Shared-Dreaming Debate of 2015

Two things made me decide to attempt a new shared-dreaming (SD) debate: First, it's been a while since a thorough debate was held about this subject: It seems that DV's discussions about SD have all but gone away, and the few remaining new discussions generally assume that SD not only exists, but is practiced successfully by many, and I'm not sure that position is ready to be a given just yet.

Next, because the implications of SD's proven and practical existence are far-reaching, to the point of possibly rewriting the physics textbooks and upgrading the power of consciousness on a global scale, SD seems a very important subject to debate, allowing both sides a chance to see what the other side thinks (or perhaps learn that there is another side).

These are the only rules, and I hope you will follow them:

* No personal attacks!

The basic question we are debating is "Does SD exist?" and not "Do you believe in SD?" There is a difference.

* Keep your posts thoughtful, and as detailed as possible. Shouting "It is true because I said so!" and "It is not true because I said so!" is not a debate, and is a waste of all our time.

* All theories, no matter how insane, are welcome. But be prepared for them to be shredded; this is a debate. after all!


So have it, and have fun!


[I was going to call this the "WakingNomad Memorial Shared Dreaming Debate," but I'm not sure there are enough dreamers left who remember that great crusader for shared dreaming... and it seems so final...]

One of the tracks (maybe the main one?) in this thread needs to be "what would constitute an acceptable proof or a valid argument that SD exists?" Without any agreement on this, there can't be any agreement on "Does SD exist?"

I’ll side with the skeptic position. My "issue" with Shared Dreaming stems from 3 particular points:

a) Definition: I have yet to see a definition of SD in which proponents of SD agree on. Without a proper definition, it’s impossible to catalog experiences which could otherwise become anecdotal evidence which could evolve into actual data.

b) Falsifiability: this is an issue that I (re) found recently when arguing with Vincefield: people like him present ideas that make a lot of sense, provide rational arguments, but don’t give me ground in which to respond to them. In the case of SD, if someone tells me “It exists because X might actually be a cause of Y and not Z”, and that theory has no predictive power, then it doesn’t allow me to infer anything, thus, I can’t argue for and against it. If some argues in favor of consciousness not being rooted in the physical brain and that allows for dreams to being shared, should I dismiss centuries of research and observations with predictive power (meaning, the current model can make guesses that prove it right or wrong) in favor of a logic that can also be applied to “we know that you can’t move your leg if we cut it, that doesn’t mean your brain moves your leg, it just means the connection between your soul and your leg was severed”?
My opinion is that a valid SD concept should be subject to criticism: evoking the unknown or the impossible (without trying to conciliate with the current knowledge we have) makes the discussion impossible because even if the readers temporarily suspend their skepticism, there’s no way to point flaws to that theory, because it’s not falsifiable.

c) Validity: there’s studies that seem to indicate that a certain portion of our recalled dreams are actually false memories; there’s also studies that show alterations to memories based on their recollection. This and other aspects of memory/sleep/dreaming, but also cognitive biases give us a pretty good certainty that first-person reports are extremely fallible. In lights of that, why should we accept that 5-10 dreams are valid evidence of SD if we can’t independently assess the event/data?
What’s more frustrating (when exercising criticism against opinions other members post) is that many proponents of SD use an extremely complex/mysterious/abstract language. This complicates a lot the topic and it ends up wasting a lot of time in the discussion. For example, a paragraph arguing for the existence of SD in which the author mentions dualism, logical impossibilities, and one or two contradictions: how are we skeptics meant to argue against an argument whose foundation (regardless of being true or false) is based on already controversial, impossible to test/know, logically impossible steps?

In the end, while I know we’re not in a research facility equipped with tools and knowledge to perform large scale studies in SD, I still think there’s a line between going from what we know, assuming X or Y, and explore the unknown, AND using arguments/theories that have zero predictive value to build up evidence for the unknown and because of that CANNOT be proven wrong.

PS: Open-mindedness is not just considering that SD exists, it's also considering it doesn't exist. So in a debate, it's very unfair if anyone skips/avoids arguments that show the flaws in their own arguments, and settles in ONLY arguing points/aspects which point to the unknowable/untestable.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

[I was going to call this the "WakingNomad Memorial Shared Dreaming Debate," but I'm not sure there are enough dreamers left who remember that great crusader for shared dreaming... and it seems so final...]

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Now I am confused. Is he no longer alive?!

Wasn't he captured by PsyOps or something?

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Originally Posted by sivason

Now I am confused. Is he no longer alive?!

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I have no idea. I was only making a joke, Sivason, one that I hoped folks who know Nomad might appreciate and maybe one that Nomad himself might appreciate, if he is still lurking. I was hoping that putting the note in brackets as an aside might keep it as an aside, too.

So, back to SD?

Hmm. I wonder where this thread will lead. I was going to just watch but I thought I might as well respond in hopes that better suited people improve my answers. So, I will start by the discussion of Zoth's three issues:

a) Definition: I propose a shared dream to be a two (different, yes) dreams experienced by two different dreamers in the same night which includes an avatar of the other dreamer and a similar theme. That is, if I were to share a dream with Zoth, we would both have two different dreams, but at least, I would dream about someone/something representing Zoth and Zoth would dream about something/someone representing me. And there must be at least one similarity, for example, we both experience a nightmare, or we both explore the moon.

b) Falsifiability:
c) Validity:

For those two last points, I don't know. Without an actual lab, we are not going to do proper scientific experiments. All we can talk about are introspective experiences.

I don't think that it is a problem that some dream memories are fake. If two people experience a shared dream, whether the memory is fake or not, there is still the fact that the experience was shared.

Also, I don't think fake dream memories are that fake. There might be changes but the overall theme is probably still the same. I don't know.

Also, I searched through my University library for information and there was nothing about shared dreaming. It seems to actually be called telepathic dreaming and this is all I found (it's a review of a book, not even primary literature):

Attachment 8293

I realize that it doesn't show, but it wasn't that interesting. They seem to say that there is some evidence but it's all very unreliable. I thought there would have been more research done on this. Probably none was good enough to be published.

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Originally Posted by Occipitalred

a) Definition: I propose a shared dream to be a two (different, yes) dreams experienced by two different dreamers in the same night which includes an avatar of the other dreamer and a similar theme. That is, if I were to share a dream with Zoth, we would both have two different dreams, but at least, I would dream about someone/something representing Zoth and Zoth would dream about something/someone representing me. And there must be at least one similarity, for example, we both experience a nightmare, or we both explore the moon.

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Do the dreams need to occur simultaneously? Must they share identical dialogue/situations?

If it's as loose as "has an avatar of the other guy + common theme and doesn't have to be simultaneous" then it's pretty clear that SD can exist and is easy as two dreamers good at incubation working together. There's absolutely nothing mystical about that. But I bet that definition won't satisfy most people.

^^ That's a good point.

Though I think Occipitalred's definition seems accurate, for the sake of determing whether SD is real or not we'd probably need to add one more piece, like perhaps an exchange of information...

Well, I would say that yes, the dreams need to be simultaneous, but if you're not a scientist and you're only talking with a friend, then, there's no way to know if the dreams happened simultaneously. But at least it would have occurred in the same night.

But I guess it's a good point you bring Fryingman, I hadn't thought of it that way. But let say I dream tonight that you and I were eating elephant meat and that you were telling me that God was real, and then I said so, and you said "Hey, I had a dream about eating hamburgers with you and I was telling you that the singularity was going to happen soon", then maybe that could be considered a shared dream, because there was no dream incubation of eating meat and talking about higher consciousness.

[EDIT] I wrote this before seeing Sageous' comment. I would agree with the exchange of information in the context of verifying if it is real but in "real life", it could merely be spending time together, like people can go watch a movie together or walk at the beach.

[EDIT 2]

I actually found these:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/conten...20006/art00006
http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.....1971.33.3.783
http://apa.sagepub.com/content/49/2/629.short

Only the second option can be read without a subscription to the journal. Sageous, did you mostly intend that we would have a philosophical debate, that we would review the scientific literature or that we would make attempts to share dreams?

