Thread: On The Nature of Shared Dreaming

Originally Posted by Dthoughts

Actually, if you think about it, time traveling through dreams in this way does not create many time traveling paradoxes because the nature of time inside the dream is seperated from the time-space continuum in our universe. You can't actually make any physical changes on the earth or cause deaths.

I guess that's a good point but when you think long enough, you come to realize that a person could use information given to them from the future to do things in the physical present and that would then make paradoxes possible. No, the thing is I just don't understand why people make time more complicated than it has to be. There is the now, everything before only exists in memory and the future is to come. It's not really a line, it's the just that things change so the now always looks different. The rest doesn't exist. You can't go in the future and come back because it does not yet exist. I don't like my tone right now, to myself, I sound like an old man telling kids that such and such is not right when I'm really not knowledgeable about these things at all. Anywho, perhaps, whatever is out there can make an estimation of what is most likely to happen in the next day and show that to you.

Shadowofwind:

Good enough. It's hard for me to imagine such things as clearly as you do given my lack of experience. I can say though, that I often find myself seeing someone for the first time in a long time and then realize I had a dream about them for the first time in a long time. And as an LDer, I know what I dream about so it's not like what non-dreamers say it is, just a false memory. It could be a coincidence but it's always impressive nonetheless. Is that what you experience? Do these people you then meet claim to have experience this also?

Well, I'm getting out of topic. Sageous didn't want this to be about experience but about theory so I'll add a theory just to make our defiance justifiable. If we dream of the future and the past and not only of the present, then, maybe we are just connecting with a superior objective consciousness which sees what has happened in the past and what is most likely to happen in the future and we just make a weird interpretation of that.

^^ You are correct, O-Red; I really didn't want to see this become a testimonial thread, as that often degenerates into either an echo-chamber or else a "Is not!" - "Is so!" thread, neither of which are very helpful, though both types of threads are plentiful of these forums! A little anecdotal stuff is unavoidable, however, and honestly to me there hasn't really been too much yet.

What is odd is the shift toward discussing time-travel; now there's a place I was not expecting this thread to go! Can we maybe switch back to shared dreaming, and maybe save the time-travel applications of the Thought Energy Bubble Theory for another thread? If not, I guess I'll survive, as this is interesting stuff!

The nature of shared dreaming.. It's just such a hard one to think about without resorting to anecdotal evidence and just plain conjuring of ideas. Ur explanation sounds very lucid though, it makes sense in relationship to my dreams. So, I have my own personal anecdotal evidence. I find remarkable the fact that you probably base this theory on ur own experience of dreams and it happens to concur with my dreams. I think u might be right about it, it fits and explains some of my own dreams I am just wondering how much of it is placebo.

As for what triggers these connections with people that cause shared dreaming. I am inclined to say that the "Dhamma" which basically translates as "The state that things are in NOW". I interpret the Dhamma as basically the accumulation of past karmic influences that affects things such as our mental state our social connections. It is this simple concept of social relationships that motivates our dreams to shift into certain directions. There's a deeper spiritual layer to it, but i think it is appropiate to assume that shared dreaming also has deep spiritual meaning to it. That probably holds up mostly for lucid shared dreams. Atleast, that's probably more of an eastern interpretation. I guess what we are doing here is trying to conceptualize shared dreaming in a western framework of mind. Because according to Sageous' theory here, if i interpret correctly; some shared dreams are accidental in the way that thoughts and mental states cause different people to align in accidental matter. I just like to think that thoughts and mindstates are not accidental in nature and there's a certain faith/goal to it all that we simply aren't always aware of. Such goal could be as simple as finding new friends in shared dreams or something. Either way, I don't think that it is safe to assume that karmic causes for shared dreaming means that we shoulden't cultivate our skills. I have fallen into the trap of thinking that. Cultivation could very well be the karmic trigger that allows for shared dreaming to happen. Nice word Karma. i like it! haha

Haha, right! (Time travel...)

Well... I'd just like to summarize things because that's what I like doing. How dream sharing works (given thought energy exists):

We broadcast thought energy equally in all directions sending to everyone in the world a bit of our experience.

