Thread: On The Nature of Shared Dreaming

It is not important how it is named, it is important that there are differences. And that we can go there and observe that. We can look on those "dimension" as not made by religious groups or individuals, only someone found it sooner. Like for example Niagara falls exist in reality even if I wasn't there. If i travel there, I would find them. Its existence is independent of everybody.

I can't imagine someone creating the surrounding I'm finding while out of body. I would rather believe that I created it... subconsciously. Well that is possible and that is why I try to introduce as little imagination and will into my travels.

I wonder how much is related OBE and NDE... I read that they are closely related... But I dont have my own experience with NDE to know for sure.

Psoinik,

Hi. Apologies again for my short replies. I only have internet access for a few minutes.

I think the astral realm can't be understood as being either objectively real like the Niagara falls or else as made up or pretend. Those ideas sort of apply to physical things, but not so much to 'spiritual' things. I think there is certainly a reality to what we experience astrally, but the way we experience that and divide it into different planes is highly dependent on esoteric religious group-thinking.

Maybe there are other points to be discussed that are more interesting than this one, but that's the one I had time for. Gotta go.

You don't need to be sorry

What about looking on astral from point that many things are there relative in comparison to physical world? If it is possible to observe more dimension that in physical world, maybe even see parallel universe at once, and our mind tries to understand or if it cant comprehend things, maybe it is clouding what we see there... As to not to be overloaded with chaotic perceptions...
Maybe, the most stable thing there is mind, which can have only relatively narrow window of state which are compatible with existence in there? Maybe that narrow window is only there because there is living body to which we are connected. When I differ from certain state of mind it throws me back... because I have a place where I can go back. Than there would be question, if my body is dead, where would changing of mind state throw me? Into grasps of imagination? Into something like LD as I experienced a few times? It would be sad to be incarcerated in dreamlike environment for who knows how long. Even worse, dreams can make me forget things I know(for time I'm in dream) which can mean I would be there for eternity if there is no reincarnation... and if there is reincarnation, it may be the reason that I must start new life without remembrance of last one.
For me dividing is not thing of religiosity or belief, for me it is just description of different places(dimensions) which have different properties, different mind set needed for existence in them. We can discuss it for very long, but we will not come to truth in many things like this one. That is because we don't have possibility to objectively see things as they are, if they are out of physical realm.
I'm not trying to create belief from what I see while doing OBE. I try to understand. I try to have things proofed. It would be much better proof if there is possible communion through OBE, through other dimension than physical ones.
Just an afterthought... I asked one of my acquaintance, a man about 65 years old what he thinks about this type of things... His opinions was very materialistic... there is nothing after death. One needs to live before he dies. Question "why" or "what for" has not meaning for him. For him it is strange to try to do things like I'm training and experiencing... and he wouldn't invest a iota of his time even if it could be done during sleep time...

Sageous linked this "his" thread
In my Dream Remote Viewing, today

16 Feb 2014 is the last post to date

I think we are one being in billions of different bodies
Like this amazing anthem says.

Thats how Dream Remote Viewing works so well
Because we are one

But we can experience it first hand
in experiments like this

↘️↘️↘️

https://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dr...ml#post2233188

↗️↗️↗️

I like to believe that dream sharing is possible. I had a dream character come up to me and tell me that I'm dreaming before and made me lucid. But meeting real people in the astral doesn't seem likely, I mean the other person would have to be out of body at the same time as you and you would have to meet up. More luckily to meet real people in regular dreams. You see people you know in the astral but I don't believe it's really them.

^^ Ah, but there is where my theory kicks in, if I remember it correctly (it's been a while)!

If it can exist at all, dream-sharing among people who are not sleeping within a few feet of each other must defy the known rules for space and time; so there really is no need for you and your SD'ing partner to be asleep at the same time. Also, there is no need to be out of body to meet in the astral, or even any need for an "astral" at all. The trick, according to my OP (I hope!) is recognizing the dream your partner is signalling you (and every other dreamer) to join.

Originally Posted by AntiDash

I like to believe that dream sharing is possible. I had a dream character come up to me and tell me that I'm dreaming before and made me lucid. But meeting real people in the astral doesn't seem likely, I mean the other person would have to be out of body at the same time as you and you would have to meet up. More luckily to meet real people in regular dreams. You see people you know in the astral but I don't believe it's really them.

A good place to start is just finding the astral in general and look around a bit. It is full of entities and at first communication and interaction will seem difficult and hard to understand. I have interacted far more with entities that live there as opposed to entities who claim to sleeping in say France or Canada. I would say the ratio is 20 astral natives for every 1 that claims to be dreaming like me. I have seen no proof that two people could get to the same place and interact, but I think each of them would have to have high level lucid/astral skill sets. 30+ years into this and it is still crazy and very hard to understand. Perhaps monks who grew up doing this as there main goals in life could do it.

Originally Posted by AntiDash

I like to believe that dream sharing is possible. I had a dream character come up to me and tell me that I'm dreaming before and made me lucid. But meeting real people in the astral doesn't seem likely, I mean the other person would have to be out of body at the same time as you and you would have to meet up. More luckily to meet real people in regular dreams. You see people you know in the astral but I don't believe it's really them.

