs

Sageous,

I wasn't arguing against dream research, I was simply describing what I can see about why its not happening. Certainly you don't dispute that its not happening. Your implication is that NIH and NSF aren't funding dream research because people like me talked them out of it. Do you think that I share their motives, or approve of their motives? Seriously, WTF? You should know me better than that. I personally know a lot of people who decide who gets research grant money, and I'm acquainted with how they think. I'm not suggesting that's how they should think.

Also, at least half of the individuals in your list acted from strongly selfish motives, ruthlessly stealing other people's work and screwing people out of patents. So what I'm describing isn't new either. Edison, Marconi, Gates, and Jobs wouldn't tough dream research with a mile long pole, even if it was in their area of business. The others in your list I don't know enough about to judge. Many scientists like Newton did a lot of flaky research, but they didn't have the chemistry knowledge to see that it couldn't pan out. The stuff that Newton did that worked had immediate practical military applications, such as the calculation of cannon ball trajectories.

Columbus was in a minority among European intellectuals in that he thought that the world was smaller than it really is. The majority, educated view was that the earth was spherical and the current size, so that Columbus couldn't make it all the way to India. And the aim of Queen Izabel was strongly imperial and commercial. I'm not arguing that they should or should not have funded him anyway, I'm saying that your version almost completely inverts what happened. Scientific progress has always been strongly dependent on by power-lust and pride. Research that can't be monetized or weaponized in an obvious way has always been neglected. Again, I'm not at all advocating that, I'm quite opposed to it. But that's how it has worked in the past also. And don't even get me started on Gates and Jobs (too late). Notwithstanding their success in business, those two guys, in different ways, have done more to sabotage technological development than a whole army of common luddites. Almost of their technology was derived from superior products which they bought and/or destroyed through backroom deals. Then they pretend they invented it and promoted it, and people who don't work in that field assume its true, because they're rich and wound up on top, which apparently is the standard that matters. The PC is not Gate's doing. He bought and/or stole every part of both the hardware and software, and twisted it into something that he could control for his own enrichment. DOS was a terrible operating system and it wasn't even written at his company. The Intel microprocessors used in the first DOS running IBM PCs were clearly inferior to the Motorola processors used in other existing PCs, and the Microsoft/Intel PCs overall were inferior to alternatives like Amiga. IBM and its client companies triumphed only because of IBM's financial leverage and monopolistic practices. The pattern continued, Windows was a bad copy of the Mac OS, which was a bad copy of X. Jobs at least had a genuine knack for creating shiny consumer toys, though again everything he handled was from other prior sources, and it was always twisted and crippled for the sake of control. So yeah, if we're dependent on the vision of people like Columbus, Edison, Marconi, Gates, and Jobs, we're screwed.

Ah, me.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

spoken during times of great invention

Sageous,

I wasn't arguing against dream research, I was simply describing what I can see about why its not happening. Certainly you don't dispute that its not happening. Your implication is that NIH and NSF aren't funding dream research because people like me talked them out of it. Do you think that I share their motives, or approve of their motives? Seriously, WTF? You should know me better than that. I personally know a lot of people who decide who gets research grant money, and I'm acquainted with how they think. I'm not suggesting that's how they should think.

Dude. You should know I would never imply that you would talk researchers out of looking into something like dream-sharing! And of course I don't believe you share the motives of small-minded, short-sighted nay-sayers; that never even occurred to me. I'm deeply sorry I sent you in that direction. No, I was simply echoing your sentiment about how the grant money machine dominates scientific research, and perhaps I did it with a large dose of inadvertently misguided inflection right at you...sorry about that. All I can accuse you of here, which may be fair, is a sad acceptance that this is the only way science gets done, or not done, anymore (or ever). I can't agree with that; the cream always rises, and if a thing exists that is within human grasp, one of us will go for it, whether the ivory tower jamokes find it profitable or not. Sorry for the rudeness; I really should have re-read more carefully before sending.

That said:

Also, at least half of the individuals in your list acted from strongly selfish motives, ruthlessly stealing other people's work and screwing people out of patents. So what I'm describing isn't new either. Edison, Marconi, Gates, and Jobs wouldn't tough dream research with a mile long pole, even if it was in their area of business. The others in your list I don't know enough about to judge. Many scientists like Newton did a lot of flaky research, but they didn't have the chemistry knowledge to see that it couldn't pan out. The stuff that Newton did that worked had immediate practical military applications, such as the calculation of cannon ball trajectories.

You sort of made my point for me here. From what I know, I am confident that more than half the individuals listed acted from "strongly selfish motives, ruthlessly stealing other people's work and screwing people out of patents," and that was not an accident. My point here is that knowledge will happen, regardless of the character of those who conceive, develop, produce, demand, or steal it. The implication here is that the folks most interested in pushing the envelope are not researchers or even scientists, but people who saw a thing and and decided they must have it, no matter how bizarre that thing may have seemed to society at the time.

Columbus was in a minority among European intellectuals in that he thought that the world was smaller than it really is. The majority, educated view was that the earth was spherical and the current size, so that Columbus couldn't make it all the way to India. And the aim of Queen Izabel was strongly imperial and commercial. I'm not arguing that they should or should not have funded him anyway, I'm saying that your version almost completely inverts what happened.