I want to talk about color. Light has all the frequencies. When the light of the sun reaches an apple, the apple absorbs all the color but red. Red bounces back and we see red. In a similar way, perhaps, the thought energy we send has a frequency which can only be absorbed by someone that absorbs this frequency and will let any other frequency pass through them or bounce off of them. A person's frequency depends on their experience of the world, who they are, their thoughts, emotions, behaviour, etc. Also, I'd like to add a bit of my own worldview to make things more logical. I believe that in this world, there is matter (particles), energy (allows matter to do work), and souls (allows matter to be conscious and have will). Perhaps thought energy is only transmitted by souls and received by souls and that is why soulless detectors scientists use cannot see this energy.

As I said earlier with my experiments, how thought sounds are only in the mouth but since we can hear in our ears in a dream, dreams are not thought but true stimuli, where does this stimuli come from? Our dreams are our perception of thought energy. During the day, physical stimuli is too strong to allow us to perceive thought energy but at night, we can. Because these thought energies come from so many other people, we have strange and illogical dreams.

To share dream, you must have good chemistry with another person so that your frequencies are similar. But really, as humans, we have many similarities so the limits are small. Probably, your position in space also helps because there is less interference.

Anyways, that's what I've gathered up to now but I still I'm feeling iffy about this.

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

Haha, right! (Time travel...)

Well... I'd just like to summarize things because that's what I like doing. How dream sharing works (given thought energy exists):

We broadcast thought energy equally in all directions sending to everyone in the world a bit of our experience.

I want to talk about color. Light has all the frequencies. When the light of the sun reaches an apple, the apple absorbs all the color but red. Red bounces back and we see red. In a similar way, perhaps, the thought energy we send has a frequency which can only be absorbed by someone that absorbs this frequency and will let any other frequency pass through them or bounce off of them. A person's frequency depends on their experience of the world, who they are, their thoughts, emotions, behaviour, etc. Also, I'd like to add a bit of my own worldview to make things more logical. I believe that in this world, there is matter (particles), energy (allows matter to do work), and souls (allows matter to be conscious and have will). Perhaps thought energy is only transmitted by souls and received by souls and that is why soulless detectors scientists use cannot see this energy.

Interesting suggestion there. I like the connection drawn there between colour spectrum and thought frequencies.. Nothing more to add really. I guess i think of matter as souls so in my view i thought the broadcasting of thought in shared dreaming is like electron transfer in a chemical reaction. The whole dream plane of where it takes places i've thought of as a gaseous solution of people all bumping into each other. Like nebulas in the universe, you find groups of chemicals that have shared properties and thrive at same conditions like temperature, pressure etc.

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

Perhaps thought energy is only transmitted by souls and received by souls and that is why soulless detectors scientists use cannot see this energy.

We might be able to find this energy, we could have found it already, who knows. Electrical signals in the brain might be a good candidate for that.

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

As I said earlier with my experiments, how thought sounds are only in the mouth but since we can hear in our ears in a dream, dreams are not thought but true stimuli, where does this stimuli come from? Our dreams are our perception of thought energy. During the day, physical stimuli is too strong to allow us to perceive thought energy but at night, we can. Because these thought energies come from so many other people, we have strange and illogical dreams.

To share dream, you must have good chemistry with another person so that your frequencies are similar. But really, as humans, we have many similarities so the limits are small. Probably, your position in space also helps because there is less interference.

Anyways, that's what I've gathered up to now but I still I'm feeling iffy about this.

Y'know, It does give us a good explanation as to why dreams are so illogical and gives us a lead to what pattern they do form in dreams!

Distance doesn't seem to be much of a problem in shared dreaming, that is one of the things that is hard to explain about it. Because, if distance matters or not, how are we tranversing space in the first place?

Originally Posted by Dthoughts

Interesting suggestion there. I like the connection drawn there between colour spectrum and thought frequencies.. Nothing more to add really. I guess i think of matter as souls so in my view i thought the broadcasting of thought in shared dreaming is like electron transfer in a chemical reaction. The whole dream plane of where it takes places i've thought of as a gaseous solution of people all bumping into each other. Like nebulas in the universe, you find groups of chemicals that have shared properties and thrive at same conditions like temperature, pressure etc.