Unless you are able to woke people to perceive astral.

Originally Posted by AntiDash

You see people you know in the astral but I don't believe it's really them.

I agree with this. I have dozens of times in my early days been in contact with entities that I am seeing as my friends or family. They were not. Did they disguise themselves to fool me? I do not think so. Almost everything you see in the beginning will be beyond your understanding so you will fill in with dream imagery until the things takes a form you can understand. The astral entities may have been trying to project something like, "you do not need to fear, we are very alike and you can be relaxed around me." Not understanding how the telepathic communication happens and not actually having eyes (instead using a new sense) you simply have to guess what you are experiencing. You feel trust and likeness and comfort coming from this thing. You fill in with a crazy good rendition of your mother.

When I dream of something I don't have an image for, I usually use the closest image I can come up with. I think that our 'astral' experiences are crude and mostly inadequate sensate metaphors for something that would seem quite a bit less comprehendable than what is usually described as 'astral'. Essentially I'm saying that 'astral' is made up, but there's something beyond it that probably can't even be thought of spatially the way we think about our other experiences.

I view minds sort of like nodes or servers on a potential network, running on similar hardware and different software, and separated by vast void/abyss/event horizon. For at least some servers, it may not be possible to communicate directly, but some severs might could communicate with each other, and a potential workaround could involve bringing the network online one node at a time.

I think this may go well with the ideas in the OP. Structure wise, I can see the dreamnet being housed within the bubble surrounding the earth which you described. Though on another level, I also see the individual bubbles/servers as being separated by a vast relative distance, with nodes occasionally interacting with each other naturally in a way similar to how neurons interact, similar to how Occipitalred described a thousand beads in a flask. The structure feels more like eternal inflation/bubble multiverse, as described here: [Is there any way to bypass this? "An error has occurred ZenithofThings! You must be a registered member for at least 7 days in order to post links. You are a registered member since 0 days."] On a deeper level the structure feels sort of like Jeremy Bearimy, as described in this short clip from the good place: [Will edit these 2 placeholders when I'm able to post links.] though much more convoluted. Not those actual letters but a very similar idea.

I have ideas on how to spark the creation of such a network. If anyone can succeed at 1v1 SD, then the connection could potentially be strengthened/stabilized, the source code for software capable of allowing multiple users to interact within a shared operating system within the dream environment could be downloaded. From there, more connections could be added, upgrading the available processing power/resources like plugging new parts into a computer, sharing/spreading the evolving OS and reinforcing the overall robustness and capabilities of the network with each new connection.

If this were to succeed, it would spark the creation of a sort of internet v2.0, where any mind connected to the dreamnet can login simply by falling asleep. I've been working long and hard on creating such an OS, though unfortunately I've never been able to share the source code. I've only had one brief verified success with SD amongst a maddening amount of failure. It happened spontaneously a long time ago, during a time after I had stopped trying to force it, and was verified using a secret email which I only ever handed out during my dreams.

After much consideration, I'm not even sure if the OS should be shared if it is possible. If such a thing were to actually happen, I don't know where opening this Pandora's box could lead, and once opened I doubt it could easily be closed. Combine the risks and benefits of a massive SD network, with the ability to warp subjective perception of time to extremes, and you have the ultimate can of worms.. For one thing, you potentially have pocket dimensions birthing pseudo-god hive minds with nigh eternal lifespans and the ability to interact with the world we live in while "awake".

I'm new here and still catching up on this thread, but wanted to share some old thoughts. Would really like to hear more thoughts on these topics. I'm glad to have found this place, and have a lot of reading to do.

Originally Posted by ZenithofThings

I've only had one brief verified success with SD amongst a maddening amount of failure. It happened spontaneously a long time ago, during a time after I had stopped trying to force it, and was verified using a secret email which I only ever handed out during my dreams.

The above is very interesting to me. Could you share the message that was sent and/or the email address?

If you don't want to mess up the privacy of that email address, just give an example that's of similar form. For example, if the address was "[email protected]", you could say it was "similar to [email protected]". (Really though, the message itself is the most important part.)

I'm interested in shared dreaming, but most people who have done personal experimentation on the topic don't seem to like sharing their results that often...

I don't have access to the account anymore, but it was short and easy to remember: ____dreams at ____. [Seems like I'm unable to post anything even vaguely resembling a link..] It was a very short dream. As soon as I felt like a connection had been made with something potentially external, back then I would try to make them lucid, and failing that I would get a little scary, repeatedly blast my email at the target with instructions to wake up and immediately email me about the dream, and then I would jump scare them awake. May have involved some level of threat/demand to send the email. Was kind of a messed up thing to do in hindsight.

Perhaps not the most polite thing to do, I didn't enjoy it, but frustrated with getting nowhere otherwise, I did this for a short while in a sort of shotgun blast aimed at everything I came across, in an attempt to connect with someone, anyone. It was never successfully aimed at any particular individual, just any random stranger I could possibly connect to, so there was a sort of lack of consent. I also wanted verification that SD is possible, even if just on a personal level, I wanted to cut out the bias. It wasn't meant to convince anyone outside of the dream of anything.

