Thread: Dreams being other worlds, OBEs, Dream Sharing, etc

Haha, I can't help the sprawl when I have so much to reply to. And clarify. I can't decide whether I am being unclear, or just not being read closely because I have been pre-emptively assumed to support pseudoscience. I'll be the first to admit that I make my arguments in strange ways sometimes.

I will think more on what the advantage of dreaming in early mammals might have been... although birds also have REM, so maybe we should think even deeper... unless there is some reason for REM to have evolved independently.

I'd like to say sorry, that it will take me a while to reply to your post, Anok - but I'm at it on the side, and I hope, I'll have it put together by tomorrow evening.
You are a refreshingly rational and friendly counterpart when it comes to debating this sort of topic and I'm enjoying myself!

Originally Posted by Anok

Haha, I can't help the sprawl when I have so much to reply to. And clarify. I can't decide whether I am being unclear, or just not being read closely because I have been pre-emptively assumed to support pseudoscience. I'll be the first to admit that I make my arguments in strange ways sometimes.

I've been trying to dig into suspicious looking aspects of what you said, even if they only vaguely did so. I'll be the first to admit, that I've brought a certain wariness on board from having been involved in many exchanges with people of a "beyonder persuasion" in real life and virtually. Hopefully this "denomination" doesn't sound derogatory now, it is really not meant like that, just strikes me as fitting and nice.
But you do a great job of demonstrating, that you don't deserve the wariness, not least because of not getting angry about being misread, but taking the time and explaining, what you actually mean, and for other reasons, too.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

@ Steph - thank you as well!! It's good to feel validated!! And let me reiterate - I do not believe in telepathy, I just like to play with the idea - as a thought experiment.

Ah - I see. So do I, and it might be a good opportunity to spell this out: I am well aware, that neither me nor anybody else can prove a negative - namely prove ultimately and without the slightest doubt, that telepathy is impossible. I just figure it to be extremely unlikely, even if I wouldn't know anything about the existence of respective experiences or experimental evidence. But I do believe, that telepathy and dream-sharing and many more exciting things will eventually be possible with the help of technology, we're already on the way!
An example: http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...wn-dreams.html

Originally Posted by DeviantThinker

StepL, that was frankly a beautifully comprehensive response.
I have nothing more to add to it except that while naturalistic science ideed cannot address problems of qualia satisfactorily, neither can any philosophy that I have seen or heard of. Most attempts to do so just replace "brain" with other labels like "Soul", "God" or the most preposterous one that I have heard given undeserved attention is that the brain is in fact merely a reciever that is streaming our consciousness from elsewhere.

Thank you! I wouldn't be able to drag anything useful on the topic of qualia or the experiential self out of my brain, either, but what I had in mind was looking up once more, what Thomas Metzinger and Wolf Singer have to say on these matters, because they seemed to make quite a lot of sense to me in the past. Without having watched or read just now, and without even knowing if it pertains to the subject of qualia/self - I'll just throw in something of theirs in the hope, it might be interesting:
Being No One with Thomas Metzinger - youtube
The Neuronal Correlate of Consciousness: Unity in Time rather than Space? - pdf

Originally Posted by DeviantThinker

I can't speak for Mister Atheist or Miss L but could it not be that dreams were not an adaption but a result of some other adaption? An adaption that conferred sufficient survival advantages to offset the dangers introduced by sleep crawling. Once there was there was enough dreamers, it was inevitable for members that exceted less monomines during their REM periods would have a survival advantage over others. I am assuming in this hypothesis that sleep apnea evolved after REM sleep and possibly dreams. However, it could be that early mammals lacked the neural circuitry required to have what we would call fully fledged dreams and REM would have simply served a maintenence period or perhaps they had more abstract dreams with little participation of the self.

I will have thoughts on the rest of your thoughtspace sprawling posts to share tomorrow but for now, I must get down to sleep.

Could very well be, Mr. Thinker! I believe it highly probable that features emerged in this order - and I really like this expression "thoughtspace sprawling" - beautiful!


@Hukif: I'm pretty sure, you do exist as well - salve!
You can render virtually everything possible with proposing good old "we are all in a simulation on some advanced being's computational arrangements".
Doesn't sway me, though.



Edit: Many thanks also for the link to that original paper, Anok, and for bringing it up in the first place, Verre!
I'm at this as well - but it'll take it's while, I have some real living to do at the side...
But I might well be able to make a good case against getting excited about it. What I can say for sure, is that it can't constitute extraordinary evidence for me, but more on that later.

That lecture you linked was fascinating. Never heard of this fellow before but it sounds like the first convincing stab at a reductionist explanation of consciousness that actually explains rather then attempts to explain away! I need more time to reflect on his theory before I can accept it but my initial impressions were of amazement, especially with how you can easily apply the malleable self representation model to lucid dreaming and the myriad of forms you can take in them. Great explanation of the sensation of a new sense gained by devices such as this too: The Haptic Compass @ Eric Gradman

@Deviant: Metzinger is a lucid dreamer himself and bases much of his philosophy on these experiences - look here, too:
Getting Lucid about Consciousness
Consciousness Revolutions review of The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger


Sorry Anok - I got a bit too tangled up in answering for my liking and could easily put several more hours into this post in order to eventually be happy with what I wrote myself, but I won't. I started answering paragraph by paragraph to the first part and that will follow as far as I got with it, after pre-drawing this one and commenting on the study.