The reason I add this, is just because scientist have already found hundreds of subparticles but none supposedly relates to consciousness so that is why I think they can only be received by consciousness. Think about it, you cannot observe something without affecting it. You cannot smell something without taking in the chemicals into your nose meaning other people can't smell those same chemicals, only those that remain. When you see light, no one else can ever see that same light photon, This is the case for everything. In the same way, for someone to receive a thought energy, they most have a way of absorbing it in a way that it ceases to exist. Only something that is conscious can experience an experience and consume it.

Originally Posted by Dthoughts

Distance doesn't seem to be much of a problem in shared dreaming, that is one of the things that is hard to explain about it. Because, if distance matters or not, how are we tranversing space in the first place?

Well, gravity acts on very big distances. Why not thought energy.

I tried to add a post last night, but I see it didn't go up. Summarizing:

Don't worry about being rude O-red, you're not, and I have the same challenges in any case.

Time travel is implied in the original stipulation of 'instantaneous' communication. I think its not the best way to think about the issue though. The key to shared dreaming seems to be shift one's standpoint of identity to one where the interrelationships between minds are primary, and the changes that physical objects go through are secondary. The thought of 'time travel' is from a standpoint of changes of physical objects, so its hard to share dreams or make sense of it from that perspective.

O-red, I agree that the future doesn't exist, and physically I don't think the past exists either, except insofar as its defined by the present. Physically all histories that lead to the present state would be equally real. And yet, premonitions that can't plausibly be extrapolated from past experience happen, and a few people have a lot of them. So for those people, this has to be accommodated somehow. The false memory rationalization doesn't work: I know when I'm having a premonition in a dream, and have written such dreams down and shared them with other people prior to the corresponding event.

One way to account for the premonition, even though the future isn't real yet, is the foreseen event is caused by some unseen fate, and we're just seeing what providence intends. But I don't think this is quite right, for the same reason I said that thinking about time travel isn't quite right.

A few months ago another guy argued that when we have the premonition, we're entangling ourselves with a corresponding future. So we're not really seeing the future or causing it so much as selecting one. I think this is probably right. However, its sort of like saying that the reason a stone sinks in water is the water molecules are moving out of the way for it. Its true, and it describes part of how nature accommodates the premonition, but its not really causing it.

Out of time again. Thanks for your thoughts.

Shadowofwind:

So you're saying that when dream sharing, our consciousness is located in the interaction of two people rather than in the brain? Is that what you mean by standpoints? Although this perhaps makes sense, I have difficulty imagining consciousness without a physical body to receive stimuli. I feel like for this to happen, your consciousness or soul would at least have to move to some sort of surrogate, or a dream body with a brain and receptors that would receive dream stimuli rather than physical stimuli... So like, the duality view where there is a physical and an idea world where the physical world exists before consciousness hence why we can't use our mind to affect it and there is an idea world that is created by all of our consciousnesses.

About fate and such, I'd like to share an idea that goes with one of my theories I might of shared somewhere. I think that our consciousness is associated with the group of cells that interact together in our body. Each cell isn't conscious, but the city of cells is. It's us. Why can this not be true at a higher level? Just like cells, we interact together. Could the whole of human and animal beings in this world that interact together also create a consciousness, which would be what people call God or the greater power. This entity which is simply the sum of its cells (us, living being, where all the inanimate matter is like our interstitial fluid, the fluid between our cells). This entity could think, just like we do. It could think of the past and think of the future. It would be all knowing, or at least know a lot if it is knowledgeable about its body. I can choose to move my arm and therefore my cells will respond and will have no free will to change this. However, as with deterministic views, some, at least, of our movements are automatic and are not affected by our free will. In a similar sense, the higher consciousness could move us in a direction, and we could move It in a certain direction. We call whatever this entity does as Fate and whatever we use our free will to do, this entity perceives it as a reflex.