I stopped using this scum-tactic after the first verification, because it felt icky. The email was a brief description of the dream, wanting to know wtf they experienced, some not so nice words, stay out of my head, etc kind of thing. I sent a reply back, apologizing and filling in a little missing detail, and I guess that maybe creeped them out or something because I never heard back.

The idea was that a brief moment of terror followed by a sudden forced wake up would help make the dream more memorable, lessen chances that the SD target would continue dreaming for hours after the connection ended, and increase overall chances of actually receiving an email. Tbh, part of me doesn't regret the scummy tactic, because it appears to have produced some level of results, though another part of me regrets the whole consent issue, so it's not something I really want to continue doing either. In my defense, at the time I still wasn't sure if true SD was even possible.

I've had a few other potential SD since then which were unverified, also spontaneous events which happened when I wasn't trying to force it, after a long period of trying to force it. The other few suspected SD may or may not have actually been SD, but for whatever reason I never got more than the single email verification.

ZenithofThings:

Sending an e-mail address in a dream seems to me to be very difficult.

I think that 'hive minds' already exist, and all people are a part of them, though they're muddled and mostly subconscious.

I agree that sharing dreams with strangers is icky under most conditions, and generally ought to be avoided, even though it is also the easiest way to be objectively sure that the phenomena is real.

As I've described elsewhere, all of my telepathetic and premonitory dreams have been at least partially triggered by an external source.

Assuming you're sane and objective (not always a safe assumption on this site), you've managed to prove to yourself that telepathy is real, but not in a way that allows you to prove it to anyone else, aside from your one victim who would rather not know. So where do you go next?

Originally Posted by ZenithOfThings

I don't have access to the account anymore, but it was short and easy to remember: ____dreams at ____.

Okay, well let us know if you end up remembering the email and/or password. I'd be very interested in reading the raw contents of such an email.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

ZenithofThings:

Sending an e-mail address in a dream seems to me to be very difficult.

I think that 'hive minds' already exist, and all people are a part of them, though they're muddled and mostly subconscious.

I agree that sharing dreams with strangers is icky under most conditions, and generally ought to be avoided, even though it is also the easiest way to be objectively sure that the phenomena is real.

As I've described elsewhere, all of my telepathetic and premonitory dreams have been at least partially triggered by an external source.

Assuming you're sane and objective (not always a safe assumption on this site), you've managed to prove to yourself that telepathy is real, but not in a way that allows you to prove it to anyone else, aside from your one victim who would rather not know. So where do you go next?

The icky part wasn't SD with strangers, but utilizing terror to increase dream recall and wake them up.

As far as the next step, I think it should be asking if I should proceed at all. If I shouldn't then I simply drop it. If I should, then I continue looking for a way to expand the dreamnet, by getting those first crucial connections set up and stabilized, and expanding from there.

Though even if those connections can be made, I'm not sure if they can be stabilized. Then I'm not sure if the OS can be shared. Even if the OS can be shared, I'm not sure if all of its' features will be usable, the OS would likely require tweaking. Then there are concerns with security, privacy, safety, ethics, etc.

Ultimately, the mass SDnet may not be feasible in its' current form, and may require future tech to bring about. Things like advancements with brain/machine interface could eventually end up hosting the shared OS which allows our minds to communicate and unlocks SD networks.

Mind rape is still wrong even if you do it gently.

I think a limitation of your computer networking analogy is it gives the impression we're designing something that can be controlled, and it makes the connection seem less emotionally intimate than it is really. You're not constructing a machine that other people will use, you're deciding how far you want to be inside someone else's skin, and how open you are to that yourself. We don't have any power over the principles governing how that works.

Originally Posted by ZenithofThings

I don't have access to the account anymore, but it was short and easy to remember: ____dreams at ____. [Seems like I'm unable to post anything even vaguely resembling a link..] [...]

The other few suspected SD may or may not have actually been SD, but for whatever reason I never got more than the single email verification.

By the way, I thought of a way you may be able to recover the email address and login. On Gmail and some of the others, you're able to enter a "recovery email" when you create the address. If you did so, it will have sent an email to your "recovery" address mentioning that a new account was created. That will let you find the address, at which point you can then use the "password recovery" option to recover the login.

So, what I suggest is to use the search function in your main email-address that you had around the time you created the dream email-address, and search for an email that mentions the creation of your new dream email-address.

If your email address was created on Gmail, just search for an email that contains the text "new Gmail address" (make sure you put quotation marks around it when you search). If it's a different provider (like Yahoo), you could maybe search for keywords like "new", "address", "dream", etc.

Anyway, this is what one of those full emails looks like (for Gmail, when I created a second account in 2011):

Congratulations on creating your brand new Gmail address, [email protected].
Please keep this email for your records, as it contains an
important verification code that you may need should you ever
encounter problems or forget your password.

You can login to your account at http://mail.google.com/

Enjoy!

The Gmail Team


Verification code: XXXXX


If you didn't create this Gmail address and don't recognize this email,
please visit: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/a...y?answer=62400

And this is what it looked like when I created some other accounts from 2013 to 2017:

Welcome to Gmail! You can login to your account at http://mail.google.com/.