Originally Posted by Anok

From what I have seen of telepathy studies, I think that it will follow hypnosis eventually into the realm of accepted science that we still don't have great causal mechanisms for. And on that note, read the article about dream telepathy, I insist. Your superficial dismissal does not strike me as valid, because the problems coded for in dreams and found to have increased significantly compared to controls were some that could not plausibly have been reflected in a photograph of the target. For example, data suggests that the dreamers may have received information regarding the target's mother dying of lung cancer, and specifics regarding the death of her husband. I'll leave the rest to you.

http://www.explorejournal.com/articl...213-3/fulltext

Now, to my discussion of shared dreaming, OBE dream worlds within a telepathic model. First, I want you to understand that I was only posting any of that to demonstrate to the OP that, according to what they found plausible, the other things they were disputing could be given plausibility. You seem to have taken things I said as if I believed them to be true and not simply plausible. My use of terminology like the "wireless-somethings going on" you referred to were in imitation of the OP. I literally just made up everything for the sake of argument based on what I knew of telepathy, as long as I was reasonably sure that I could defend its plausibility.

So, let me attempt to address your concerns. When I use the words "'skeptically' conditioned," I firstly put scare quotes around "skeptically" to denote that I was referring to shoddy skepticism - in this context, the unwarranted belief that dreams are completely self-contained (get back to me on that once you've read Carlyle's paper).

"Not completely self-contained" - this seems to indicate to me, that you do have a certain concrete idea of your own, as to how dreaming might have something "paranormal" about it, but you didn't yet let us in on it. I don't think it's overly fruitful to argue about on the surface and with respects to what other people believe or don't believe, without knowing, where you are actually coming from - so please tell us about it!

Now to the study - I do indeed have relevant concerns with it - lets forget about experiment #1, they're aware of the downfalls of that themselves.
Experiment #2 was done in two batches, first the real experiment with photo, and they mentioned it clearly, that the experimenter wasn't aware of who the target person was and didn't know anything about their problems. But of course the experimenter knew, that the person was real.

One year after the original experiment, they conducted the controls - they tell us that the students were unaware of the fact, that it wasn't a real face, but they don't say, that the experimenter was. And I would propose, that the experimenter in the control experiments knew, the picture was a dummy.
The whole study was set out from the start to go like this - test it with a real photograph, wait for next year's psychology lectures, test it again with a dummy. How could the experimenter in the second series possibly be unaware of the fact, that there is no real person on that picture? I can't see, how that could have been accomplished, and if it had been actually accomplished, then they would have mentioned it.
Besides that - they say that from how the students behaved, they had no reason to believe, that somebody noticed, that it wasn't a real person. This speaks for the above suspicion as well, that they've been looking out for that, but it doesn't speak for what went on in student's minds.

They didn't use a collage of real people, but constructed the face from scratch. I find it very plausible, that it might have evaded the conscious awareness of the students, but it might well be, they "knew" that the picture was an artefact unconsciously not (only) because of the experimenter, but from looking at it, and hence they invested less dream-imagination.
The funny thing is - control and experimental group dreamed of the same features, just in different intensities, which made the results significant.
So using this artificial face instead of another person with other problems has two big downsides
a) the experimenter most probably knew about this fact, that it's artificial, and unconsciously subdues the results by that
b) face recognition is one of the most sophisticated mental features we humans have - it is to be expected, that people react to an artefact differently than to a real face, namely more indifferently.
It would have been very nice to have the possibility to look at that artificial face - to do a realistic face from scratch and without using snippets of real photographs is an extremely difficult thing to do, if you want to fool millions of years of evolution in terms of unconscious recognition mechanisms, which by the way are amazingly effective - from looking at a person's face people glean tons of insights in a split second, but I digress.

By the way - just a thought - one could have checked, if trying to guess at the problems consciously with each picture would have yielded clear differences, best several normal photos and the dummy, and then see, if you find people unconsciously reacting differently to the fake than the others.

But then we have this nice little portion under "results":

Because multiple comparisons were performed on these subgroup categories, both before and after target exposure, the possibility of type I errors should be addressed. Because this was an exploratory first study, the more stringent Bonferroni corrections were not applied. Had they been applied, we would have had to conclude that none of the individual categories were significant. However, the overall result was highly significant (P < .00001), so this conservative conclusion would likely have been a type II error. The best compromise was to assume that the three categories showing significance with alpha = 0.05, were the categories that contributed most to the very significant overall effect.

So - they say, it would have been a good idea to check for false positives, but had they done that properly, "conservatively" - then they wouldn't have gotten significant results - and their excuse for this is - because this was an exploratory first study. How does that excuse anything?

Even without this quite revealing "little detail", my scepticism would stand perfectly well only grounded in the arguments about the control group's experimenter and artificiality of the picture.
But why am I not surprised to find muddling in terms of stats as well?

Spoiler for more relevant excerpts from the paper:

Experimental Group
In contrast to Experiment 1, all students were required to be in the study. This allowed a sample size of 66 students (approximate ages of 19-24 years, 50 females). As before, after baseline collection of two dreams (pre) for class project one, students were introduced to the special project. They were told (as described in the section “Instruction Protocol”) to try to have two dreams about a woman in a photo (different from the target in Experiment 1). As before, the target person was completely unknown to the experimenter and to the students. Some students reported needing several nighttime tries and examinations of the photo during a period of weeks to be satisfied with their attempts. The project deadline was about 4 weeks after it was introduced, and it gave the students reasonable time to try to come up with the dreams requested.

For the write up of the dreams, students were required to reproduce each dream, as much as possible, exactly as it was dreamed. They were allowed to comment on whether or not they had actually dreamed about the target person. Successful or not, students also were asked to score their dreams according to the Hall–Van de Castle scoring system, to learn the technique. Thus, the project served two purposes. Students were graded on the scoring segment of the project and were expected to comment on the special incubation project. However, they understood that they would not be marked up or down based upon the degree to which they could actually dream about the target person.

The photo of the target person was provided by a friend and was completely unknown to the class instructor (Experimenter) or to the class at the time when the dreams were turned in. The friend never interacted with any of the students. The target individual lived approximately 500 mi. away in another city. It is unlikely that either the Experimenter or any of the students will ever come in contact or meet this woman.