All apologies again... I was going for a cheap and easily cliche here, just to make my point in as few words as possible. That was disingenuous of me, especially in the environment of ready-made history that dominates the Web. I know the story as it played, for what it's worth, but thanks for reminding me that others do too, and might give a crap. Shame on me for cheaping out. Still, I think the point remains valid.

Scientific progress has always been strongly dependent on by power-lust and pride. Research that can't be monetized or weaponized in an obvious way has always been neglected. Again, I'm not at all advocating that, I'm quite opposed to it. But that's how it has worked in the past also. And don't even get me started on Gates and Jobs (too late). Notwithstanding their success in business, those two guys, in different ways, have done more to sabotage technological development than a whole army of common luddites. Almost of their technology was derived from superior products which they bought and/or destroyed through backroom deals. Then they pretend they invented it and promoted it, and people who don't work in that field assume its true, because they're rich and wound up on top, which apparently is the standard that matters. The PC is not Gate's doing. He bought and/or stole every part of both the hardware and software, and twisted it into something that he could control for his own enrichment. DOS was a terrible operating system and it wasn't even written at his company. The Intel microprocessors used in the first DOS running IBM PCs were clearly inferior to the Motorola processors used in other existing PCs, and the Microsoft/Intel PCs overall were inferior to alternatives like Amiga. IBM and its client companies triumphed only because of IBM's financial leverage and monopolistic practices. The pattern continued, Windows was a bad copy of the Mac OS, which was a bad copy of X. Jobs at least had a genuine knack for creating shiny consumer toys, though again everything he handled was from other prior sources, and it was always twisted and crippled for the sake of control.

Agreed, on all counts. Again, all apologies for forcing you to type all those words. I'm familiar with the history, and I guess assumed that the examples, especially of Gates and Jobs, who most definitely invented nothing, would drive home my point that there will always be someone, no matter how nefarious, who will discover, guide, and do everything necessary to control new knowledge and its applications. My bad for not being more clear and thus forcing you to tap all those keys. Bad exposition day for me, I guess!

So yeah, if we're dependent on the vision of people like Columbus, Edison, Marconi, Gates, and Jobs, we're screwed.

Now that is what I like about you Shadowofwind! I write all this disjointed*, half-assed, barely comprehensible shit and there you are at the end not only fully getting my point but compressing it into a sweet little nutshell that I wish I had written in the first place. Amazing!

Yup, we are always on the verge of being truly screwed (Cold War, anyone?). It's what we do. I think history has shown us clearly enough that we are indeed dependent on people like these, and much worse (you forgot to include the gods of war, and DARPA). Sometimes it just sucks to be human, especially when you look at some of the serious ugliness coating almost all of our collective roots.

Hey...

Maybe dream-sharing has not been studied, "discovered," explained, and exploited for some very real, perhaps slightly non-human reason: could it be that there is a more mature race, or metaphysical condition anyway, that is doing all it can to prevent the Edison's of our (and any other) era from gleaning the truth behind phenomena like dream-sharing? Maybe something within our very souls is holding us back until we're "ready" for world-changers like this?

...Or not.


Thanks for putting up with me, Shadowofwind, and for always testing my sincerity. Such reactions are always needed.


* Just to put an exclamation point on "disjointed," I must add here that I'm currently posting on another dream-sharing thread, and I managed to thoroughly confuse myself. Half of what I said would have made a lot more sense if it were actually referring to posts on this thread, rather than the other, especially the "big stuff" I was imagining cold come from scientifically proving shared-dreaming. Duh. It's bad enough I got myself pulled into another dream-sharing thread, but this time I did it twice at once, with dismal results (on both threads, I might add). Sheesh.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Maybe dream-sharing has not been studied, "discovered," explained, and exploited for some very real, perhaps slightly non-human reason: could it be that there is a more mature race, or metaphysical condition anyway, that is doing all it can to prevent the Edison's of our (and any other) era from gleaning the truth behind phenomena like dream-sharing? Maybe something within our very souls is holding us back until we're "ready" for world-changers like this?

I'm still confused, but we seem to be saying a lot of the same things, so moving on....As I experience it, there is obstruction of a nature similar to what you're suggesting. It would be just as true though to say that its the malevolent aims of a race that will enslave or prey on what we eventually, or that its our own, selfishness that's holding us back, or that its our own patience and wisdom. I don't mean that these are all partially true, I mean that they're different true views of the same thing, like one of those trick paintings that looks like two different things depending on how you look at it. Our souls are shared with the souls of what we may become. Part of what I'm doing is searching around for the right motive that moves us forward, that puts me in conscious harmony with the 'good' future.