Here are a couple of tips to help you get started:

Use Gmail's import tools to move mail and contacts from your other email accounts to your new Gmail address.
Download the mobile app for Android or iPhone and iPad
to stay connected on the go.
Should you ever encounter problems with your account or forget your password we will contact you at this address.

Enjoy!

The Gmail Team

If you didn't create this Gmail address and don't recognize this email, please visit: https://accounts.google.com/AccountDisavow?adt=XXXXX to unlink this account.

If searching for it sounds inconvenient, I'm willing to send you $20 (over PayPal or what-not) in compensation if you manage to recover the login and email in question. ^_^

(I'd really like to see an example of a shared-dreaming verification! I'm pretty skeptical of it personally, but I'd be very interested if it were real, and an "in my hands" email verification from years prior would be pretty compelling!)

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Mind rape is still wrong even if you do it gently.

I think a limitation of your computer networking analogy is it gives the impression we're designing something that can be controlled, and it makes the connection seem less emotionally intimate than it is really. You're not constructing a machine that other people will use, you're deciding how far you want to be inside someone else's skin, and how open you are to that yourself. We don't have any power over the principles governing how that works.

What exactly do you mean by mind rape? Ideally everything done to bring about the SDnet would be done with mutual consent between everyone involved. Though if the SDnet were brought online, I doubt it could be controlled for long, and humanity has a tendency to weaponize whatever it can. This is one of my concerns preventing me from putting my full effort into moving forward with the project.

One of the things I incorporated from the psions is a system for programming constructs, which can be quite useful as a tool for dream control. Many things in my dreams are intentionally programmed. I often create and play dream rpgs with functional rules, npcs, etc all working just as designed. Of course, I'm able to bend the rules if I want, so unfortunately I don't see why other dreamers wouldn't be able to do the same, and don't know how I would go about preventing such a thing. Assuming any of this is possible, and is also something I decide I want to attempt, I'd want to do extensive testing during the first few connections before going further with attempting to bring the network online.

I use a lot of code in my dreams. The OS has a lot of built in features such as voice commands, customizable HUD, etc and is meant to act as a sort of dev kit to allow even novice lucid dreamers to easily manipulate their dreams and design their own worlds via an easy to use interface.

But yea, we may or may not have any power over the principles governing how SD works, because I don't think we know how it works.

Originally Posted by Venryx

By the way, I thought of a way you may be able to recover the email address and login.

Sorry, but this was over a decade ago, and I've tried but failed to access the account a few times over the years. It's possible I have the password written down somewhere but I haven't been able to find it. Also, it was never intended to work as verification for anyone other than myself. I'm not really sure what a system intending to verify the existence of SD to outsiders would even look like, though I haven't put much thought into it because it isn't something I'm particularly interested in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you guys could just flip a switch and the shared dream network I've described would suddenly go online, after which anyone falling asleep would see a login screen with the option to enter the SDnet, and could stay for as long as they want, meet up with other users who are logged in, etc, before waking up.. Would you choose to flip the switch or not? Why or why not?

This is a question which has haunted me for a long time, and I'm still undecided, but leaning towards not flipping the switch. Personally despite having similar concerns and its' own sets of pros and cons, I think it might could be safer to pursue replicating the SDnet with true deep dive VR tech capable of accurately mimicking LD experiences, though it could take quite a long time before such a thing is developed.

Originally Posted by ZenithofThings

Sorry, but this was over a decade ago, and I've tried but failed to access the account a few times over the years. It's possible I have the password written down somewhere but I haven't been able to find it. Also, it was never intended to work as verification for anyone other than myself. I'm not really sure what a system intending to verify the existence of SD to outsiders would even look like, though I haven't put much thought into it because it isn't something I'm particularly interested in.

The approach I mentioned, though, would let you recover your dream account without having to remember your password -- assuming you did have a recovery email connected.

Isn't it at least worth checking your main account from that period, to see if it's linked with your hidden dream account?

Anyway, assuming you didn't have your main account and dream account connected, I'd still be pretty interested in:
1) Knowing what the exact email address was for the dream account. (Who knows, maybe someone else remembered one of your attempts, and I could find a second verification posted to a forum or something through Google. If you'd rather not broadcast the address, I'm open to a private-message!)
2) Reading an early account of the dream you're aware of, from your dream journal or something. I know you've already described the contents, but reading a "closer to the time it occurred" record could provide details that could have otherwise been forgotten over the years. Were you writing to a dream journal at the time, or some other written record?

Originally Posted by ZenithofThings

If you guys could just flip a switch and the shared dream network I've described would suddenly go online, after which anyone falling asleep would see a login screen with the option to enter the SDnet, and could stay for as long as they want, meet up with other users who are logged in, etc, before waking up.. Would you choose to flip the switch or not? Why or why not?

I would obviously want to think about that some more, but I think I probably would, yes. The concerns you mentioned, while valid, I think are better to face head on as a society, instead of potentially having just some rogue group somewhere find out about it and start exploiting it without the rest of us knowing. At least if we "flipped the switch" and enabled it globally, the "good guys" would have a chance to know about it and start setting up safeguards, to prevent a "subtle takeover" or manipulation campaigns by smaller groups that are in the know.