Definition

Pretty good point FryingMan ^^ I have mixed thoughts about Sageou's suggestion: in one way, shared dreaming immediately makes me think of a shared experience, in the same way Christiane F. experienced a shared hallucination with her friend (via drugs, but anyway), without any need of exchange of information. But that assumption already leads to some hard questions:

- Is SD intentional? If so, does it require intent from both participants?
- Does SD require the presence of other dreamers at all? I can simply dream about X and Occipital dream about X but we never see eachother avatar in the dream. Even more complicated, what if we are there, but not visible? Shared dreams might not necessarily stick to a panoramic view that allows recognition of other dreamer's presence.
- If this is shared dreaming, wouldn't incubation be considered a lower-form of it?

So, how about:

Shared Dreaming: a dream experienced by two or more people simultaneously, containing either the same unambiguous dream content. (if we agree on 80-90% of dream content on our description of the dream, wouldn't that fulfill the same requirement as we exchange information which might not necessarily happen?)

Technically, this experience would still be impossible to measure via objective reports, because even if we use that japanese technology that primes people to dream about something, and then reads the neural activity to determine and reconstruct the same dream content, every brain is different in terms of how its perception is processed. So we'd still be stuck with subjective dream recall reports, but I guess this would be fine if we made use of proper blinding techniques.

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I don't think that it is a problem that some dream memories are fake. If two people experience a shared dream, whether the memory is fake or not, there is still the fact that the experience was shared.

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Good point: whether you dreamed about it and I just created that memory after being awake, the similarity of the experience by itself wouldn't be less valid, even if it wasn't exactly a shared dream.

Tomorrow I'll try to gather us some literature on shared dreaming when I come back of work :)

These topics are endless...

Posting some links, read if you want :)

http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...-dreaming.html

https://flowofmysoul.wordpress.com/2...shared-dreams/

https://flowofmysoul.wordpress.com/2...ared-dreams-2/

Interesting links flowofmysoul ^^

Since you are here, would you mind answering a couple questions for us (it seems you're the right person to ask to):

1. If you are wrong and you aren't experiencing shared dreams, what would you say you have been experiencing?
2. What would make you change your mind regarding the existence of shared dreams? What would convince you that they aren't possible/real?
2. Why do you think there's barely any studies pointing to the existence of shared dreams?

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Originally Posted by Zoth

Definition

- Is SD intentional? If so, does it require intent from both participants?
- Does SD require the presence of other dreamers at all? I can simply dream about X and Occipital dream about X but we never see eachother avatar in the dream. Even more complicated, what if we are there, but not visible? Shared dreams might not necessarily stick to a panoramic view that allows recognition of other dreamer's presence.
- If this is shared dreaming, wouldn't incubation be considered a lower-form of it?

So, how about:

Shared Dreaming: a dream experienced by two or more people simultaneously, containing either the same unambiguous dream content. (if we agree on 80-90% of dream content on our description of the dream, wouldn't that fulfill the same requirement as we exchange information which might not necessarily happen?)

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Good points, Zoth. It's true that there would not necessarily be a need for "avatars/visual representation of other dreamers"... And it is true that if shared dreaming is to ever be practical or reliable, incubation must be allowed in the definition.

Given my small research, it makes more sense to refer to shared dreaming by telepathic dreaming. In this sense, dreams are not a physical plane, they are simply "brain activity" and shared dreaming is the ability a person's brain to affect another person's brain activity during REM-sleep or dreams.

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Originally Posted by Zoth

Technically, this experience would still be impossible to measure via objective reports, because even if we use that japanese technology that primes people to dream about something, and then reads the neural activity to determine and reconstruct the same dream content, every brain is different in terms of how its perception is processed. So we'd still be stuck with subjective dream recall reports, but I guess this would be fine if we made use of proper blinding techniques.

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I think that you could get significant reports if you compared with a control group that were told to incubate similar dreams as someone but to be closed minded to sharing a dream. Or something like that.

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Originally Posted by Zoth

1. If you are wrong and you aren't experiencing shared dreams, what would you say you have been experiencing?
2. What would make you change your mind regarding the existence of shared dreams? What would convince you that they aren't possible/real?
3. Why do you think there's barely any studies pointing to the existence of shared dreams?

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I especially like the two first questions, I hope he answers.

I've just started reading flowofmysoul's stuff and it's interesting.

No experiment can ever prove shared dreaming. It could only point towards some unexplainable exchange of information. A profound psychic could pick up on information from clear across the world as easily as across the room, if you believe the same schools of mystic thought as I do. Distance is not an issue (and does not actually exist). An exchange of information may point towards one of the two subjects having some form of ESP and not shared dreaming. Would that still be cool? Of course, but it would not prove dreaming was shared.

Zoth's original point has little merit when talking about subjects with unclear mechanisms and potential as well as questionable existence. We can not have such discussions but say it must be limited to standard science and limit the metaphysical aspects. It may seem unfair to some, because you can not disprove or even refute a statement that is based on concepts of spirituality, by the inherent 'unknowability' of those subjects.

But hey, look at me, I just said that distance does not exist with a straight face (you can not see it, but it is very straight, lol) Who could even begin to take me seriously if I say such over whelming non-sense? Yet, I am an educated man, with decades of experience in "mystical" things, and honestly believe that as much as I believe the sky is Blue. Wait, I may as well say the sky appears blue, because "there is no sky" in the same way, "there is no distance." On top of that I just used the statement, " with decades of experience in "mystical" things," so now my validity is laughable at best.

I get that it is a crappy thing to debate 'beliefs' that can not be demonstrated, and brings on the exact thing Sageous asks to avoid, but perhaps certain topic are just going to be that way.

No offense intend towards Zoth who is one of my favorite members and has a valid point, if one that may be asking too much here.

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Originally Posted by Zoth

Interesting links flowofmysoul ^^

Since you are here, would you mind answering a couple questions for us (it seems you're the right person to ask to):

1. If you are wrong and you aren't experiencing shared dreams, what would you say you have been experiencing?
2. What would make you change your mind regarding the existence of shared dreams? What would convince you that they aren't possible/real?
2. Why do you think there's barely any studies pointing to the existence of shared dreams?

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To start there is no such thing as shared dreaming. Sharing minds, global consciousness, telepathy, any of these terms are more valid then shared dreaming.

1. If I am wrong. It depends on a situation, similar communications between two or more people might lead to similar dreams. Big world events, might lead to similar dreams. Living the same daily life as your partner does, might lead to similar dreams between two of you. And so on, depends on situation.

2. Lack of success. More and more lack of success.

3. If you are talking about public studies. Its a very complicated subject to study. Most people think shared dream is similar to waking life meetup, you look at each other, you talk, you wake up and recall it. No, its not like that, at least for now. There are many different scenarios, lucid vs non lucid dreamer, non lucid vs lucid, lucid dreamer vs awake person, non lucid vs awake person, lucid vs lucid, non lucid vs non lucid..
Lets take an example where one person is sleeping and is lucid dreaming and another person is also sleeping and is lucid dreaming too. You will not see each other as you look in real life, you would see each other of what you are in a particular dream(of what you are on a subconscious level). For example I like using quotes of famous people and in dreams it feels like powers are endless. Another dreamer saw me endlessly morphing from object to people, at the same time using different quotes of different people.
Another topic is language, words that we know are often useless in shared dreams. It is a completely different experience, you won't find words to describe some feelings from shared dreams. A lot of things are interpreted symbolically and that's another problem for studies.
It is hard to give one person a complicated passcode like "uk4zS0" and ask his partner to find this password in his dreams. Even if you know the passcode, chances of you giving it right to another person are miserable, however if those numbers matter to you, if you are temporarily attached to them, your partner can find that exact password in your memories instead of looking for you and asking you the passcode. Somebody gave you that password and you have that memory, if you saw it somewhere, then it should be in your head.