I don't think our consciousness must travel outside of our body during dreams... At least I don't feel it. If there us superconsciousness consisting of consciousnes of all thinking entities, then we are somehow connected through it.
In OBE I feel my consciousness(or soul?) travels out of body... I feel it like something is trying to hold it inside body. Maybe ties to body. It grows weaker as I distance from body further. It is also weaker hold if my relaxation of body and concentration is better.

Timetravel- it has not much meaning to preserve timeline, when you are above time. Time is simply only one of dimension of 11 dimensional universe. Matter can't travel through time. Information- maybe, maybe not. Rigid scientific opinion is: it can't. BUT... Information is transmitted by material medium- either solid mater, or electromagnetic waves. Using immaterial medium, such as soul(which is not scientifically provable) could make for faster transmission. Causality will not be disturbed by this. Changing something because of knowing of future events will cause only choosing different timeline. Only one changing timeline would probably know that events were changed.

My own experience are only from OBE, dreams are too imaginative...- I knew some future events some even 20 years before they happen. But because I didn't know time they will happen, nor turning points making the future events happen I couldn't change any undesirable outcome. From this it seems, that even if I know of some future events, I couldn't change them. Therefore it is either entirely impossible to change timeline, or it is possible but I don't have enough training and experience to know why, when and how...

I'm now in experiment(3 months now). I got quite complicated illness. It seems like I have found in it turning point and did something I originally didn't want to do... There were timelines where I was dead in close future. There is at least one where I lived much longer, maybe till 70-80. I did the change of events, I went to seek physician before by illness initiated autoimmune reaction wasn't started fully. Now I have to wait... I will see whether it can be done. BUT EVERYTHING CAN BE MY IMAGINATION ONLY.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Time travel is implied in the original stipulation of 'instantaneous' communication. I think its not the best way to think about the issue though. The key to shared dreaming seems to be shift one's standpoint of identity to one where the interrelationships between minds are primary, and the changes that physical objects go through are secondary. The thought of 'time travel' is from a standpoint of changes of physical objects, so its hard to share dreams or make sense of it from that perspective.

No, it isn't. I implied that communication was done in the absence of time, or, rather, without regard for it. The absence of something by no means implies travel through that something. How can you travel in something that is not there? And no, just because you can make the semantic stretch that since "instantaneous" means you crossed space without time, then you must have time-traveled, please don't... because then we'll spend ten posts discussing why you never crossed space, either, because space may be absent from this formula as well... and yet we are still not talking about timelessness and spacelessness; just about a phenomenon that might occur without physical regard for the known rules governing those concepts.

So enough about time-travel, guys: it was never intentionally implied, and if you got that impression, well, consider un-impressing yourselves. Plus, all implications aside, time travel is utterly irrelevant here... please save it for another thread, lest this one get even more muddled.

Fine. Now you have me talking about time travel!

I think if we want to talk about a theory for shared dreaming, the subject of time paradox unavoidably comes up, just like the question of 'where' consciousness is. Even if the answer is 'nowhere', we still have to address the misconception, because its central to understanding whatever is going on.

I think that in some sense consciousness doesn't really have a location. We're conscious of things that have locations, and we imagine locations for things that we are conscious of, but its the non-locality of consciousness that makes the sharing possible. So to answer an earlier question, for me physical proximity seems not to make any difference, just as proximity in time only makes a difference in terms of relevance of relationships. And I don't think of my consciousness as 'traveling', though there is a sensation of movement as the context I have my attention on changes.

O-red, many of the ideas an experiences you're describing are similar to mine, I've been ignoring them due to a lack of time, not because I don't find them interesting. Your description of being an arm of fate is like what I experience for instance, and changing the scope of what I think of as 'I' is key to the shared experiences. Similarly, if I recall correctly you described feeling the sound of a thought in your mouth. This is also an experiment I've done, and it shows that the experience of one's thoughts being 'in' one's head is similar to the reason sound on stereo headphones seems to be in one's head. I presume that my thoughts correspond to brain activity, but my association of the subjective experience with my head is nevertheless somewhat of a projection. In a dream I've assumed the activity is in my brain, and to some extent in another location if there is extrasensory perception. But this raises a good point, because often the images the dream incorporates are from the following days experience, not the previous days. So if the images are forming in my brain, maybe this implies that I'm in some kind of superimposed state, where I'm using my brain not just in the present moment. I think that all people do this to some extent all the time anyway, that their subjective momentary experience is actually smeared out slightly over a few milliseconds, and over closely similar physical states, and they wouldn't even be conscious without that. Actually, consciousness aside, nothing would work without that kind of ambiguity, its essential to physical existence and chemistry.