The reason I started posting again is I decided that my more disengaged approach wasn't working. It seemed like I was regressing, loosing my aspiration and curiosity in a bad way. Gotta go. Best wishes.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I'm still confused, but we seem to be saying a lot of the same things, so moving on....As I experience it, there is obstruction of a nature similar to what you're suggesting. It would be just as true though to say that its the malevolent aims of a race that will enslave or prey on what we eventually, or that its our own, selfishness that's holding us back, or that its our own patience and wisdom. I don't mean that these are all partially true, I mean that they're different true views of the same thing, like one of those trick paintings that looks like two different things depending on how you look at it. Our souls are shared with the souls of what we may become. Part of what I'm doing is searching around for the right motive that moves us forward, that puts me in conscious harmony with the 'good' future.

I picture the race as benevolent, but aside from that, I think that's an excellent, and I deeply hope correct, statement.

The reason I started posting again is I decided that my more disengaged approach wasn't working. It seemed like I was regressing, loosing my aspiration and curiosity in a bad way. Gotta go. Best wishes.

..and I at least am glad you're back. This is a good place to blow out some dust for me, or better yet have it blasted off on occasion.

Wow

It is 8:12 AM here I just finished puting my dream in DJ here then I checked email. There was only 2 email. One was just a bounce back from another place I posted my dream and the other was your post Sageous.

In your opening quote from ShadowOfWind I read:

***Our souls are shared with the souls of what we may become***

Day before yesterday I cryed a lot with depression and physical pain then (as usual, when I sink very low) I got an idea. Shadowofwind, that sentence encapsulates that idea.

***Our souls are shared with the souls of what we may become.***

In short, two days ago I got the idea to give-up trying to get folk to share dream on my thread called Synchronicity Game Relaoded and share dream, instead, with my self.

I ask my future self to give me a dream of an item that will appear on the news exactly one year, (to the day) from NOW.

I stuck a note on my full length mirror that reads:

***Future Debbie
Give me a dream
Of something that will happen
In the news
300 and 65 days from Now
And let that somthing be
Happy, Uplifting and good

HUM HUM HUM

Om mani padme HUM.

I will look at me in the mirror before I go to bed and space out as I chant that.

I am zonking in, (or out?) to share dream with a future me about something scientificly verifyable.

I was getting mad about everyone everywhere just talk talk talking about scientificly verifying shared dreaming in stead of pulling out all stops and participating. But now I feel ok about it. I even apreciate it, especially this thread.

9:06am now here.

Debra Jane,

To me the experience you just related is an example of the shared aspect of thought. The thought you quoted is not a new thought for me, and my dream premonitions are possible in part because of it. But the thought was just a little bit clearer than usual when I wrote it, because of your thought. Assuming this works the same way for other people as it does for me, your thought a couple of days was possible in part because of my thought. For me shared dreaming amounts to this same sort of thing.

I'll try to explain better why I don't generally participate in shared dreaming experiments. I already accept that shared dreaming is real, so I don't need to try to prove it to myself. If another person is interested, I'm willing to take the time to point out where I think their arguments against shared dreaming fall short, to open the door of possibility for them. But I'm not going to try to break the door down against their will. (Though maybe that's not how it seems to the person I'm arguing with!) I've also contacted academics, expressing a willingness to participate in studies. If they're not interested, I'm not going to keep begging them, as if I'm a high school kid trying to be accepted by the 'popular' people. If they prefer ignorance to loss of academic control, I can't pry that away from them. I don't see that group demonstrations on this site accomplish much to that ends, because there's no way to show that we're not sharing private messages and faking the data. I already have a couple of documented premonitions, where I wrote down a dream and mailed it to someone a few hours before it was mirrored in real life. These examples aren't absolutely compelling as "proof" for people, but again I don't see the need for people to require rigorous proof of something that they can't themselves experience. The need to "decide" if shared dreaming is or is not real seems to me to be an unhealthy desire for control. They can just leave the door open, and when and if dreaming has some practical value to them it will come through the door.

Another reason I don't participate is I'm not a strong lucid dreamer in visual sense, partially due to apathy. If I had interest, my strongly lucid dreams would still probably be fairly short though, not more than a half a minute or so. Mostly I think when I'm asleep, pretty much how I do while I'm awake. So this makes me ill suited for astral-plane type experiments such as I've seen discussed here. Another reason I'm reluctant is sharing thought is an intimate thing, and I haven't entirely figured out what I'm comfortable with. I don't want to develop relationships that are unhealthy or inappropriate in the sense that they capture my attention at the expense of my wife and kids. I wouldn't even post here, but I'm physically separated from them anyway from economic necessity. Hopefully this will change within the next year.

Pretty much all of my interesting dream experiences have to do with asking questions and finding answers to questions. So if you want to share something, I suggest looking in your heart and finding your important aspiration(s), and clarifying that in your mind. Or think of something you're trying to understand that seems important to you. If you have some openness in relation to me, and I have some thought that's relevant to your thought, that will do something. It will produce a dream, or intuition, or change in awareness, or an event in waking life, and probably all of those things. But what is most important, finding the answer we seek, or doing that in an exotic, paranormal way? If the answer is what is most important, then I think we must concern ourselves with that, not with how it manifests, because we truly want goes a long way towards determining what we get. I am always open to this kind of sharing, and its why I signed up on the site. Sometimes I post stuff, sometimes I exchange e-mails and private messages with people, because some things work better without an audience.

Best wishes.