Dreaming person vs dreaming person experience is weird a fuck :) If somebody wants to study this, they should start with dreaming vs non dreaming.









Even when I had many successful shared dreams, I still tried to look at it from a sceptic view. A major symbolical sync isn't something you can rely on. You need to look for a sync that is weird, out of place and chances of such lucky sync between several people should be almost impossible.

I will give you one example. (It was was like 1 year ago)There were three of us trying to share a dream. Last few weeks most of our dreams were on topic of one big tree, where we tried to meet and etc.. Nothing weird, just green grass around and a big tree, whole week. Then one night I decided to change topic, without telling it to anyone. I appeared in a village, it was dark and there was a girl standing there, I called for two other people whom I tried to share a dream with and then I decided to do something out of place, so they can notice me and notice what I did. In that dream I ripped her head off and her head floating straight upwards as well as her blood. Next day I was waiting for two replies from my partners, I received two emails and in both they saw a girls head ripped off and floating straight upward and it all happened in a village. That is only one sync mentioned from this dream, we had two more in the same dream.

So what are the chances of this happening randomly? Nobody mentioned village or girl or her head before, it was supposed to be the same green grass big tree thing. And this isn't the best sync we got.

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Originally Posted by sivason

I get that it is a crappy thing to debate 'beliefs' that can not be demonstrated

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I agree here. Saying figuratively. That's why I am improving every day, so one day I can come and do this with ~100% success rate on any given person.

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Originally Posted by sivason

I get that it is a crappy thing to debate 'beliefs' that can not be demonstrated, and brings on the exact thing Sageous asks to avoid, but perhaps certain topic are just going to be that way.

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Yes, that is probably true...but if people say they believe in SD, and then argue and defend that belief as you do yours, Sivason, well, the debate ought to move along just fine.

First off, I ran into Nomad on facebook last week, and he was doing well. Married to a hot blonde, and he was doing some sort of liver flush that was helping with his arthritis.


I'm so done with proving anything. If I ever start sleeping better, all you people demanding proof will be afraid to go to sleep, and nobody will believe you! If I was interested in trying to prove it, I might start with twins. Most sets of twins have had shared dreams, which I theorize is because their internal landscapes are so similar.

Shared dreaming, also known as Mutual Dreaming, happens to varying degrees. You have what Linda Lane Magallon calls Dream Meshing, where the dreams of 2 or more people seem to synch up to varying degrees in content and themes without actually meeting the other dreamer. You used to see this a lot in the DJ section here on DV. You can have full shared dreams where just about everything is pretty much the same, and you can have a mix somewhere in between Dream Meshing and Shared Dreaming. You almost never get a perfect shared dream where everything matches up, yet that's what everyone seems to expect.

Sharing Vs Meshing: Dreamers United - English

It's important to understand shared dreams do not occur in a shared dream space. Each dreamer creates their own unique and independent dream where they are in complete control. Yet it's still a shared dream. If you ever come to terms with that, the truth of it, it's going to change the way you see the waking world, which for all intents and purposes works the same way. It's like asking two different artists to illustrate the same story. Overall it will be the same in general, but there will be differences in style and interpretation.

One of these days I'm going to go Freddy Krueger on the skeptics. One of these days...








https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRPCrWPAtEQ

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Originally Posted by FryingMan

Do the dreams need to occur simultaneously? Must they share identical dialogue/situations?

If it's as loose as "has an avatar of the other guy + common theme and doesn't have to be simultaneous" then it's pretty clear that SD can exist and is easy as two dreamers good at incubation working together. There's absolutely nothing mystical about that. But I bet that definition won't satisfy most people.

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No and No. As for timing issues, I saw one account here on DV I found to be credible between a father and son that happened 20 years apart. Father had it when his son was a small child, about his son when he was grown up, and the son had it when he was grown up. Sounds far fetched, yet it had the key markers I look for in any shared dream account, which is archetypal differences. In the father's dream, they went into a Denny's, in the son's dream they went to a Wendy's. That was the only big difference. Different yet kind of the same. You see that kind of thing in almost all shred dream accounts where you can track down both versions, and there's just no way everyone would "make up" that kind of odd detail. Hell, most people don't even understand those types of differences even after I try to explain it, so how could they possibly make it up?

Plus there was too many people involved in those Nomad dreams, too many different timezones. It never could have happened if everyone had to be asleep at the same time.

As for being Identical..
In the Moon Meetup, I found myself lucid on the moon. Look around at a whole lot of nothing until I spot a random kitchen, just sitting there on the moon. Since it's the only thing around I go to it. As I'm looking around wondering what to do next, in pour all these mafia type thugs and next thing I know everyone's kung fu fighting. I didn't exactly see Waking Nomad in that chaos, but...

In Nomad's dream for that night, he was on the moon, in the middle of an epic sword fight, as was typical of his dreams. Then for no apparent reason, he holds up his sword, and yells "TO THE KITCHEN!!!!", and leads his battle to the kitchen. I assume that's the point where all the mafia guys showed up in my dream. I interpreted his battle a bit differently, but his influence is unmistakable.







Oh! Almost forgot about this! A variation on my Mousey MILD technique, where the M stands for mouse. You imagine holding a mouse in your hand as you fall asleep to quickly bring out a dream version of your hand.

I was thinking if you tried this with a partner and held hands as you both fell asleep, but both stayed focused on that one hand holding your partner, you should get a phantom hand just like with the mouse method. But instead of holding a dream mouse, you'll be holding .... what exactly? What would happen? Beats me, I snore too loud and nobody wants to sleep with me. :)

I disagree with Sivason. In that only experiments will prove SD can exist

I say can exist because it doesn't yet. It will require vast technology, and not just wishful thinking, and B.S. No doubt in the distant future there will in fact be devices that allow one to experience things scanned from one brain and placed into another. But I would want to define shared dreaming as simultaneously experience the dream, either from one point of view/experience or as a pack.

If we take a definition of we just have to have a similar dream then shared dreaming wouldn't mean much. Suppose I fall asleep and enter a lucid dream in which I have good real world recall and mongo-control levels, and so I remember reading some stuff on here and I decided to start deleting things, sure my dream probably starts out nothing like one of Sageous dreams but I just delete everything, then sit in the nothingness for an hour or so then try and fail to build a trinity engine. When I wake up I log in and Inform Sageous of my great proof of shared dreams because it is exactly like the ones he has.

No I don't think so, recently I have had two dreams about teeth falling out does that mean I have had a shared dream with thousands of others including many of you, not unless we have a meaningless definition that shared dreams are just common dreams.

Shared dreams should be like shared sex, both people there in the bed together. Just because you and 2.5 billion other guys have grabbed themselves at least once in their lives does that mean you are part of a mass shared masturbation? Because your lame definitions of different dreams at different times in different places by different people sound like a similar formula for one big sticky mess. Real shared dreaming in the future will be two people laying near each other connected by a super computer.

Yep, it's a complicated issue, and if you prefer to let computers do your thinking for you, I guess you'll just have to wait until somebody invents a shared dreaming machine.

Or you could try, it's not like you have anything to lose. Coolemd, what if I could leave a mark on your body that would probably show as a red shape on your skin when you wake? Get lucid and find me. I won't lead you to water, but I can make you drink.

I'm not gonna spend a ton of time in this thread. Most of my contributions to this topic can be found throughout my post history.

Not sure if this is well known nowadays, but most all the accounts of shared dreaming on this sight were knowingly induced. As for the rest, a handful were blatantly fabricated, and only a select few seemed to arise spontaneously. The ones that arose spontaneously (some of which I've personally experienced and verified) were always the most interesting and perplexing to me. For the longest time, I could never quite pin down the mechanisms behind these shared dreaming experiences in a satisfying, potentially verifiable manner.