The capacity to feel seems to me to be the same as cognitive consciousness, but the content is different.

Maybe this answers my questions from past threads about 'astral' matter. The stuff that I'm concerned about doesn't have a physical location, except insofar as its connected with things that do have a physical location. So we won't find it or understand it if thinking about it that way.

Shadowofwind:

I don't have the time to read all your post right now but I'll just make a fast comment about "consciousness not having a specific location."

If something does not have a certain location, it has no boundaries, and without boundaries, it is omnipresent and it makes no sense that there would be more than one consciousness in this world. For there to be more than one, they need to be seperated somehow. If they are spaceless, they are not seperated and must be the same. That is a flaw I see with being spaceless and having seperate selves.

Also, the issue of time does not have to be discussed if we agree that we can only share dream in the present moment (I only mentionned it because I had seen threads where people shared dreams in different time zones and said that time was irrelevent. I just don't think you can share the same experience at different times. Although someone that is awake can probably send thought energy to sleeping people. Only one person is receiving a dream from another person. The sender is not dreaming.

However space must be discussed. As of now, I think there are three theories, either we experience shared dreams in our own brains, in a parallel universe or in a spaceless world. I don't like the last one personally.

Just rushing by...

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

If something does not have a certain location, it has no boundaries, and without boundaries, it is omnipresent and it makes no sense that there would be more than one consciousness in this world.

I think it makes sense because what we are conscious of, such as our own brain activity, or feeling in our own nerves, has a location and boundary. But it seems right that the consciousness is without boundary, that's why we can have these other kinds of experiences also.

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

Also, the issue of time does not have to be discussed if we agree that we can only share dream in the present moment

But we can not agree on that because its not true. The only 'shared dreams' I have any experience with to talk about at all are not like that, and this is core to how it works.

^^ Is it core to how it works, Shadowofwind, or, based on your own anecdotal experience, is it core to the specific personal conclusions you have drawn about how it works?

This may seem trivial on its face, but I think the difference is significant... it is okay, in my mind even recommended, to consider things based on more than just your own experience. There may be more from which to draw for investigation of these things than just an individual's experience. That you experienced something does not make your take on that experience more or less "true," Shadowofwind, though it does add valuable evidence to a greater investigation. To define truth only from your own experience seems a bit short-sighted to me. To dismiss as false something that wasn't included in your personal experience seems just plain wrong.

This, by the way, is why I was hoping this thread would spend more time discussing theory than anecdotal "proof." We've all got personal stories that explain everything; its the general info we can exchange, sans anecdotes, that might get us to workable conclusions.

Of course that's just me. If "It's true because I said so/because it happened to me" is the accepted currency here, I'll submit to the popular notions and quietly let the thread go where it goes.

Sageous,

There seems to me to be a fairly simple logic problem here....If someone claims to share a dream in the present moment, I'm not dismissing that at all. In fact I believe that other people have such experiences, and that their experiences are interesting and relevant to this discussion. But when someone suggests that its only possible to share a dream in the present moment, yes I can correctly call that false without dismissing anyone else's experience. A counterexample disproves a statement, and I have many counterexamples. Of course you don't have to believe me, but then you're the one that's dismissing something as false because it wasn't included in your personal experience, not me.

Of course I can not "agree that we can only share dream in the present moment", and I don't think its reasonable for you to agree to that either, since you know of my experience. Moreover O-red's statement wasn't even based on his experience with shared dreaming, it was more of an expression of a philosophical preference.

In any case stand by what I said. If you want to form a good theory about something, I think you have to try to accommodate the evidence you have. Otherwise, its like the so-called scientific researchers who consistently find no evidence of paranormal phenomena, because they define what they think it should be like and test for that, rather than considering what people actually say they experience. But if you think you've got enough data about simultaneous shared dreaming, and can "agree that we can only share dream in the present moment" without losing anything important, then go for it, and there's nothing more I can contribute.