Control Group
This group was composed of 56 students (approximate ages of 19-24 years, 41 females) in the Dreams and Dreaming class, 1 year after the experimental group had completed their course. It seemed possible that the mere mention of the fact that someone in a photo has serious problems could induce dreams similar to the ones in the post section of experiment 1. The students might have felt somewhat obliged to produce dreams of a negative nature to please the instructor and report the most negative ones they had as opposed to more positive dreams. In addition, because the second set of dreams was to be part of a project to be submitted near the end of the school year for both experimental and control groups, the students might have been under more stress and naturally had these kinds of dreams as a response to their more stressful environment. One way to test for these kinds of alternatives was to present a group of participants with a completely fictitious photo. If the (post) dreams after exposure to the fictitious picture were more problem filled than the pre-exposure dreams, it would provide support for the idea that dreamers can be induced to provide the negative material, simply by asking them to dream about someone with unpleasant problems. This idea would explain the negative content of the post dreams of Experiment 1.

The target photo was constructed by a computer expert who had no idea of the purpose of the request. He simply designed a face from humanoid parts that looked every bit as real as the target photo for the Experimental group. It was decided to manufacture a face rather than “clip” a face from a magazine, since faces belong to real people that would no doubt have some problems in their lives. The face was put on the course Web site and Control subjects were asked, as before, to try to dream of the serious problems facing this individual.
There was nothing to indicate that anyone in the Control group perceived the photo as being anything but a real person with real problems. The same protocol for instructing and coaching students how to incubate dreams was applied in class and seminar settings as was done for the Experimental group.

Okay - now to my further ramblings as far as I got with them - but under the caveat, that I might not be having the time and leisure for getting into an intense drawn out back and forth, even while asking questions. But hey - I'm not alone here, maybe if I won't - somebody else will.

Originally Posted by Anok

No, I think you misunderstand me on several counts. But I'll get to that after I explain my concept of SP, since you directly requested it.

Yes, I did – thank you for clearing it up.

Originally Posted by Anok

I believe that sleep paralysis is a condition that evolved because preventing the physical acting out of dreams was favorable for the survival of the dreaming organism. This cannot have anything specifically to do with falling out of trees, because REM is found in some other non-human animals. Why exactly SP is a favorable, I am uncertain. It could prevent waking during dreams due to collisions with objects. It could conserve energy. It could be something else. Regardless, I am not very interested in THAT part of the evolution of dreaming... I am much more interested in what happened before SP. Did dreaming and SP evolve simultaneously? They seem like very different processes, so unless someone proposes me a common cause, I find that unlikely. So was there a time when dreaming animals simply sleepwalked? If so, they would not have the evolutionary advantage of SP - so what made dreaming such a valuable trait in a population that the sleepwalking animals weren't squeezed out via natural selection? Those are my actual points of interest.

Same here. But what I am still lacking is an idea, how your very own conceptualisation of paranormal phenomena actually looks like, or what a mind is in your view. Are there aspects of the paranormal, which you deem impossible, or rather highly unlikely yourself? And if so, which ones and on what grounds?
It's quite important to understand, where you are coming from, otherwise we'll turn in circles.

Originally Posted by Anok

So, I am not some irrationalist arguing against scientific concepts willy-nilly. I never argued for SP having functions unrelated to evolution. Most of what I have written in this thread has been a critique of what I consider to be an unscientific argument for rationality. I was particularly concerned with making this critique since it is directed against a field of science that gets, in my opinion, more than its fair share of unscientific criticism, simply due to a combination of prejudice from disbelief and the fact that it is more difficult to establish evidence for phenomena with as-yet unknown mechanisms.

You don't need to know the mechanism in order to show, that an effect is there.
Disbelief because of lack of mechanism is only one part of it - it would have long been over-ridden like in other cases, where we do find effects, but don't have the slightest idea, how the mechanism behind it might be working. Not so long ago, quantum effects were discovered - all over the world, millions on millions of experiments were conducted, and they all found the same, significant effects, and nobody understood what it means, or how it could possibly even be true. New mathematical tools needed to be developed to try and formulate it etc...
But in contrast to telepathy et al - it was undeniably shown to be the case - and so billions are spent, literally, to find out exactly how it works, and progress has been made and especially by a certain unfortunately deceased Prof. Feynman, who fittingly had something to say on the matter at hand, too:



A great example, because QM is so extremely counter-intuitive, we had no idea about the mechanism, but it was shown to be be in effect over and over and without a doubt, which was intellectually, technically and financially way more difficult than conducting psychological experiments by the way.

It's lack of mechanism which leads to disbelief - but only combined with the utter lack of reliable demonstrability combined with an abundance of demonstrated cases of failure, and over a very long time. Either honestly just not finding something, or worse. Compare with QM, and there we have an abundance of data just like I would want to see it for psi. One would think, that in more than a hundred years, somebody would have come across a way to demonstrate the effect, which is repeatable and beyond debunking, so that the field could finally get to work concertedly and try to find out, how it works. But this is not so.

Were I myself a believer, a "parapsychologist", I would be eminently angry with the majority of people within my own field, who discredit it by blatant incompetence up to right-out deliberate fraud. Would make me furious - and it's not entirely irrational for somebody outside of the field to point to that fact either, raise the question, as to why this might be so. And that's where it gets interesting, really interesting.
Imagine some similar epic failure would happen in another field of study with an emotionally neutral topic, one which isn't about validating personal experience or wishes at all - the proponents of this maybe initially promising seeming new field would long have dispersed and invested their energies elsewhere.
That would be the rational response to such a phenomenon.