It's been awhile since I've last delved into the theory behind shared dreaming, but I've been doing some light research into physical processes which could account for sync-ups which were not explicitly induced. I stumbled upon a few lesser known properties, effects, and triggers of mirror neurons. For the sake of time I'll assume you all know the basics of what mirror neurons are and/or can use Google. And to help you shortcut some research: apparently visual stimulus isn't necessary for all types of mirror neurons to trigger. Thus, it's not unreasonable to think folks who regularly chat over the phone or via skype are susceptible to the mental effects of these neurons--which could potentially result in shared dreaming experiences arising without explicit induction.

Obviously, this hypothesis is pretty loose, and would require equipment and dedication beyond most of our means to properly test--but I feel it offers an interesting physicality-based explanation for this particular phenomena.

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Originally Posted by Mzzkc

I'm not gonna spend a ton of time in this thread. Most of my contributions to this topic can be found throughout my post history.

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That's fine, but the main reason I started this thread is because expert and rational information like yours is drifting further and further from view; I'm not sure that people will be terribly interested in browsing your 2,000 posts to get your take on shared dreaming (even with DV's search-ish function). Any input you -- and anyone else who feels like they talked themselves into a coma about SD a couple of years ago -- can provide would be most welcome.

^^^ I know. I just don't have the time to debate all this properly right nao. x.x

Maybe next week?

^^ Any time is great!

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Originally Posted by sivason

No experiment can ever prove shared dreaming. It could only point towards some unexplainable exchange of information....An exchange of information may point towards one of the two subjects having some form of ESP and not shared dreaming. Would that still be cool? Of course, but it would not prove dreaming was shared.

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If you prove ESP, that's good enough. The ESP that you would be able to prove would involve the same kind of deep psychological experience that is reflected in a 'shared dream'.

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Originally Posted by Mzzkc

Not sure if this is well known nowadays, but most all the accounts of shared dreaming on this sight were knowingly induced. As for the rest, a handful were blatantly fabricated, and only a select few seemed to arise spontaneously.

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Sounds about right.

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Originally Posted by Mzzkc

I stumbled upon a few lesser known properties, effects, and triggers of mirror neurons....Thus, it's not unreasonable to think folks who regularly chat over the phone or via skype are susceptible to the mental effects of these neurons--which could potentially result in shared dreaming experiences arising without explicit induction.

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This doesn't work for my experiences, most of which included premonitions and involved strangers the morning before I met them. Since I don't watch TV or movies that also tends to remove a lot of possible external triggers. For most of these dreams the other person did not have the same dream, so it is not a 'shared dream' in that sense. But I lump them together because when both people do remember the same dream, it seems to be the same kind of phenomena as the other experiences. It feels the same and the type of information obtained is the same, whether both people are aware of it at the same time or not.

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Originally Posted by The Cusp

if you prefer to let computers do your thinking for you, I guess you'll just have to wait until somebody invents a shared dreaming machine.

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No if the computer was doing the 'thinking' (creation/ rendering) then it would be a simulation that is available now, you go online let your brain scan the simulated environment with your eyes as your companions / opponents do the same, a shared virtual world that is rendered entirely by the computer.

To be a shared dreaming machine, it would require that one or more brains create the material that is being scanned (and or integrated) by the computer and then rebroadcast to the sharing dreamers. The computer would merely be the conduit for the shared dream, much as your purely imaginary conduits, except real, where every dreamer would experience pretty much the exact same brain/brains created content in real time or near time. No doubt with the ability to replay the dream content latter, rather then demonstrate its ability via morning pillow marks.

I think that shared dreaming isn't real in the sense of two people being 'in' the same dream. I think that's a semantic misunderstanding. A dream isn't a place that you go, or something that your being is more than a tiny bit inside of. A dream can be shared in much the same sense that a movie is shared, which is superficial and external to the real sharing. What is shared is the mental and emotional state that spawns the dream, so to speak. It is like being the other person for a moment. What makes this remarkable in a dream, is the dream often draws its imagery from future events, or expresses things about the other person that could not have been guessed through external means, which you can see objectively if you first encounter the person the day after the dream. This shows that there is real internal sharing somehow, that it is not some kind of extrapolation or projection, hence our interest in it.

Usually you don't want these kinds of experiences in situations where you're in a position to prove it to yourself objectively though. You'd rather also have good external communication with the people you're close to that way, in which case there is no way to prove to yourself that anything supernatural is going on. (By supernatural I don't mean that the experience is above nature, I mean that it is outside what we currently understand about nature.) So it takes a special set of circumstances to prove that it is real objectively. But I think it is possible. Although it is true that people haven't been proving this in clinical-trial-like settings, neither have people been doing those experiments and finding nothing. Nobody with enough experience and understanding of what to look for has been doing those kinds of experiments in an academic setting at all. This shouldn't be surprising if you realize how much research is dominated by corporate interests, or corrupt resume-building schemes where in order to do a study and write a paper several other more senior people have to be willing to buy into your idea and put their names on it. Between just those two dynamics, almost nothing in this subject area is investigated by 'experts' at all. I'd still try it if I could find an opportunity though. It is true that there were a lot more PSI related studies many decades ago, back when LSD was new and people were more progressively optimistic, but I think those studies were naive, people didn't have enough understanding of what real phenomena they might figure out how to test for. I doubt that anyone is going to have any success getting randomly selected students or psychic 1-900 con artists to do things like mentally transfer pass codes to each other, telepathy such as people actually experience just isn't like that.

I'm not trying to make a particular point to any particular person, these are just some of my thoughts on the subject.

While lucid dreamers try to go cave man with their favorite anime girl
Meanwhile back in JAPAN:



background stuff and original dream video of some japanese genius dreaming about solving equations
https://www.youtube.com/v/EFN0Si3ZvCY


how japanese machine learns to read brain with images
https://www.youtube.com/v/MElU0UW0V3Q


Update on Japanese progress
https://www.youtube.com/v/gQueU9a8URw

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Originally Posted by cooleymd

While lucid dreamers try to go cave man with their favorite anime girl

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Speak for your self man, you can't put all lucid dreamers in one category.

^^ Seriously.

I'm pretty sure I've never gone caveman on any DC in a dream, ever. We're not all like that. Cooleymind, and I'm not sure what this has to do with shared dreaming.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

I'm not sure what this has to do with shared dreaming.

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Did you watch any of those videos. Many seem to think that science is doing nothing while their antecdotal dreams are the real advancement in dream science. If you had watched the videos you would have seen that using EEG and FMRI, machines now exist in both Japan and also here in central California, where computers are taught to recognize what brains are seeing and then record dreams.

Seems to me their progress is relevant.

One of the actual uses of the machines will be to read minds, so perhaps its more related to telepathy at the moment than shared dreams, but this is the type of equipment that would be needed for shared dreams.

Eventually this technology will be a great lie detector.

They can strap me into it and ask If I have really had 100101 lucid dreams and when I say yes, and it detects partial truth, I'll have to admit that is in binary :)

When they ask so really only 37 lucid dreams the device will know I'm telling the truth tho :)

eventually it will be good for shared dreaming, if a totalitarian government hasn't used the devices to stomp out all dissent that is.

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

Speak for your self man, you can't put all lucid dreamers in one category.

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And what category that'd be? ;)

He meant that while people play in their lucid dreams, scientists in Japan are building machines that try to record what's happening inside your head.

I think it's unfair though, to compare the common folks with scientists. Obviously we're not doing that, we don't work in that department. For anyone but scientists that study the brain, all we have is ourselves and our brains and the possibility that that is enough.

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Originally Posted by Occipitalred

And what category that'd be? ;)

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Tho I work as a computer programmer I lump myself into the Biochemist/Molecular Biologist category :) as most of my many years of college are in that field.

I think that science is relevant as my position is clearly that shared dreaming as I define it (same dream, same time, from brain to brain via a conduit) doesn't exist YET!

So these dream machines seem relevant to me.