^^ All apologies, Shadowofwind. In retrospect, I should have addressed my post as equally to O-Red as to you. The point wasn't that you were wrong or right, but that the conversation seemed to be at risk of becoming an anecdotal exchange that I sensed would take us away from the topic and lead us rapidly down an unwanted and unhelpful "Is so because I said so/Is not because I said so" path. Taking such a path is unwanted by me and unhelpful to me, and perhaps to me alone, but as OP'er I figure I'm allowed an opinion.

That OP, BTW, said nothing about sharing a dream in the present moment, and for good reason: if this bubble exists absent of the rules of time and space, then concepts like "present moment" are meaningless -- just as concepts like "precognitive" are meaningless. My point here is -- and always was -- that things like "present moment" just do not matter in this conversation; making them matter removes us from the original idea, and sets us down a road paved solely in personal experience that leads in as many directions as there are people posting -- and not to a place where much is learned, though much is certainly argued! Yes, anecdotal evidence is valuable, especially when accumulated with other anecdotal evidence from other individuals; but for me allowing it to become the only source for answering questions like that posted by my OP seems just not the right way to go.

I hope you understand. If you think I am wrong, and that this is the route threads like this must take, then say so and I will bite my tongue and say "So be it." This is, after all, not my world; what in the end do I know?

Well well… This thread feels like so many of my dreams, where I faithfully cross invisible limits and end up in forbidden regions very unintentionally to the exasperation of the inhabitants.

So I came up with an idea, what if we continue the time and space discussion in spoilers and keep talking about the theories at the surface of the thread. Two conversations at once. And perhaps the time and space conversation will one day submerge to help the sailors that navigate above the waters.

Spoiler for Of Space and Time:

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I think it makes sense because what we are conscious of, such as our own brain activity, or feeling in our own nerves, has a location and boundary. But it seems right that the consciousness is without boundary, that's why we can have these other kinds of experiences also.

What I mean is, if something is spaceless, it has no boundaries. Without boundaries, you cannot count them. For example, I can count three rabbits. I know there are three because they are obviously divided in three different entities. If consciousness does not have a spatial location, it cannot be counted and you cannot say: I see three people, there must be three spaceless consciousness. There is just one. If I have to bring a metaphor, I would say it's like a sea (although it's not). The sea is only one because you cannot separate a section of water from another so it's all one. This is not actually a problem if you think we are all the same consciousness only experiencing different bodies at once. But if you believe that we all have different souls, then, souls must have spatial parameters.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

But we can not agree on that because its not true. The only 'shared dreams' I have any experience with to talk about at all are not like that, and this is core to how it works.

I must ask, though, are these shared dreams or premonition dreams or whatever they are called?

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Their subjective momentary experience is actually smeared out slightly over a few milliseconds, and over closely similar physical states, and they wouldn't even be conscious without that.

If this was true, than we would not have free will in the present moment because the future would have already happened. Our free will would only exist in the sense that we can plan our future actions but not our immediate ones.

Now, to steer the conversation back to its purpose, this was the initial question:
How can two people communicate in a dream instantly, without regard for time or space, and how do they find each other at all?

Now I see how time and space were taken out of the question just as well as the credibility of thought energy...

1. How can two people communicate in a dream instantly?

Please answer me and tell me if this is the general agreement right now (given thought energy exists). Thought energy are products of consciousness and they are broadcasted in all directions and absorbed or not by other consciousnesses that are in tune with the broadcasting one. And that all dreams are formed by us but also by the million of thought energies that strike us from the millions of other people and animals (if they have consciousness) around the world. Obviously, animals are less in tune with us. This means, we don't only share dream with one person but millions. That is why if two people ever share a dream, they both experience a different dream, because they are also sharing dreams with other people at the same time. I think this would explain a very big problem of dream sharing. Anyways, do we agree with this?