Originally Posted by Anok

Completely aside from the question of validity of more developed concepts of the topics we are debating, those concepts (such as from certain Yogic and Hermetic traditions as well as parapsychology) must actually be understood in order to make a convincing argument that they are invalid.
Not understanding these concepts thoroughly before judging them invalid is a serious issue. With the exception of parapsychology, these concepts emerged way before modern science had anything to say about them, so as a result they cannot realistically be expected to be in scientific terminology. Heck, their sources are often in defunct languages, translated to English so long ago that the English is easily misinterpreted, and then never updated. Then the New Age movement came along and, with terrible control of information, obfuscated these concepts severely. But it is a fallacy to judge the existence of a phenomena based upon an invalid or nonexistent explanation of its mechanisms. For example, it is reasonable to posit that the healing sleep trances induced at temples to Asclepius were hypnotic in nature, and as you noted, hypnosis is quite verifiable nowadays, even though it was sharply ridiculed in very recent decades. It was rather unreasonable to assume, as historically occurs, that such things were the result of ignorant people deluding themselves or exaggerating.

My first reaction to this was simply to write "agreed", but that's not good enough. It is indeed a fallacy to judge the existence of a phenomenon based on a lack of explanation. But that's not what's actually happening - the problem is the lack of valid demonstrations of these phenomena yet to be explained, and I mean demonstrations under controlled conditions. Take the Randi challenge (One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) - it's running since the late 60s and the prize money stands at one million dollar to anybody, who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under conditions, which are agreed upon prior to the testing, so the person to be tested, said she was happy with how it would be conducted. In some cases Randi even agreed to remove himself for hundreds of miles, not to be disturbing the ongoings with his doubting. More than a thousand people have tried their best and they have all failed. Why is that? Interestingly only a very few of them have begun to actually doubt their abilities, the classical reaction is to dismiss their failure as being caused by something external, instead of considering, that they used to see results because of something internal in them biasing their home-experiments.

That's the one aspect of it. The other thing, not directly on topic - I don't think I need to be intimately familiar and understand the details of a belief-system in order to call bullshit on it. If it rests on a claim, of which's correctness I have reasonable doubts, say reincarnation - then I can dismiss, what is being constructed on the premise of that claim, without being aware of the details of the dogma. I surely need not study theology in order to be an informed agnostic atheist, either.

Originally Posted by Anok

Originally Posted by StephL

And to all my knowledge, and considering, that the endeavour didn't start yesterday, there is no such thing as convincing evidence to the effect, that this phenomenon actually exists, consciously or unconsciously, awake or asleep - anywhere.

You are the one - it looks so at least - to make an extraordinary claim.

As I'm sure you expect by now, I disagree. You are the one who is propagating the notion that no valid evidence exists "anywhere." I am arguing that the standard of validity being applied to parapsychology has historically been tainted by prejudice stemming from uninformed disbelief. Honestly, if I did not see so many arguments along the lines of "your results can't be real because your proposed mechanisms aren't real," often followed by a refusal to actually experimentally falsify said mechanisms due to it being a waste of time or career suicide, I would be more inclined to accept the scientific consensus. I understand that untestable mechanisms make for no hypotheses and therefore a scientific dead-end, but they do NOT falsify results.

Well - I was only saying that "to all my knowledge" there wasn't valid evidence "anywhere". But I really have to disagree, that the standards of validity concerning psi research would be unfair, either something is valid, or it is not.
There is no unfairness in insisting on data being valid beyond a shred of a doubt, and to be repeated over and over and by different institutes - this goes for any other field of science as well. To conclusively show something "unknown" - as in not (yet) featuring in scientific knowledge - is always an extraordinary endeavour. As I have pointed out above, this disbelief, which you bemoan is far from uninformed.

Originally Posted by Anok

On this note, I'm glad you brought up hypnosis and EEG. I have both worked informally with hypnosis, and been trained to conduct EEG / ERP experiments, as it happens. And I have read enough brain research regarding hypnosis to know that while its reality has a neurological basis, and even some of its processes can be inferred from EEG data, we still have an extremely poor understanding of why any of it should be happening in the first place. Saying that hypnotic phenomena results from inducing increased activity in self-monitoring brain areas which allow the reconfiguration of activity elsewhere in specific ways is no more and no less informative of cause than saying that telepathy results from induced activity in perceptual brain areas (which would be expected) which allow for the perception of specific stimuli.

I disagree. Hypnosis is a state of affairs in the brain, induced usually by another person working a certain technique upon the classical senses, esp. by talking and visual clues. Receiving this information, the brain puts itself in this state and then goes about changing itself. There is no mystery involved except for how exactly and in detail this self-changing mechanism works. Seeing a corresponding heightened activity in certain brain areas tells you, that these regions are probably actively involved in bringing about the effects. Hypnosis is the brain working on itself, so the explanations of the details are to be found in the brain and good is.
While measuring a heightened activity in perception-related areas while supposed telepathy takes place, does tell you nil and nothing as to what triggered these regions into activity in the first place.

Originally Posted by Anok

I would beg to differ with your idea of the supernatural however - mainly, that most parapsychological researchers are claiming supernatural occurrences in the first place. Unknown mechanisms do not entail supernatural mechanisms any more than poking out a bat's eyes and concluding that it can navigate well sightlessly entails something supernatural. Now, while dream telepathy success over hundreds of miles might entail ESP, it does not imply that ESP is supernatural. I really don't get your argument.

Well - some do and some don't. If I wanted to nitpick - dream telepathy must be extra-sensory-perception, not "might entail", and if it really were perception without the use of senses - what's natural about it? It would be natural, if you mean by esp sensed by a sense yet to be discovered. But I'm yet to come across somebody claiming such phenomena, who does not at the very least subscribe to Cartesian dualism. Surprise me - do you believe in an immortal soul or equivalent phenomenon, independent of a body? Or do you say, mind springs from matter, it's the brain being active in an electro-chemical manner, but from what the evidence shows me, information can be transferred with a yet to be found medium and mechanism anyway? You would be in the minority with the latter view, I'd say.