If shared dreaming is defined some other way then I don't think it means much. For instance I had a dream about Kiira Korpi before I ever met her, if you dreamed of her too is that a shared dream. Is it a premonitory dream? Guess if I go to her next ice stating competition but we end up at a construction site and then take a train ride across Russia, it will have been, but until then I'll remain on the fence. Interestingly I didn't even know who she was when I had the dream, but maybe I had seen her on the web or news and just didn't remember.

I'm not one of those people who has a weird dream, and then thinks my dreams can't be weird there must be something wrong with the world and everyone else in the world. NO, I'm pretty sure that dreams are weird and people who want to infer great meaning and purpose from every stray thought they can remember while sleeping are the ones far beyond the help of science.

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Originally Posted by cooleymd

People who want to infer great meaning and purpose from every stray thought they can remember while sleeping are the ones far beyond the help of science.

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I am curious, what are the negative consequences of wanting to infer great meaning and purpose from every stray thought they can remember while sleeping? Why would they need help out of this behavior?

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If shared dreaming is defined some other way then I don't think it means much. For instance I had a dream about Kiira Korpi before I ever met her, if you dreamed of her too is that a shared dream. Is it a premonitory dream?

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What someone said earlier is that having the exact same dream from a different perspective in another timeperiod is a shared dream. Not anything else that you are implying here. It's not even a weird idea to consider that time is non-linear in the experiences outside of waking experience. Please dont miss the point.

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Originally Posted by Occipitalred

I am curious, what are the negative consequences of wanting to infer great meaning and purpose from every stray thought they can remember while sleeping? Why would they need help out of this behavior?

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I believe that dreams help us integrate our memories and serve as a threat simulator. Teaching us different possible responses to situations. But to believe that they are actually filled with importance and meaning in their own right seems a bit much. Is my last dream this morning, of overhearing a coworker talking about me in a meeting and then me yelling into the meeting you F..... B..... is supposed to be some sort of subconscious breakthrough. In the dream I immediately begin dreaming that I better go report what they said about me before they report what I just yelled into the meeting, clearly the threat simulator in action, adapting itself to poor office politics and the inherent threats therein.

If you truly believe that everything in dreams has meaning, yes you probably need help. Sometimes a dream is just a dream, and often we don't remember enough to know what the brain was doing with the information it was processing, and the possibility definitely exists that those aren't tonight's winning lottery numbers but just random thoughts.

DThoughts:

If people had exactly the same dream at different times I suppose it would be a shared dream, but I still think it would require a brain scanner, brain recorder, and playback to actually occur.

I guess so, cooleymd. It probably is wrong for people to absolutely believe that everything they dream about has a hidden meaning and to give it a lot of importance. I can think of a few times where these things could be bad. I once had a stalker girl who had all the signs of being a psychopath who analyzed my dreams using online dream dictionaries and making links to how it meant I loved her. I can't imagine myself being so dimwitted as to fall for that, but I would feel sorry for anyone who would, and indeed, they would need more help than science can spare! But I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at your dreams and seeing if there is anything that clicks in your mind and if there is anything constructive you can take from them. Anyways, I digress.

I just noticed your signature, and it makes me laugh. :)

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Originally Posted by Occipitalred

I just noticed your signature, and it makes me laugh. :)

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yea my caveman reference was a paraphrase of some other dream view member from the other day and it may have been meant humerously

But given Sageous reply, if I ever form an oppressive government and get my hands on the dream/mind reader, I'll have to question him thoroughly on his DC interactions. I know I don't treat DC very well, lucid or not :)

I don't doubt that Sageous is honest when he says he does not disrespect his DCs. I personally don't remember harassing anyone lucid or not. But we digress! Is telepathy possible? And is it easier in dreams? ;)

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Originally Posted by cooleymd

yea my caveman reference was a paraphrase of some other dream view member from the other day and it may have been meant humerously

But given Sageous reply, if I ever form an oppressive government and get my hands on the dream/mind reader, I'll have to question him thoroughly on his DC interactions. I know I don't treat DC very well, lucid or not :)

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Nice.

I won't defend myself, Cooleymd, because I know my own mind, I see no reason to lie on a web forum, and it would have nothing to do with shared dreaming. I'm not sure it is a great idea to draw such sweeping conclusions about someone you've never met. We are not all alike.

Okay, maybe that will be the last personal attack (we can hope, anyway); anyone want to take on Occipitalred's questions?

Sageous is good enough his DCs would not freak out and start fighting him, so why would he NEED to go caveman?

This brings an on topic thought to mind. Do we really trust most lucid dreamers not to loose their sanity/focus and 'go cave man on us?

I believe that if I really have experienced astral beings, I unfortunately have tried to sex them up when they were not interested many dozen times. No cave man stuff, more just the humping puppy routine. That could be an awkward aspect of shared dreaming.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Seriously.

I'm pretty sure I've never gone caveman on any DC in a dream, ever. We're not all like that. Cooleymind, and I'm not sure what this has to do with shared dreaming.

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It has a lot to do with shared dreaming and especially with this thread.

As far as I know, I saw similar progress in UE/US on how they monitor images that people see. They were able to transmit what you see in your mind to a monitor, resolution was so low that you could distinguish only basic symbols like '+' 'O' 'X' and etc.. But this is only a beginning.

As soon as this technology advances and they will be able to see a detailed image, then they will be able to see all our dreams. If they can see all our dreams, two people can be connected to such device and prove that shared dreaming does exist.

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Originally Posted by Occipitalred

And what category that'd be? ;)

He meant that while people play in their lucid dreams, scientists in Japan are building machines that try to record what's happening inside your head.

I think it's unfair though, to compare the common folks with scientists. Obviously we're not doing that, we don't work in that department. For anyone but scientists that study the brain, all we have is ourselves and our brains and the possibility that that is enough.

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Not everybody is going to cave man playing with favorite anime girl. There were times when all I wanted from lucid dream was fun, because options were unlimited. When I started lucid dreaming, to me it looked like a lot of fun and only fun, nothing else. Later when all dreams started to be lucid, I had so much time to waste there, 4 years later I understood there is much more then only fun. Since then I did try and study many things, including solving equations..

And I know few people from DV who are doing the same, that's why I said don't put us all in the same category.

Sometimes common folks have more knowledge of beyond dreaming stuff then most scientist :)

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Originally Posted by sivason

This brings an on topic thought to mind. Do we really trust most lucid dreamers not to loose their sanity/focus and 'go cave man on us?

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Even if you trust a shared dreaming partner, subconscious mind might bring up some surprises. For example, something basic can turn over into a nightmare for your partner, even if none of you are intending to share a dream that night. You do share a dream few times and want it or not, you are somehow connected now.

Something funny and sometimes scary happens to us from time to time. One of us is watching an intense movie, of course other parties does not know about it. Such movie will provoke certain images, certain thoughts in your mind and when your partners are going to sleep, they catch up on those thoughts, images and events.

A horror movie might cause a nightmare to your partner on exactly same theme that you saw in a movie. A comedy can cause some funny dreams to him/her. And movies on fundamental questions of humanity can cause some interesting shared dream experience and discussions.

Now add your daily life here, your daily events and emotions, your thoughts... any of those can become dreams for your partner. And they are not going to see that emotion, experience, thought as an imagine. They will feel it completely, most probably more intense then you did.

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Originally Posted by sivason

No offense intend towards Zoth

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Quick remark: I probably speak for several people here when I say that no one (especially not you :hug: ) needs to make these disclaimers. My ideas/positions/perspectives are in a box, they aren't myself. In this and every single discussion, whenever someone proves me wrong/challenges my input/criticizes my approach, it's my privilege and pleasure to update the box, taking out older stuff in favor of more correct/better information that fits the model of reality.