(It's similar to the concern about advanced, general AI. There are groups seriously worried about a rogue group being the first to achieve it, and causing a catastrophe that we can't recover from due to the AI outpacing us and making us unable to "pull the plug". It might not even be a "rogue" group, but just a group that wasn't careful enough. Anyway, the reasoning is that if the state-of-the-art AI development is done out in the open, we'll have time to realize when it's getting too close to the point of no return, and thus be able to carefully inch our way up to it while minimizing the chance of it becoming destructive.)

Originally Posted by Venryx

I would obviously want to think about that some more, but I think I probably would, yes. The concerns you mentioned, while valid, I think are better to face head on as a society, instead of potentially having just some rogue group somewhere find out about it and start exploiting it without the rest of us knowing. At least if we "flipped the switch" and enabled it globally, the "good guys" would have a chance to know about it and start setting up safeguards, to prevent a "subtle takeover" or manipulation campaigns by smaller groups that are in the know.

(It's similar to the concern about advanced, general AI. There are groups seriously worried about a rogue group being the first to achieve it, and causing a catastrophe that we can't recover from due to the AI outpacing us and making us unable to "pull the plug". It might not even be a "rogue" group, but just a group that wasn't careful enough. Anyway, the reasoning is that if the state-of-the-art AI development is done out in the open, we'll have time to realize when it's get close to the point of no return, and thus be able to carefully inch our way up to it while minimizing the chance of it becoming destructive.)

Interesting response. Another thing to consider is that if it's possible to create such a network, it is likely to happen sooner or later without my help, so the choice becomes whether to flip the switch or delay someone else from flipping the switch.

A big problem though is that we don't exactly know what we a dealing with. If we could get multiplayer dreaming working at all, on a small scale, then perhaps we could learn more, but even then if combined with the TPD (Time Perception Dilation) abyss things become much more unpredictable. Even if the first few nodes on the network were somehow vetted careful "good guys" I doubt a headstart would mean much when dealing with such massive potential timescales. I mean, if anyone could have the option to sleep for an hour but dream for billions+ years, there's no telling what that could do to human minds, or what could return once the body wakes up.

Venyrx,

I don't think that anyone can provide you with any "proof" that can't be faked. I have some e-mail evidence that I know I didn't fake, but there's no way to demonstrate that to someone else. So I think if you want proof, you have to have the experiences yourself.

A few years ago, I used to taunt skeptics a little bit on this point. It seemed to me that a lot of people's skepticism came down to fear, since they were willing to argue endlessly about shared dreaming, but not willing to try it. Now I think that it is important to respect that fear, and not try to push someone's buttons until they decide to try something that they don't really want to do.

Here's a possible experience to try: Ask yourself a question, something you care about fairly deeply, like the answer to a philosophical or psychological issue. Be open, in other words willing to not control your own dreams. Write down what you dream afterwards. I'll make note of my dream and send it to you. If my dream contains imagery or other details from your life that I could not have known otherwise, then there's some evidence. Since I share my dream first, you'll know I'm not faking it. Then if you share your dream, I might be able to provide some additional explanation. My dreams tend to be fairly metaphorical, so there will probably be enough subjectivity in interpretation that you wouldn't be sure that its not just a coincidence or reading stuff into it that's not there. But once you get a small sense of the experience, if you keep pulling on that string and wanting to know, you may get clearer experiences later. That's how it went for me anyway.

The reason I suggest asking a philosophical question, is that's the kind of thing the 'shared dreaming' part of me cares about. It has no interest in trading passwords or predicting lottery numbers or other such things. I don't control it, and I don't make any attempt to influence my own dreams, it just happens or it doesn't. I almost don't even dream now, so I don't know if anything will happen if we try this, but its easy to try. Previously, I seemed to be about 50% successful with this sort of thing. In one case I don't know if it was real or if the other person was making up his dream afterwards to make it match mine. In another case the sharing was objectively real. In another case or two I believed it was real, and so did the other person, but it was subjective, without objective evidence. In one or two cases the other person did not dream at all. Here I'm only talking about deliberate attempts to do this on this web site. Most of my experiences have been spontaneous, not deliberate like this.

As I've explained elsewhere, probably even in this thread, it doesn't matter if we're both asleep at the same time, it doesn't work that way. Just pick the next sleep after you read this, if you decide you want to do it, so we know which dreams we're trying to compare.

ZenithofThings,

In some countries, if you lie to someone about your feelings and intentions, and as a consequence they have sex with you, that's legally considered rape. The encounter is "voluntary" on both sides, but one or both people didn't really understand what they were getting into. And even when it doesn't meet any useful legal definition of rape, one or both people can still get hurt that way, even when there is a lot of grey area. And even when there's full consent on both sides without deception, its still not always a good idea. Many people who are sexually promiscuous are able to act like that because they're really not very open emotionally, they have other internal walls that they keep raised.

With shared dreaming, there are still walls, but there also has to be a lot of openness at a fairly deep level or it likely doesn't happen. And consent with shared dreaming is problematic in that you open yourself up to things that you can't fully anticipate at the outset, particularly if you're new to attempting to shared dream. Most people really don't want other people in their minds that way, whether the other person intentionally scares them or not.