Originally Posted by Anok

I have already addressed your call about more well-developed systems. Perhaps I should have strictly said "more developed," though. Sorry. In any case, it should be clear that I would point to all of them, because I believe that we have assumed many traditions to be valueless which we should not have, just because they seem exotic and are not tailored to our understanding. As far as giving you an example that doesn't "fall on its face," what exactly have you decided are main reasons that esoteric interpretations of dreams fail? It would be useful for me to provide you a good example if I knew more about what you do and do not consider plausible, like I knew for the OP. I would ask that you consider whether or not you have taken the time to conclusively understand the systems that you have so far rejected, however, since misconceptions have run rampant since the New Age movement gained popularity.

I'd much rather want to know, what you find conclusive yourself, as I've been asking, instead of bringing up and down arbitrarily chosen belief-systems on my own.

Originally Posted by Anok

Are you just ignoring what I said in, literally, the first half of the sentence you quoted in bold? "We would need to assume that completely different accounts showed no evidence of a shared dream?" If you truly understand my point about the plausibility of a false negative judgment due to unskilled telepathy in one participant but not the other, and how this might result in under-reporting and decreased verifiability of shared dreaming, then I am confused.

Granted.

As announced and being sorry for it, too - I'd rather hold it here, and press "submit reply" - but I'll get at the rest as well, if superficially.

Originally Posted by Anok

As far as how you would connect to somebody, research I've read about perceiving or manipulating anything almost always suggests that intention is enough to elicit the phenomena, and other independent factors modulate success. That is certainly true of the dream study you didn't read, for starters, which is a decent source for this topic as it involved intentionally connecting to another through dreams.

Well yeah - that's "how to do it" but not "how does it work" - but we need not argue about that.

Originally Posted by Anok

When you begin talking about evil masters of the craft of dream invasion, it is you who begin making assumptions! This line of thinking is related to your discussion of how people can do "anything they want" in lucid dreams. How scientific of you. Would you please provide me an example of someone that can do "anything" they want in lucid dreams? Obviously you did not mean this literally, since you apparently do not believe that people can gain information about or interact with others in lucid dreams. You believe that dreams are constrained to both experience and control by a single individual. I agree that, if a dream is private, your "anything" statement would be true - although I would argue that these people have become skilled in dream control, and that I could propose that any action that violates techniques for good dream control could be considered "impossible." However, I think it is logical that if two people were sharing a dream telepathically, any action that one dreamer tried to take might be inhibited by the efforts of the other dreamer to maintain dream stability. Therefore shared dreams would operate more according to the consensus of its participants. This could be weighted towards a more skilled lucid dreamer on one hand, and on another hand, sharing a dream with an unskilled dreamer might double up the difficulty of dream control!

So, back to your evil dream master. Do I think that it is, in principle, possible? Yeah, sure. But they would need a very rare level of control, might need to be even more skilled to overcome interference from their victims, ah... what about my equally valid proposition of the virtuous dream master? People are pretty good (if not perfect) at keeping each other in line in real life. What makes you think the dream world would be different? There are new agers that spend a lot of time trying to project or journey or whatever they think they are doing, in order to help people. I have been members of communities where people specifically talk of trying to stop things like astral rape and psychological manipulation of people through their dreams.

Then, and more unfortunately, you are hard pressed to provide evidence that some of the awful dreams that some people experience are not, in fact, the kind of assault you are describing - even if I think it would be rare due to everything I've said above.

Yeah - that's how I meant it. You could propose that there are guardian dreamers, taking care of affairs in such a way, that society wouldn't notice the fallout from the evil master's activities and my argument is moot. Not a problem - granted.

Originally Posted by Anok

Regarding your implication that I claimed that the substance of the dream world was something entirely “other,” as I’d imagine you’d call “supernatural,” I simply did not. I described a model according to what the OP seemed to find plausible, based on telepathy, and in fact I assumed that brains were the origins of telepathy, just because the OP referred to wireless brain communication. Since I explained that the experiential content of d that telepathic communication was more important than firings of neurons which we do not individually perceive, I considered it acceptable to say that thought was the substance of this dream world. How, exactly, is this different from talking about websites instead of bits? It is useless to talk about dreams on the level of perceived experience in terms of the firings of neurons, after all.
Finally, I have already said that I fully realize the value of double-blinded studies. And, in fact, I did not ask you to accept single-blind studies. I actually was trying to convey something entirely different, which you seem to have glossed over. Psi research has claimed to show evidence that intention can facilitate interesting things like telepathy or the manipulation of probabilities, and has claimed that belief is a modulating factor of success (another thing which the dream article you didn't read corroborates, since the most accurate dreamers felt more confident they could perform the task, without knowing their performance). Psi researchers also commonly claim that it is possible to produce significantly negative results, possibly due to strong doubts or disbelief.

If this is true, then it applies very strongly to the business of determining whether or not psi exists. It becomes extremely difficult to prevent the researcher from interfering with data, seeing as you can't very well conduct research if you don't know what you are researching. So this effect would predict false positives for research where the involved people believe in psi, and false negatives for the involved parties that disbelieve, with the occasional significantly negative result.

The problem here, as I'm sure you are very prepared to reply to me, is that it is hard to falsify. I agree with you, that is a serious research problem. I would also agree that it makes an excellent, EXCELLENT excuse for bad psi results in the majority psi community, and an excellent cover for would be frauds, trying to fabricate positive evidence.

But that doesn't mean that the claim doesn't need to be disproved, and like I said falsification is difficult by the nature of the claim. I don't have a solution for you, unfortunately. It is easy to expose a similar effect in hypnosis, which I do not believe is psi; I have suggested that resistant people have attracting magnets on their hands, had them close their eyes, and seen their hands move farther apart. When they open their eyes and see this, the job is done. If you can think of a similar test that might apply to being conscious alone, please let me know. Until then, I will play the devil's advocate for psi in the hopes of producing more curious scientists, funnily enough, to even the psychic odds of our culture. Just in case.