On the topic of "No experiment can ever prove shared dreaming." brought by Sivason

While at some point I agree with you Sivason, and even with several remarks made by The Cusp, I can't help but think that's not the case for everything.
Let's analyse the scientific study of lucid dreaming: if you look throughout story, many individuals tried to achieve understanding about the event itself and the process that leads someone to be aware that they are dreaming. It seemed clear from the beginning that subjective reports were all there was. But then, due reports and reports, eventually people managed to understand some characteristic that allowed the observation of a phenomenon that seemed impossible: communication between dreamer and non-dreamer.
You say that we can't prove shared dreaming, but we can certainly "disprove" it (when I say disprove, I'd say have a very high degree of certainty that it isn't happening): this reminds me of a study that showed that even if consciousness/dreams had some external subtract that doesn't show up in the brain, the events would stick to memory themselves. This allowed an experience to be made regarding ESP.
(You can read about the ESP experience in here)

In my point of view, then even if you can't ever confirm the null-hypothesis, you can certainly ignore self-report, which are extremely subjective, and go to other ways (like neuroimaging) to prove/disprove what those people were experiencing.

In the topic of "the experience in and out of itself" by flowofmysoul

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2. What would make you change your mind regarding the existence of shared dreams? What would convince you that they aren't possible/real?
2. Lack of success. More and more lack of success.

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It's important to understand shared dreams do not occur in a shared dream space.

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The contradictions start here: in one side, we may have people that believe shared dreaming occurs in the same plane for both dreamers, in the other, The Cusp says they do not. Right here, a massive discrepancy that despite different interpretations, is already a clue on how we can analyse dream reports, and develop a science of shared dreaming.
According to flowofmysoul, his lack of success seems (I'm assuming because he didn't mention anything else) would be the only thing that would convince him to be wrong: the argument speaks for itself.

Regarding the Cusp finding about a shared dream here on DV

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Sounds far fetched, yet it had the key markers I look for in any shared dream account, which is archetypal differences. In the father's dream, they went into a Denny's, in the son's dream they went to a Wendy's. That was the only big difference. Different yet kind of the same. You see that kind of thing in almost all shred dream accounts where you can track down both versions, and there's just no way everyone would "make up" that kind of odd detail. Hell, most people don't even understand those types of differences even after I try to explain it, so how could they possibly make it up?

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Really? How about the woman that knew how to speak german (I think it was german) without anyone else teaching her? How do you explain that? It's impossible right? Turns out, nope, there was a very simple reason why she could understand/speak it.
My point is: you're picking evidence and then interpreting based on your own experiences. Not to devalue that, but wouldn't it make much more sense to gather 100 shared dreaming reports and see how they differ/are similar? Don't take this personally, but you're a onironaut with tons of experience: are you saying that confirmation bias is not relevant in these kinds of reports?
This also goes to flowmysoul by the way: I've yet to see attempts at proving yourselves wrong, which is the mark of a skeptic. That's fine if you're not looking to do so, but like I said:

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there’s a line between going from what we know, assuming X or Y, and explore the unknown, AND using arguments/theories that have zero predictive value to build up evidence for the unknown and because of that CANNOT be proven wrong.

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If you're only trying to prove yourself right, you're automatically classified as biased. How about we all try to evaluate information and try to make some model that would allow us to rule out dreams that seem but are not SD and true SD dreams?
I might seem way too assertive, but honestly, throughout all these decades, still not a single experiment managed to produce some unmistakable results towards shared dreaming? If experienced SDers tell us the characteristics of SD, even we in this thread are capable of thinking of a model that would work at least to INDICATE that there's an actual transmission of information. If it's impossible, then this largely disproves shared dreaming, as in the same manner as that ESP study indicated above did. Is this asking too much Sageous (I'm talking to you since you're the one who made the thread ^^)? I'd say it worked out pretty well for lucid dreaming.

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It's been awhile since I've last delved into the theory behind shared dreaming, but I've been doing some light research into physical processes which could account for sync-ups which were not explicitly induced. I stumbled upon a few lesser known properties, effects, and triggers of mirror neurons. For the sake of time I'll assume you all know the basics of what mirror neurons are and/or can use Google. And to help you shortcut some research: apparently visual stimulus isn't necessary for all types of mirror neurons to trigger. Thus, it's not unreasonable to think folks who regularly chat over the phone or via skype are susceptible to the mental effects of these neurons--which could potentially result in shared dreaming experiences arising without explicit induction.

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This right here is great, helpful information (regardless of right or wrong) because it gives us something to work with. Besides, if we have/had a clear definition that everyone in this thread agreed (by the way, what are your definitions flowofmysoul/The Cusp?), we could advance discussion I believe. Or not 0o

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What is shared is the mental and emotional state that spawns the dream, so to speak. It is like being the other person for a moment. What makes this remarkable in a dream, is the dream often draws its imagery from future events (???), or expresses things about the other person that could not have been guessed through external means, which you can see objectively if you first encounter the person the day after the dream. This shows that there is real internal sharing somehow, that it is not some kind of extrapolation or projection, hence our interest in it.

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What else in your opinion could be the interpretation of said observations?

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Nobody with enough experience and understanding of what to look for has been doing those kinds of experiments in an academic setting at all. This shouldn't be surprising if you realize how much research is dominated by corporate interests, or corrupt resume-building schemes where in order to do a study and write a paper several other more senior people have to be willing to buy into your idea and put their names on it. Between just those two dynamics, almost nothing in this subject area is investigated by 'experts' at all.

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You know this is a pretty common argument for proponents of physic phenomenons: actually, we know that loads and loads of studies are published with negative findings. How do you respond to the data? Can you point flaws of these studies to us? What expertise do you think it's needed?
Oh and once again, comments on the ESP study mentioned above?

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Originally Posted by Zoth

what are your definitions flowofmysoul

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I don't want to give a wrong definition when I do not have a stable theory on how this all exactly looks like. I have few theories, but before making any definitions I want to learn more. For now I use 'shared dreaming' so it can be understood.
You can't say that 'playing football' is the definition of life, right? Same way you can't say shared dreaming is the definition of what is happening here. One fact that events of the person who is not sleeping can be picked up by a person who is sleeping at that same exact moment, already explains a lot. Some people might say "but some scientist are saying that some parts of our brain might fall asleep while we are awake" and etc.. pointing towards the idea that these sleeping parts might be the place of contact. I don't think it is so, there are few reasons for that, let me know if you wanna know them.

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Originally Posted by Zoth

I've yet to see attempts at proving yourselves wrong

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I cannot share all studies and events that I am or was in. But I can say that I did couple of experiments. One of the main reasons for that was to prove that we are wrong. Here are some numbers of the amount of visitors.
Attachment 8305
These are all people from internet whom I never saw, met, talked or read about. And I got really great results from this experiment, instead of proving I am wrong, I once again proved that I am right. I've got tons of data that I am still learning and making some advancements from.
I am trying to prove my self wrong every day. I am trying to connect my recall to what happened to me recently or happened in past, trying to explain every successful shared dream by looking at my past memories, experience, thoughts and trying to understand if my subconscious mind could anyhow trigger some certain images in that dream.

I can explain many of my lucid dream fragments by information of my past memories/thoughts/worries/emotions. Some of the Information that I got from someone in a shared dream or information that someone got from me is unexplainable.

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

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Originally Posted by Sageous :
^^ Seriously.

I'm pretty sure I've never gone caveman on any DC in a dream, ever. We're not all like that. Cooleymind, and I'm not sure what this has to do with shared dreaming.

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It has a lot to do with shared dreaming and especially with this thread.

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The videos may have a lot to do with SD, but a judgment that I was probably lying or forgetting about "going caveman" on DC's did not; that is all I was referencing.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

The videos may have a lot to do with SD, but cooleymd's judgment that I was probably lying or forgetting about "going caveman" on DC's did not; that is all I was referencing.

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Ah ok.