I agree with you that you have some ability to construct a miniature thought-world in which some dream experiences are easier for other people to have. But its a bunch of thoughts around the subject, its not really the underpinnings of how the sharing really works. So there's still a lot built into it that is the way it is that you can't change. By way of analogy, you can build a wheelbarrow to cart some stuff around in, but you can't change the rules of gravity, leverage, and friction.

I think our idea and ideological thought-weelbarrows are somewhat important, but a lot less important that I used to suppose they are. To push the analogy a little further, the tool may say "Essential To Your Yard Job (TM)" on the side, or essential to salvation, or whatever, but its really just a box sitting on a wheel with two handles forming a Type II lever. Get rid of any part of it and you can still probably find a way to get the job done if you want to.

So how about hosting the OS in a neutral group meetup place? Perhaps everyone could share an image of the same unique door to conjure and walk through as part of attempting to reach the neutral zone? Could maybe even provide various kinds of built in shielding for everyone. Has something like this been tried?

Your response is intriguing, shadowofwind.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Venyrx, I don't think that anyone can provide you with any "proof" that can't be faked. I have some e-mail evidence that I know I didn't fake, but there's no way to demonstrate that to someone else. So I think if you want proof, you have to have the experiences yourself.

It's true that someone's sharing of an email isn't "proof" in the societal sense, ie. if you try to share an email, some will claim you sent it yourself. However, on an individual level, sharing that sort of content can be pretty convincing for the person who first requested it.

To be more specific, due to the circumstances by which my contact with you has developed (my asking for a copy of someone else's email, but then finding someone else allude to their having something similar themself, after having already been active in the thread apart from my asking) I'm someone who would believe you if you sent a screenshot of an email with evidence of shared dreaming.

In other words, while I don't have "proof" that the emails in question are genuine, I have good reason to think they are, because:
1) You were not actively seeking out people to try to convince. (most people who hoax things will immediately seek others out to share it, not wait till someone else brings it up)
2) You were already active in this thread, writing substantial posts. (due to time constraints, it's not very reasonable for a hoaxer to get involved in lots of threads, if their sole purpose is to trick people who eventually might ask for evidence)
3) You write thoughtfully and coherently, and you seem genuinely interested in the subject. If you were a hoaxer of evidence for it, I'd expect a more controlled and elusive writing style. (deflecting counter-points, instead of demonstrating understanding of them and accepting that providing definitive proof is difficult)

And finally, the one you might find the most unexpected:
4) I have, in fact, already done pretty extensive, personal experimentation on the link between the mind and remote entities (that is, "extensive" relative to mainstream attention/acceptance; "just the beginning" relative to what is possible). In my case, my experimentation was directed toward "psi" rather than shared dreaming, but it's plausible that the mechanism behind one would be the same as the mechanism behind the other.

To be more specific, I purchased a "hardware-based random number generator" (the BitBabbler black: TRNG hardware, software, and testing - BitBabbler), coded my own software to translate the output from the device into actions on-screen, and starting running "sessions" where I would "will"/"intend" the results to trend toward the designated target. (with my computer recording the results of every session in a database) [Note: The software does make use of the mouse, but only to change the location of an on-screen "intention-focusing" marker. The code that runs the simulation is entirely separate from the code that changes the location of the marker.]

It will surprise some to hear (as it did me!) that the experiment -- yes -- succeeded. And it didn't just succeed "nominally"; the results deviated from chance so far that it reached a peak "rarity by chance" of 1 in more than 32,000 (32,258, to be precise -- with the control series remaining under the 1 in 20 threshold throughout the entire experiment). After that "peak", the results did begin to weaken. One might consider it to still have been "trending" in the right direction (depending on the length of the evaluation window), but because the trend intensity was much weaker, the rarity-by-chance value began to drop. Because of this, I put the experiment on hold (ending at a rarity by chance value of 1 in 2,808).

See here for screenshots/graphs of the results from the experiment: https://imgur.com/a/iKkSxKn

I did consider resuming shortly after, if pre-marked-as-such "test" sessions showed the effect restrengthening; but I only tried this once or twice before deciding it wasn't worth the time on a continuation that some people wouldn't consider legitimate anyway. (Since it increases the chance of the effect being based just on some environmental variation between days. Since I'm familiar with the code, I knew this to be very unlikely, since the random-number generation process applies a "simplify each from-device number to just a 1 or 0 (based on an alternating more-than/less-than mapping), sum it with 199 other such 1s/0s, and use the result as your actual number" filtering process, which dramatically mitigates the effects of any large-scale environment changes. But since this takes further explanation, and is another component for people to dis-earnestly criticize, I figured it was best to leave the result as is and just start fresh with a new, more comprehensive experiment in the future.)

(I'll eventually get back to psi experimentation, but there's other things I'm focusing on right now; I got what I wanted out of my initial experimentation foray, and when I return to it I intend to expand the experimentation and make it easy for anyone to set up and perform themselves -- and with the streamlined ability to combine everyone's results into a global result set. However, if someone is intent on replicating my experiment right now, I'm willing to help you do so, so long as you aren't lazy about your half of the setup. ^_^)

It's also worth noting that throughout my experimentation process, I updated my friends with the results as they developed (specifically, over Google Hangouts). Like you mention shadow, there's no definitive way to prove oneself as an honest person; but just as I trust your account based on heuristics (writing style, understanding of epistemology, the path by which the person came in contact, etc.), so also I'm hoping people will be able to recognize my own account as genuine.