Please anyone, state the flaws of this theory and what is missing to fully explain dream sharing? 'Cause I feel like it's pretty complete

2. how do they find each other at all?

That's probably the biggest missing part of our theory. Obviously, there is the possibility that it is impossible to do that. But let's say it is, since we are trying to explain what so many people claim to do. I guess, it just comes down to what we said before, the two people must be quite similar, be good lucid dreamers, have good chemistry, understand each other on a deep level, not necessarily know each other...

Anecdotally, based on my experience....To have a weak shared dream, the two people don't have to be very similar, there just has to be some kind of intersection of intentions. Also, one person can have the experience even if the other person doesn't dream lucidly. Again, its 'shared' in that the other person's thought is identifiably in the dream, not because they have the same dream.

Yes I agree a large number of people influence the dream, which both enriches it and confuses it. But the interaction with one person can out from the rest. For example, a few nights ago I dreamed of a science or engineering student who had remarkably neat handwriting who reminds me somewhat of someone I knew 35 years ago named Donovan. Based on past experience, I think this is probably a real person, and that this person probably has an older sister. The dream would be influenced by me and by other people too though. The thing that clinches it as a shared dream would be if there were a fairly unique element to the dream that the other person recognizes as theirs. For example, the next night I dreamed of having a hexagonal grid of black bug-like spheres on my chest and stomach. And the next night I dreamed of a realization involving the chain rule in a calculus class. If someone else had the same dream the same night, and neither of us has been watching TV or other popular media, they might find that convincing. Whatever their standard of evidence, I think its generally possible to satisfy it if they're interested in pursuing it. Personally I had to have a lot of dreams like this before I accepted it as real.

Sageous, I know we're going off topic, but like I mentioned earlier, I think its very hard to form a theory except by fitting it to the evidence we have, and its necessary to describe the evidence, which in our case is pretty much all anecdotal. I don't think that O-red is being unreasonable at all, or that we're arguing at each other instead of talking to each other, even though the conversation has been a bit choppy since neither of us has much time. Though his outlook is different from mine, I think the experiential underpinning is actually remarkably similar, at least potentially, and I don't feel like the communication has broken down. It just takes a little bit of time since we're starting with some different assumptions.

You say, a connection of empathy and similarity is not required for shared dreaming? Only just intention is needed?

So you're saying telepathy is real in the dream medium. By the power of your own will you can connect with someone else outside of space and time. My problem with this is how easy it seems. There is not even a process of learning how to become a telepathy master in which you would, for example, need to learn how to empathize with the people you want to communicate on a deep level. That would explain why so little people can do it. But then, if it's only will that is required, why has shared dreaming not been proven yet? Anything that you can do by just willing it, I have a problem believing it. The reason is, I spent all my childhood and early teens believing in magic and making great efforts to do anything magic or find magic people. In vain. It's not that I am saying that it can't be real anymore but let's just say I don't intuitively believe in wizards anymore.

But, I will share a theory that explains how it could possibly work. (Ain't I nice)
I thought about this theory wondering how would saying a specific word and making a specific wand gesture could ever make something levitate. It just makes no sense that the universe would have such universal rules and that wizards, to do magic, would have to say random words, use the right wood, do the right hand motion to find new spells. How would spells work? So the only way it could work is if there was such a thing in this world as "symbol energy" (again, like thought energy, it has nothing to do with energy). Symbol energy works by giving powers to symbol. For example, if frogs are a symbol for the night, you could make a magic potion with frogs that could give a night-themed effect. Obviously, such symbol energy is very scarce in our world, despite all the symbols that we have. I mean, placebos could be an example of symbol energy, but as a kid, I once drank an invisibility potion (a very true one, it was the grossest thing I have ever tasted and I will never know what was in it). Anyways, I did not become invisible. Since the symbol energy theory does not work, I don't understand how anything magical could happen.

So my question is, how can you will a shared dream to happen? Explain it in terms of thought energy or another theory.

As I said before, its not 'by the power of my own will'. I don't 'will a shared dream to happen'. Its totally uncontrolled, except for my openness. I don't even choose the other person, and don't choose what I learn about them. I can ask a question ahead of time, and will get an answer if its the right kind of question, but what question occurs to me to ask is mostly fated anyway.