Zoth: There aren't loads and loads of studies on paranormal phenomena such as I've suggested exit. I doubt you can find a single one. Unfortunately I didn't see the ESP study you refer to, but I'll look back through posts if I get time later when I'm not typing on my phone. Scientific studies typically depend on being able to isolate causes and effects in time. This is very difficult to do in a controlled way in relation to ESP or telepathy. For instance, suppose you were to flip a coin 100 times while viewing the result, and I'm supposed to read your mind to determine the result. How can I distinguish the result you are viewing right now from the result you viewed a minute ago or the result you will view in a minute? It all feels the same. Also, the sensitive part of me doesn't care about coin flips and can't be made to care. We need a real topic that it cares about, and that has enough emotionally unique aspects to avoid confusion between different trials. Worse, someone else needs to care too, in my experience it usually only works where there is an intersection of two people's minds. Situations like that come up fairly often in the course of living, but it would be harder to set up a study that way, and you need to know what the difficulties are before you can try.

I only have another ten minutes, so here's the best I can do right now. Ask yourself something that you care deeply and personally about, a major answer you seek in life. I'll see what I dream tonight and write it down send it to you. If this works, the dream will be a metaphorical attempt towards an answer, and the images in the dream will be taken partially from your thought or life in a way that you recognize as significant. Not proof, but suggestive enough that you personally can't just blow it off as a coincidence or some other kind of fallacy. A requirement is that you have to be open to someone or something that's not you being in your personal mental space, or else it won't work. I also don't know if I can still do this, because I haven't tried for over a year and it went badly the last time. Kind of a weird proposal I know, but it is the most direct approach I can think of. We could argue for a long time about things that I claim to have experienced and verified which are outside of your experience and not get very far. If you decide to do this, make a note of your dreams tonight also. I'll tell you mine first so you know your statement doesn't influence mine. Tell me if I should post it or send a private message.

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Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

It has a lot to do with shared dreaming and especially with this thread...As soon as this technology advances and they will be able to see a detailed image, then they will be able to see all our dreams. If they can see all our dreams, two people can be connected to such device and prove that shared dreaming does exist.

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I was thinking of the technology as being what would become the conduit for shared dreaming to exist (in the future). But I suppose that would require the ability to place images in the mind as well, whereas to do as you suggest and just read two dreams to see they are the same would be easier with nearly existent tech. I wonder how much similarity you will want to claim it was a shared dream tho.

I would want at least location, symbols, shapes, characters and flow to be pretty similar (as obviously they would be if the computer connecting two dreamers was inserting the stuff from one mind to the other in real/near time)

If you want proof than exchanging a pssword and all things reported exactly the same by two dreamers who have never met.

If you just want to believe: same time both occur, same theme on location, any events that happen, and weather. add in a common theme discussed that need not be exact.

Example: Me and Sageous both report dreaming at the same time.
His dream: He calls out sivason and a giant furry spider appears and starts trying to drink off Sagous' cocktail. He asks"sivason?' and the spider becomes a human dc looking however sageous imagines me. He notices a parade is now going by is front porch, and an elephant is painted pink. Sivason complains that he has not drank nearly enough to see pink elephants.

My dream: I am looking for something and shrink down to tiny to dart through a mouse hole. I see a guy drinking what looks like a masterful cocktail. I float up and stick my whole head in it and guzzle. I hear 'sivason?' I see the DC is different and called me by name, so I enlarge to full size. It is sageous as I picture him. Suddenly a handful of pot belly pigs and cats start marching by, Monkeys start riding them. I say :I am not so drunk as to warrant monkey riding anything.

That would be enough eveidence for the two who had the dream, but would be meaningless to any who want 'proof'

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Originally Posted by cooleymd

I was thinking of the technology as being what would become the conduit for shared dreaming to exist (in the future). But I suppose that would require the ability to place images in the mind as well, whereas to do as you suggest and just read two dreams to see they are the same would be easier with nearly existent tech. I wonder how much similarity you will want to claim it was a shared dream tho.

I would want at least location, symbols, shapes, characters and flow to be pretty similar (as obviously they would be if the computer connecting two dreamers was inserting the stuff from one mind to the other in real/near time)

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Even if today you would have technology that would let you see what two people are dreaming of in high definition, you would not see exactly the same dream on both of them.

Why? Because information that one receives will inevitably pass through ones perception and interpretation. And if one of the participants is not an experienced lucid dreamer, I can only imagine what kind of twist his mind will add to such image. Then add lucidity into configuration, lets say one of them isn't lucid, he might completely interpret that information the way his subconscious mind wants and generate something completely weird out of that information.

What to do? There are two ways. First you should not be sleeping the moment you are receiving information, this way you have more 'waking thinking' with you, somewhere between waking and dreaming. The easiest way is your first nrem dream when you are falling asleep, but staying conscious.
Second, one person can setup a symbolical password. Lets say a 'Crocodile', second person should be dreaming of crocodile. You can increase the difficulty later on. Results will improve the more these two people 'share dreams' with each other.

And on top of Sivason's and Flowofmysoul's excellent points/examples there is yet another problem: as far as we know, there is no ANSI code, no HTML, for telepathic communication. In other words, Sivason's examples may even be too generous, because what is coming out of one person's mind may have nothing at all to do with what another mind might recognize as anything, much less an intended symbol or message.

For instance, say that Sivason wanted to send the image of a cat to me. Come lucid time, he takes a careful moment to form the perfect archetypical cat, backlights it nicely, and maybe even teaches the cat to say "Hey dummy, this is Sivason!" before sending the image into the aether. And say also that the image makes it to me (how it did that is another huge problem, BTW, maybe more on that later?). Unfortunately, because my perception is organized in a slightly different manner than Sivason's projections, not only do I not see a cat, but I see nothing at all, except for maybe some odd fuzz just over the horizon. This difference probably wouldn't need to be much, either, to throw the whole communication off. And, since the same rules probably apply to telepathy, I'm not sure, Flowofmysoul, if being awake or close to being awake would help much.

Just as two people who speak different languages can eventually learn to communicate, I imagine that a couple of shared dreamers would, over a substantial amount of time and many shared LD's, eventually be able to learn to understand their communications... but they still would not be able to understand anyone else's.

I suppose we could be genetically hard-wired with the code and just don't know/remember it, but that seems unlikely to me -- you'd think someone would have stumbled upon that code by now, given the amount of brain and DNA research that is being done.

Of course, this problem only exists on a material level that assumes the brain is doing the heavy lifting of consciousness. If we assume instead a mystical connection, perhaps that when we dream we are connecting to a cosmic consciousness that has already built the SD-ANSI code and embedded it in our souls, then we are back at Sivason's example above. Now, though that assumption seems conventional wisdom on the DV forums, when you look at it on paper it seems a bit hard to fathom.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sageous

And on top of Sivason's and Flowofmysoul's excellent points/examples there is yet another problem: as far as we know, there is no ANSI code, no HTML, for telepathic communication. In other words, Sivason's examples may even be too generous, because what is coming out of one person's mind may have nothing at all to do with what another mind might recognize as anything, much less an intended symbol or message.

For instance, say that Sivason wanted to send the image of a cat to me. Come lucid time, he takes a careful moment to form the perfect archetypical cat, backlights it nicely, and maybe even teaches the cat to say "Hey dummy, this is Sivason!" before sending the image into the aether. And say also that the image makes it to me (how it did that is another huge problem, BTW, maybe more on that later?). Unfortunately, because my perception is organized in a slightly different manner than Sivason's projections, not only do I not see a cat, but I see nothing at all, except for maybe some odd fuzz just over the horizon. This difference probably wouldn't need to be much, either, to throw the whole communication off. And, since the same rules probably apply to telepathy, I'm not sure, Flowofmysoul, if being awake or close to being awake would help much.

Just as two people who speak different languages can eventually learn to communicate, I imagine that a couple of shared dreamers would, over a substantial amount of time and many shared LD's, eventually be able to learn to understand their communications... but they still would not be able to understand anyone else's.

I suppose we could be genetically hard-wired with the code and just don't know/remember it, but that seems unlikely to me -- you'd think someone would have stumbled upon that code by now, given the amount of brain and DNA research that is being done.