I am unfortunately out of time for the night, but look forward to your response!

Yeah - misunderstanding - it read to me as if you were claiming the substance of all reality would be thought, not of dream-reality - my bad. Also a misunderstanding with the double-blinding, and happy to learn, that you do indeed see the necessity of doing that.
Concerning falsifying that claim, that you need to believe in it in order to have it work - I would really first of all want to see it demonstrated that it works at all. But if I chance upon a genial idea, like the one with the magnets - I'll let you know!

Sorry again it took so long, is so long, for throwing it out with a less proper than planned workover, and with being unsure, how much time I might or might not invest in replying back. Got to save myself from doing nothing else...


I didn't get to present such things, but it's open in a tab next door - so I'll throw this in as well - Ganzfeld studies meta-analysis: http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/ganzmeta.pdf

Originally Posted by StephL

Edit: Sorry @Verre - the article you linked up to doesn't strike me as convincing evidence for dream-telepathy, even without seeing the details of the study. Showing people a picture of a person with multiple problems and then asking them to dream of these problems and coming up with an unusually high seeming frequency of correct hits could mean multiple things. Maybe that the unconscious mind is very good at picking up visual clues for say her arthritis, which the conscious mind wouldn't come up with for one thing. If you wish - we can try and roll this case up more properly, upon reading this secondary report on the actual study - I don't feel overly motivated to do so.

No, I absolutely agree that the study, even if the results turn out to be valid, does not fit into our preconceptions of "telepathy" or "dream-sharing," which is actually the main reason I found it worth bringing up (even if I didn't explain myself very clearly).

It seems to me that whether we are skeptics or believers in particular phenomena, we tend to get stuck in overly rigid paradigms. One example we all know well is OBEs. Before lucid dreaming was a widely-recognized and accepted activity, people would have experiences (as I'm sure many of us have done) where it felt like they were leaving their bodies and walking around some kind of duplicate of the physical realm. Early on, people applied terms like "out-of-body experience" and "astral plane" to these phenomena because they simply didn't have better mental schema or vocabulary on hand to try to explain what they were experiencing. Unfortunately these terms made the phenomenon sound so kooky and implausible that it was inevitably thrown in the same bag with mysticism and other psi- phenomena, and people who claimed to have had such experiences were widely regarded by those of more skeptical temperament as either deluded or lying.

Already, the situation is rapidly changing: lucid dreaming is a broadly recognized and widely practiced phenomenon, and many of us LDers have had "OBE-type" experiences. However, rather than supporting the contention that "out-of-body" experiences or "the astral plane" are real (although there are still plenty of people inevitably clinging to the old ideas and terminology), instead the paradigm has shifted to understand OBE-type experiences as just another variety of lucid dream. We are now equipped with the mental schema and terminology that allow us to better rationalize and interpret these kind of experiences when they occur.

The same thing may turn out to be the case with "dream sharing." Whether or not we think it is possible, on both sides of the fence we've gotten into a bit of a rut as to what we think it is. What interested me about the study I linked is how completely it confounds our existing expectations of what such a thing, if it does exist in some form, might look like. There's certainly a lot about the dream state that we still don't understand, even if we don't venture into mystical territory. We're only beginning to understand the nature of our own minds and sentience -- which is nice, since the physical world is sadly lacking in fresh frontiers to explore these days.

What especially intrigued me about the study was that it was conducted across media that were so impersonal. The dreamers had no contact with the person they were supposed to dream about except through a visual representation. What can we learn about someone by looking at their photograph and then dreaming about them? "Very little," would seem to be the most plausible answer, yet the study suggested otherwise. Of course it might turn out to have been a bad study -- poorly designed or ineptly interpreted -- and I don't have the time or inclination to do due diligence on it either. I just liked the possibility it raised that personal contact mediated by "mere representations" (whether photographs or dreams) might be real and meaningful, on some level, after all... which would be handy given that we live in a world where more and more human contact is mediated in precisely these ways.

Originally Posted by Verre

It seems to me that whether we are skeptics or believers in particular phenomena, we tend to get stuck in overly rigid paradigms. One example we all know well is OBEs. Before lucid dreaming was a widely-recognized and accepted activity, people would have experiences (as I'm sure many of us have done) where it felt like they were leaving their bodies and walking around some kind of duplicate of the physical realm. Early on, people applied terms like "out-of-body experience" and "astral plane" to these phenomena because they simply didn't have better mental schema or vocabulary on hand to try to explain what they were experiencing. Unfortunately these terms made the phenomenon sound so kooky and implausible that it was inevitably thrown in the same bag with mysticism and other psi- phenomena, and people who claimed to have had such experiences were widely regarded by those of more skeptical temperament as either deluded or lying.

Already, the situation is rapidly changing: lucid dreaming is a broadly recognized and widely practiced phenomenon, and many of us LDers have had "OBE-type" experiences. However, rather than supporting the contention that "out-of-body" experiences or "the astral plane" are real (although there are still plenty of people inevitably clinging to the old ideas and terminology), instead the paradigm has shifted to understand OBE-type experiences as just another variety of lucid dream. We are now equipped with the mental schema and terminology that allow us to better rationalize and interpret these kind of experiences when they occur.

You know - I find OBE a perfectly fine term - it's the connotations and the impression, it would mean the same thing as Astral Projection which are problematic - as you say - because something which is in no scientific dispute whatsoever could come across as bunk to people, who might miss out on trying to learn it because of such misconceptions. But take it on the face of it - while such a type of WILD - you do have the experience of leaving your body - and experience isn't the same as fact.
Same as I find UFO fitting for an actually unidentified flying object - but everybody seems to rather think, that an UFO is a flying object which can be identified as an alien air- or even space-craft. That would be an IFU, if you take it strictly, wouldn't it? And a weather balloon is an UFO until final identification. So people do see UFOs all the time. But language has a life of it's own - sometimes it's simply impossible to free a term from connotations. So I half agree with you that a new term would be good - the other half thinks it's fine - just needs demystifying and differentiation from AP.