Some people believe in karma or providence. However something like that works, it works the same way. My subconscious 'higher self' coordinates the interaction with the other person's subconscious higher self. There's an affinity at that level. Its like what you said about being a small part of a larger god-like self. To the small extent that I'm aware of the process at all, I shift my sense of identity into that larger self a little bit.

As magic powers go, this is pretty weak stuff. Its strong enough and consistent enough that I can be sure its real, but not strong enough that I can really do anything with it beyond that. So your search for magic people has been answered! But as is often the case with such things, the answer is a bit of a farce.

Yeah I know this is the thread for theory, but I don't have a theory for it. There are a lot of other things that I could do long before I had any hope of developing a theory for it, like building proteins or defending my body against infections. It would be funny for a person to say "I'm not going to eat until you can explain how digestion works!" If you want to do the same kind of thing with dreaming that I do, I guess its probably within your reach, if you persistently strive in that direction. Then you'll be in a better position to build a theory, since you'll have more actual data to work with. If you exercise your ability to think with feeling, particularly on 'spiritual' subjects, and you explore the nature of identity, somewhat in the manner of jnana yoga, that points in that direction. It sounds like you've already done a lot of that.

Okay,
I thought you said you could choose with who you talked. Then, that's reasonable. You just sort of ask to this higher nature to allow you to experience shared dreaming and it just plans the rest for you. This makes more sense to me, the way I understand what you said, not the way I wrote it down here. A lot of these things make more sense in our heads than on paper (or on screen). It's just weird to convey such abstract ideas but I get it.

Yes, for sure, that would be silly if a person starved themselves until they knew about the mechanisms of digestion. However, it is interesting to theorize about how digestion works while digesting a good meal

And obviously experience of my own would come in handy. Although I have none. It is not a priority yet. I am very busy and have little time for lucid dreaming which I would like to master before thinking about attempting such things as shared dreaming, OBEs and such (I have no opinion about them right now, although I like theories). I really see it as if there are two main things I have to work on right now and these things are my Will Strength and my Mindfulness. They are both weak (although stronger than most people who don't think about it). I've come up with good methods to improve them. I've just got to make them into habits.

Originally Posted by Occipitalred

Okay,
I thought you said you could choose with who you talked.

I might have some choice about it. But then there's the question about the extent to which my will is really free, or whether my subconscious has already suggested the choice before I think I'm making it. More often than not, if I have one of these weak shared dreams, it will be with the person I have the most philosophical interaction with the next day. In any case, the how of it is all left to providence, and I'm not doing anything with my will besides the simple choice of what I'm interested in. Similarly, I don't control my dreams, I'm lucid only in the sense of being aware of and thinking about what's going on. I prefer it that way, because it leaves my subsconscious/higher-self more freedom to do what its going to do. I'm generally disinclined to mental discipline for the same reason. Of course it makes sense to focus when working on a problem, but I think we're way too ignorant about what matters and how things must work to just decide what's important and try to keep our minds on that all of the time. I think this is a limitation of systems like raja yoga.

So....just a thought about the physical mechanics of shared dreaming, not so much the nature of it.
I was reading about homing pidgeons and then wondered about magnetite in the human brain. It seems that magnetite or biomagnetite, forms in certain directions and in a chain pattern in the brain. It is found to be an electric conductor on the cellular level so maybe the common thread is the magnetic attraction of a fellow dreamer. Maybe humans have an innate ability to connect and locate each other in a similar way that homing pigeons navigate electronic magnetic fields.

I would be very cautious to use physical fields(like magnetic or electric- electromagnetic) as way to connect to someone. I read also about experiments where they tried communication on very long distances and they did it from Faraday cage. Even though it was for telepathy. This should be in my opinion similar, only experimenter uses dream state for communication.
I'm more inclined to take in consideration karmic bonds, or other bonds between people(souls). If they know each other they have bigger chance, if there are feelings between them then the chance is even bigger. Thought is not in my opinion some energy bubble or something... it is more like limb. We are using thought as a way to interact and manipulate our surrounding.