Because I often get frustrated with the lack of transparency from other people claiming they have evidence of things (but that the evidence is just not currently accessible for some reason), let me break with that trend by being upfront:
1) About a year ago, I became interested in the subject of psi. I considered it quite unlikely (~10% probability), but I was interested in it enough that I thought I'd look into it more.
2) I spent weeks doing extensive reading on existing psi research. The results were not conclusive, but they were much better than I expected. By the end of my research, I was seriously considering the possibility that psi is real.
3) During my reading, I also came to find that tons of people who criticized psi (and the research), were doing so based not on reasonable complaints, but just because they found the idea "ridiculous". For example, a group would do a study and obtain positive results (rarity-by-chance values of over a thousand, over a million, over a billion), and critics would just ignore the data and complain about "problems" with the study that they didn't even take the time to see if they applied. In many cases, the "problems" were known by the researchers before they even started their work, and they carefully prevented it from coming up. The critics never knew this though because they didn't even take the time to look at the paper (and others hearing of it dismissed the research immediately because they assumed those complaints were valid).
4) Although the data from existing research was promising, there is always the concern that some of the researchers were making mistakes or outright lying. While selective reporting was already shown insufficient for many of the study sets (the amount of deviation from chance is just too high, given how many studies would have had to have been discarded to yield the given global average), the doubts about competency or honesty are ones which are harder to definitively rule out. This is true of every field, but it's especially prevalent for subjects that are not currently accepted by the mainstream. Because of this, I decided I would perform psi experiments myself: this way I have direct access to the source code (to verify for myself that the code and analysis-algorithms are accurate), and because I am the sole test subject, I know there's no deception going on during the test sessions.
5) I got to work and coded a simple experiment, where I try to will the number generator to yield more high numbers than low numbers. This first attempt had interesting (imo) results, but ultimately did not reach the traditional bar of "significance" (ie. a termination-point rarity by chance of 1 in 20 or better).
6) I designed and coded a second experiment, specifically designed to amplify the "psi effect" if one were to exist (the basic idea is that I had two targets, a positive and a negative, but the negative target was concealed to prevent subconscious "psi missing"; once the session completed, it would then tell me how many times the visible "positive" target was hit relative to the unknown-location "negative" target). This is the experiment I mention above; the results were (in my opinion) very successful -- performed over about twenty days, with a streak of 13 straight days of gains at one point.

The good part:
7) The device I used is a commercial product that anyone can buy. (and I still have my copy, which still functions)
8) I still have access to all of the data from my experiment. It was not lost to a fire, accidental deletion, etc., so I am able to deliver if someone asks me for it.
9) Because I updated my friends with what was happening during the process (both my reading as well as my experimentation), I have multiple third-parties who can verify that things developed as I describe. (If someone wants contact info, I can provide it on request through private-messaging.)
10) The experiment was done carefully (well, for an experiment that some random software-developer put together; it's not as air-tight as a years-in-the-planning lab study done by a room full of PhD professors, but oh well), and with precise rarity-by-chance values calculated (based on Monte-Carlo simulations). Because of this, I can give a distinct number to people who ask how significant the results really were, in a way that rational people cannot just ignore. (Instead of having to rely on a person's subjective opinion of how significant some result is. Not that subjective analysis is useless; however, it's much easier for people to brush-off/dismiss that if the theory clashes with their existing worldview.)
11) The software was self-developed, and is not part of some organizational distribution barrier, so I can share it with anyone who's willing to try replicating the experiment. (I can work with you on request if you're interested. I just haven't done so yet because it will take a fair amount of time to package up nicely, and no one has shown a serious interest yet.)

Anyway, if the above text-version is too boring, here's a link again to the screenshots/graphs of the results from that second experiment: https://imgur.com/a/iKkSxKn

In summary, I'm actually pretty open to the idea of remote interactions. I say that I'm skeptical of shared dreaming because, even though I do now believe in psi (not conclusively, but I do consider it more likely than not), I'm skeptical about how much that psi connection is involved in the seeming correlations between specific dream accounts. I think there probably is some connection (just from general psi interaction), but I have doubts about how substantial that connection is. (as opposed to it mostly just being coincidence, misremembering, exaggerating, and/or selective reporting)

That might sound bad, but I think a healthy skepticism is good to have, as long as you're genuinely open to considering new evidence that comes in. For me, this is how I currently approach shared dreaming: skeptical, but interested, and willing to hear more. (and eventually experiment myself, most likely)

So anyway, my point is that I do care quite a bit about potential evidence for things like psi or shared dreaming, so if you have evidence for such things, I'm very interested in seeing it! (I'm not just a critic looking for something to shoot down ^_^)

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

A few years ago, I used to taunt skeptics a little bit on this point. It seemed to me that a lot of people's skepticism came down to fear, since they were willing to argue endlessly about shared dreaming, but not willing to try it. Now I think that it is important to respect that fear, and not try to push someone's buttons until they decide to try something that they don't really want to do.