The same thing may turn out to be the case with "dream sharing." Whether or not we think it is possible, on both sides of the fence we've gotten into a bit of a rut as to what we think it is. What interested me about the study I linked is how completely it confounds our existing expectations of what such a thing, if it does exist in some form, might look like. There's certainly a lot about the dream state that we still don't understand, even if we don't venture into mystical territory. We're only beginning to understand the nature of our own minds and sentience -- which is nice, since the physical world is sadly lacking in fresh frontiers to explore these days.

Ah - but here I must protest! Well, this of course has to do with me seeing neuroscience and consciousness research as exploring the physical world. It's surely the most fascinating scientific frontier in my eyes. But the cosmologists are very busy, too, these days - then there's evolutionary medicine and psychology, long ignored among the dogmas and paradigms of these fields in their traditional forms. Nanotechnology, artificial life/intelligence, "transhumanism", sustainable energy sources, helping nature regenerate, however that is going to be possible - if it's even possible - but it might be with the help of biotechnology, including genetics - and, and, and...

Check out these threads - they are literally full of "scientific wonders":

http://www.dreamviews.com/lucid-drea...ess-brain.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...wn-dreams.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...kthroughs.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...%B4t-know.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...-argument.html

What especially intrigued me about the study was that it was conducted across media that were so impersonal. The dreamers had no contact with the person they were supposed to dream about except through a visual representation. What can we learn about someone by looking at their photograph and then dreaming about them? "Very little," would seem to be the most plausible answer, yet the study suggested otherwise. Of course it might turn out to have been a bad study -- poorly designed or ineptly interpreted -- and I don't have the time or inclination to do due diligence on it either. I just liked the possibility it raised that personal contact mediated by "mere representations" (whether photographs or dreams) might be real and meaningful, on some level, after all... which would be handy given that we live in a world where more and more human contact is mediated in precisely these ways.

Yes - it would be great and immensely practical, if it worked - and I believe, that phenomena like telepathy and also dream-sharing will be with us in the future with the help of technology. I really hope, you'll enjoy looking through these threads - that's the future in my eyes - there are some deep human wishes, which's fulfilment we need to engineer for ourselves, otherwise we just don't have them yet.
My view.

Edit:
And by the way - I would find it deeply disturbing, if I would believe that actual other sentient beings are able to somehow influence my dreaming directly. That's not the reason, why I don't believe it - but if it were true - then I would not really be the master and director of my dreams, not unconsciously like in normal dreams and not while consciously influencing their course lucidly with dream control either. Reason and also all my personal experience speak for that it is not so, thankfully. I consider dreams my very own and completely safe virtual reality, my personal space of freedom. I would feel at the least diffusely constrained in my experiences, if it was otherwise and under such poor personal control as it is believed to be functioning, and as the reported examples indicate. To a degree I would be open to all sorts of unwanted phenomena out of my control and even without me noticing. That's really not what I would want as a state of affairs - it would be reasonable to be be concerned, even worried in such a scenario, and to learn techniques to avoid contact to happen without invitation.

It would indeed also have moral connotations. If a DC could really be another entity - how can one freely play then - say play at fighting?
Imagine technological virtual reality - you would have an influence on another person with real consequences - not the total freedom of dreams, even without considering something quasi-physical like simulating a fight - but what you express has an effect on somebody other than yourself, sharing experience with you.
I believe dreams are a moral-free space besides all of the below which comes from a fantastic science-fiction novel by Linda Nagata I read at the moment - 'Tech Heaven' - and I could write ages about it - but there's this little detail between chapters which I find so fitting that I'll quote it:

LA.FLOW---LIFESTYLES "Multiple-Choice Quiz"

Question 1: What is a dream?

a: the mind at play

b: a mental exercise aimed at honing the brain's efficiency in processing sensory information

c: the world's oldest form of virtual reality

d: all of the above

Originally Posted by StephL

Ah - but here I must protest! Well, this of course has to do with me seeing neuroscience and consciousness research as exploring the physical world. It's surely the most fascinating scientific frontier in my eyes. But the cosmologists are very busy, too, these days - then there's evolutionary medicine and psychology, long ignored among the dogmas and paradigms of these fields in their traditional forms. Nanotechnology, artificial life/intelligence, "transhumanism", sustainable energy sources, helping nature regenerate, however that is going to be possible - if it's even possible - but it might be with the help of biotechnology, including genetics - and, and, and...

Check out these threads - they are literally full of "scientific wonders":

http://www.dreamviews.com/lucid-drea...ess-brain.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...wn-dreams.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...kthroughs.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...%B4t-know.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...-argument.html

All excellent points (and threads!) although I had meant to imply "fresh frontiers" in a purely geographical sense. Even then, you could fairly argue that we haven't fully explored the deep ocean, and we're just beginning to figure out the broader cosmos.

Still, I find it fascinating that as recently as the nineteenth century, we were still trying to map the continents, yet already--only a few generations later--we've moved on to mapping things like the brain and the genome! It really does feel to me like the twentieth century heralded an inward turn, and we're probably just seeing the first baby steps of it.

As above, so below.

As in, so out.

I like reading peoples thoughts that are more about sharing personal experiences and ideas rather than what people have read out of books or heard in lectures. Nobody knows for sure. Why try to take a dump on someone else's beliefs?

Yeah, I feel with you, Verre - where have all the dragons gone, sleeping on the edges of our maps?
In our dreams - that's where they still soar!
Weell - I need to dream one into flying through my inner skies still, that's a long held project!
Maybe we live as long (with some tech) as to witness humanity explore other planets with alien life - the ultimate dream.


Runeworld - I really don't see it as crapping - but if you want to know, why I go to the trouble at all - here's a little excerpt of my "journey". In short - my superstitions towards lucid dreaming combined with a very powerful experience kept me off LDing for nearly ten years and for no reason at all except that Castaneda had primed me to explicitly expecting evil entities and didn't prepare me for SP with one shred of useful knowledge. I consider this harmful - I have deprived myself off valuable experiences because of unnecessary fear. That much for motive.
But you go on believing - I don't jump at people out of the bushworks and shout: "You need to stop believing!!" You need not even read my "crap"!

Originally Posted by StephL

..how I was an early agnostic atheist...
But then something took a hold of me again, in my early twenties, and I was into all sorts of spiritual seekings, this was singularly, clearly and ultimately the most important topic of them all.
Being unsure of what to believe concerning the supernatural or even divine simply wasn't an option. I had to know, what I believe. And I wanted to believe.

So there I was as well. And once you find just one little trace of a shadow of some evidence, once you have a little bit of hope - you want to protect it like a lioness, until to your deep sadness again somebody had shown it to be false.
It's horrible - and also great, because you make spiritual experiences.
Heck - you learn lucid dreaming, because searching is simply what you are. And finally, finally I had found something which actually works!!

Enter my little anecdote, which made me leave lucid dreaming be after the first (in adult life - I didn't draw the connection back then), extremely impressive, hyper-realistic and super scary experience having followed Castaneda's book and techniques. Not enough, that I was terrified in the dream - I threw all my will-power at "getting back to my body" - and ended up still in sleep paralysis. Why did I not just lucid dream and experience the wonder and glory, which I got ten years later, when I made a second, short exploration?
Because I was afraid.
I even avoided talking about the topic at all because a friend, who had not yet tried out those exercises, was totally terrified by what I told her about my experience. And she scared me back in her turn with stuff.
Damn.

I never ever went through SP again, it surely was because I literally used all my might to wake up - arrived consciously in a "body still asleep". Now I know - and I didn't manage a WILD yet, but I did have vibrations and optical hallucinations (beautiful electrical-blue mandala hanging behind my eyelids). Now, with proper knowledge about what REM atonia is and knowing hypnagogic hallucinations for what they are from a first person perspective - I would now love to get the full show one day!!

I would like to experience such an OBE WILD with bells and whistles and SP before - standing up from my bed seemingly without a transition to sleep, and into something looking almost like reality.
Absolutely understandable to draw supernatural conclusions - without proper understanding.

The actual problem back then was, that I was explicitly primed towards even initially expecting evil entities.
Everybody who has gobbled down these books, like stupid me did, knows what I am talking about.

And then to find out it is fiction, and not even authentically South American Shamanism, but invented by some American sociologist and best-seller-author!
That's something I came to consider as worthy of opposing - scaring people off things like lucid dreaming!

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Well-named, Ironic Atheist

It is ironic to expect believers to respond to evidence or reason. What you come to realize after spending enough time here, or just discussing these topics in general, is that skeptics tend not to be swayed by belief and believers tend not to be swayed by evidence. And even more ironically, most people actually are both in some ways, compartmentalizing their beliefs away from their reason. It's the way the mind is set up to operate, we see no problem with calling ourselves skeptics while in some other context we hold beliefs completely at odds with skepticism.

To really get a handle on why so many irrational beliefs are so prevalent today, take a gander at Stephen Hicks' excellent book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. The Kindle edition is really cheap (can read it on your computer if you select "read in Kindle Cloud Reader - no need to actually have a Kindle), and there's even a PDF floating around if you're willing to search for it. This is one of those books I'm extremely glad I discovered, it makes so many things click into place.

Blurb:


Should be required reading in every school. What I found really 'enlightening' is the fact that every major thinker throughout history who championed irrationality in some form (Nietzsche, Kant, etc, the foundation of today's postmodernism) did it because at root they were religious and couldn't stand the way science and reason chipped away at their beliefs. So there you have it. This is where all these bizarre ideas come from such as "But we can't really be sure our senses show us reality, therefore we must assume reality is NOT as we perceive it" (huh?) and other head-scrtachin' classics.

Addendum:
Here's a paper about the book that serves as a pretty good intro to it: Stephen R. C. Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault: A Discussion -
Steven M. Sanders Bridgewater State College

I looked up the book and the pdf was one of the first results, it's apparently free here on stephenhicks.org. I'll be giving this a read tonight, thanks.

Originally Posted by Anok

Specifically, the dogma of this commandeered skepticism is an improper understanding of science. Almost all such "skepticism" that I have seen has boiled down to the following lie, one way or another:

"Argument with the majority view of the scientific community is inherently irrational."
.

I know that what I am about to say is not what you are saying in this post, but you must realize that Beyond Dreaming is full of people with similar dogmatic beliefs, but only the opposite. People in this subsection use the terribly lame excuses that "we can't really know if any of this stuff really does or does not exist", that our knowledge and perception is too limited, that people who align themselves with "science" without understanding what they are talking about, and people that are just being "close-minded" are all proof that any old bullshit is real. They also seem to assert quite often that since any of this stuff is possible, that it exists. Look, I'll admit some of this stuff or hell even all of it is possible, but that doesn't mean that it is true.

As I already said, I'm not claiming that you are saying this in your post at all, but there is an overwhelming majority of believers in this subsection that would and often do use many of the illogical points I already mentioned to prove that these things are true phenomena without any kind of empirical evidence in support of their argument. If anything the skeptics who wrongly use popular scientific opinion, rather than evidence, to contend that these phenomena aren't true are the lesser of two evils in this respect because when it comes right down to it, at least the evidence or lack thereof (that they didn't use) at least seems to suggest what they are saying more so than what the believers are.