I personally think it usually has more to do with arrogance than fear. A lot of the critics I encountered on existing psi research, seemed to be treating the papers as something just to laugh at and feel better about themselves for confidently rejecting (while providing only shallow, condescending, and sometimes just plain wrong justifications for). I suppose a subset of them might be from fear as well, but I don't think it's the most common reason.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

Here's a possible experience to try: Ask yourself a question, something you care about fairly deeply, like the answer to a philosophical or psychological issue. Be open, in other words willing to not control your own dreams. Write down what you dream afterwards. I'll make note of my dream and send it to you. If my dream contains imagery or other details from your life that I could not have known otherwise, then there's some evidence. Since I share my dream first, you'll know I'm not faking it. Then if you share your dream, I might be able to provide some additional explanation. My dreams tend to be fairly metaphorical, so there will probably be enough subjectivity in interpretation that you wouldn't be sure that its not just a coincidence or reading stuff into it that's not there. But once you get a small sense of the experience, if you keep pulling on that string and wanting to know, you may get clearer experiences later. That's how it went for me anyway.

I think I probably went through a similar experience while beginning my research into psi, and eventual experiments on it. If the quirks of psi research apply also to the phenomenon of shared dreaming (assuming it is real), then I have some idea of what that process could look like.

Two interesting things about psi research is that, 1, it's not as straight-forward to study as some people assume, because the phenomenon appears to interact significantly with the state of mind of both the test subject and the researcher (this is unfortunate, but it does not make research pointless, as some critics like to pretend). And 2, it's quite the adventure to gain first-hand experience of discovering a whole field of studies I never knew existed, realizing how biased mainstream thought can be and how swiftly people will discard scientific approaches when it strays too far from their preconceptions, and thinking about what implications such phenomena may have on the nature of the world, if in fact they are genuine.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

The reason I suggest asking a philosophical question, is that's the kind of thing the 'shared dreaming' part of me cares about. It has no interest in trading passwords or predicting lottery numbers or other such things. I don't control it, and I don't make any attempt to influence my own dreams, it just happens or it doesn't. I almost don't even dream now, so I don't know if anything will happen if we try this, but its easy to try. Previously, I seemed to be about 50% successful with this sort of thing. In one case I don't know if it was real or if the other person was making up his dream afterwards to make it match mine. In another case the sharing was objectively real. In another case or two I believed it was real, and so did the other person, but it was subjective, without objective evidence. In one or two cases the other person did not dream at all. Here I'm only talking about deliberate attempts to do this on this web site. Most of my experiences have been spontaneous, not deliberate like this.

Well thank you for the offer! Most people are not serious enough about these sorts of subjects to actually put in time to try to see if they are true. Most will not even spend a half hour to do some Google searches for existing research on the topic.

On your offer specifically: That sounds fun, and I'd like to do so. I have a similar problem that I'm currently not having that many vivid dreams. I'm experimenting with some software-driven LD induction ideas (eg. having it generate random 3-digit numbers, with me trying to train my memory by repeating it back the next time I awake), and I've had some successful inductions, but I'm still a far way off from reliability. I know lucidity isn't necessary for what you propose, but for me, I usually don't have vivid/detailed/memorable dreams unless the spark of lucidity first gets introduced into it.

In summary, I'd like to try your idea, but I'm not sure how long it will take. Maybe how we can do it is, I'll formulate a subject that's meaningful to me as a suitable "target". I'll then wait until I have a dream that deals with the subject substantially. I'll then send you a message (or post in this thread), letting you know I've completed my side, and have recorded the result. (And I'll post my dream and thoughts to a third-party site which shows the "last edit time", so that once you've posted your dream, I can link you to my own pre-written account, and we can compare them to each other -- knowing that neither has been tampered with after reading the other's.)

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

As I've explained elsewhere, probably even in this thread, it doesn't matter if we're both asleep at the same time, it doesn't work that way. Just pick the next sleep after you read this, if you decide you want to do it, so we know which dreams we're trying to compare.

We could do it that way, but I'd rather wait until one of us (probably me) has a substantial dream on the target before starting the process. This way we have a higher chance of finding "noteworthy matches", as opposed to if it's based on a hazier dream with few details (where even if you manage to match something in my life, it's less demonstrable to other readers by means of the raw dream accounts).

By the way, I've always been kinda curious why some (eg. you, zenith, and many others) are not interested in "proving" things like this as much as I am. For me, one of the most important things to do, before you spend a lot of time on something, is to obtain clear evidence that it is real so you can convince the wider world. Why? Because if you can convince the wider world, you can increase the amount of research that gets done on it.

I mean, imagine if the world woke up tomorrow, and 80% of scientists were convinced shared dreaming is real. Can you imagine how quickly our knowledge of the subject would advance? So I can understand why it might not be interesting personally to someone to obtain clear evidence, but aren't you guys at least interested in it because of what it would mean for expanding how much research is done on the subject?

Anyway, looking forward to our eventual SD attempt! (As well as the email interaction you mentioned -- that should be fun to read, even if not conclusive )

I just need to think of what question to use as the target now...