Of course, this problem only exists on a material level that assumes the brain is doing the heavy lifting of consciousness. If we assume instead a mystical connection, perhaps that when we dream we are connecting to a cosmic consciousness that has already built the SD-ANSI code and embedded it in our souls, then we are back at Sivason's example above. Now, though that assumption seems conventional wisdom on the DV forums, when you look at it on paper it seems a bit hard to fathom.

---

I understand your thoughts, I had same thoughts some time ago. But it is much better then you think it is. First of all, transmitting a cat image isn't the best idea, you have to create a cat in your dream, that will work better. If you believe what you have made is a cat, then your partner will see a cat. If you will make something that does not look to you like a cat, then your partner will be confused too.

If you are looking at it as a code, there is a code that we all have and we are all able to communicate. You do not use language in your shared dreams, you can try, but that will make not much sense. All communications in shared dreams are more of a telepathy communications.

That's why in another similar topic recently, I said that one of my main goals is to learn, understand and develop this new way of communication. Sensory feelings in shared dreams can be way more intense then they are in waking life. It's not just a code, it is an amazing beautiful peace of art that does exist there. You just have to let your self go and don't focus on language, text, questions, answers.. Just go and experience it.

Think of it as next step in evolution.

^^ That is all good (and pretty nice, I must agree), but what then comprises telepathy communications? I think they would tend to work the same as shared dreaming, in terms of exchanging information or emotions. But let's assume for a moment that telepathy communications exist:

Since exchanged emotion, or sensory feelings, is arguably another form of communication that is probably just as "encoded" as language (if not more so, given that nature has had millions of years to establish the language of emotion), wouldn't the feelings you attempt to share be potentially just as misunderstood as images or language in the examples above? You might feel happiness or love during a shared dream, but how does your partner recognize that feeling, or even know it has been shared?

Are you assuming that the basic form of emotion (call it an energy template, maybe) has already been made uniform through evolution (or our collective unconscious, or a single universal dreaming mind, or whatever), so that their "transmission" can be received and understood in telepathic form? That we are innately "programmed," perhaps as a side-effect of those eons spent designing the physical language of emotion? That therefore emotions, or the "information of feelings," can naturally be transmitted and received between two people, or naturally understood in the midst of a SD?

If so, then that is an interesting assumption, and one that might fit into both the materialistic and mystical models noted above. And yes, understanding and developing that already existing natural exchange could well represent an evolutionary change -- one accelerated by LD'ing, of course!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ That is all good (and pretty nice, I must agree), but what then comprises telepathy communications? I think they would tend to work the same as shared dreaming, in terms of exchanging information or emotions. But let's assume for a moment that telepathy communications exist:

Since exchanged emotion, or sensory feelings, is arguably another form of communication that is probably just as "encoded" as language (if not more so, given that nature has had millions of years to establish the language of emotion), wouldn't the feelings you attempt to share be potentially just as misunderstood as images or language in the examples above? You might feel happiness or love during a shared dream, but how does your partner recognize that feeling, or even know it has been shared?

Are you assuming that the basic form of emotion (call it an energy template, maybe) has already been made uniform through evolution (or our collective unconscious, or a single universal dreaming mind, or whatever), so that their "transmission" can be received and understood in telepathic form? That we are innately "programmed," perhaps as a side-effect of those eons spent designing the physical language of emotion? That therefore emotions, or the "information of feelings," can naturally be transmitted and received between two people, or naturally understood in the midst of a SD?

If so, then that is an interesting assumption, and one that might fit into both the materialistic and mystical models noted above. And yes, understanding and developing that already existing natural exchange could well represent an evolutionary change -- one accelerated by LD'ing, of course!

---

I know they are not misunderstood from my experience. I am not sure how this communication formed in first place, but I know it is working well.

Its not the same telepathy as you see in a movie. You are not talking to each other like 'hey 123 how are you, fine 321 and you?'. You look into each others eyes and you experience each other, as if you are looking into her soul. It is so much more complicated then simply a conversation.

Sometimes you see no body, but you feel the presence and still have some feelings of you two communicating. You both know what you are thinking about.

edit: One thing comes to mind, that idea in Buddhism that all is one and one is all. This is how it feels when you are with someone in a dream, you do not differentiate who is who, no ego, an ultimate reality I guess.

There seems to me to be an additional difficulty with concrete facts, besides them being hard to generate unambiguously from feelings. Some things are very clear to me while I'm dreaming, but I can't bring them out of the dream. I think there's a reason for that besides physiological limitations. Some facts belong only in particular contexts, and it is harmful to force them to exist elsewhere. I feel that and experience some of the harm of forcing it, even though I don't understand the reasons for it.

Our debate seems to have ground to a halt, or perhaps a level of equilibrium, so I'm hoping we can extend the debate from “proving” the existence of shared dreaming (I honestly never asked to debate proof of SD’s existence anyway) towards debating what shared dreaming might physically be -- what is its nature? So, for the sake of debate, let’s assume for now that SD exists*, and debate now how it functions in reality:

Since our brains do not produce enough energy to transmit an electromagnetic signal more than a few inches, much less thousands of miles, and because there seems no existent way to find your SD partner, it seems that SD is breaking some rules of physics. How does it work?

Post whatever theory you might have, no matter how crazy it sounds. And no, things like “Shared dreaming works because it does,” or “There are some things that are just beyond us, so we should accept them and not think about how they work,” because those are not theories and say nothing about the nature of shared dreaming. Also, anecdotal evidence does not equal an explanation of the nature of SD. Finally, calling SD “telepathy” is also not an explanation of how it works, because that only begs the question, “How then does telepathy work?”

To start things off, here is part of an OP from a thread I started on this subject a while back that summarizes my own hair-brained theory (the entire OP helps this bit make more sense, BTW):

Quote:

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Thought energy is created by individuals and tends to be attracted to other individuals' created thought energy, as well as itself. This dual attraction, when combined with the billions of actively sentient beings these days, has formed a “bubble” of coherent thought energy that encompasses our entire planet. So what we have is an energy sphere of connected thought pools (each pool representing an individual), and that energy is not under the jurisdiction of Newton’s laws.

When we dream, we enjoy a direct connection with our personal pool of thought energy, which in turn is connected to all the rest of the world’s pools through the surface tension of the thought energy bubble. From this position we have an opportunity to “transmit” to all the other individuals’ pools simultaneously, and also to listen to any recognizable transmissions that might be coming from other pools. If we can manage to recognize and understand these exchanged transmissions, then we are dream-sharing.

---

So how about your ideas on the mechanics of SD? And remember, this is not a debate about proof. It never was.

* For those who cannot assume, even for argument, that SD exists, that's fine; you can describe why the mechanics of SD just won't work in the physical world as we know it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sageous

I think they would tend to work the same as shared dreaming, in terms of exchanging information or emotions. But let's assume for a moment that telepathy communications exist:

Since exchanged emotion, or sensory feelings, is arguably another form of communication that is probably just as "encoded" as language (if not more so, given that nature has had millions of years to establish the language of emotion), wouldn't the feelings you attempt to share be potentially just as misunderstood as images or language in the examples above? You might feel happiness or love during a shared dream, but how does your partner recognize that feeling, or even know it has been shared?

---

I think emotions are more likely a response to a dream then part of the dream, the dream is made of the sensory stuff sight, smell, touch, taste, sound, proprioception. I would say it is like this suppose in the real world we share a set of seats at the Superbowl and are watching / experiencing the same basic view, sounds etc. Imagine that I am a Patriots fan and you are a Seahawks fan our emotions will not be the same, they will be opposite because our emotions are internal and a response to the external. In a dream the sensory stuff is also internal but I would think that the emotional response would still be separate from it. So if we dreamed of seeing the game together our emotions would still be opposite.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sageous

How does it work?

So how about your ideas on the mechanics of SD?

---

I've been wondering about this for last two years, I have many different thoughts and ideas and many of them are mutually exclusive. When you will start building ideas on mechanics of SD, you will realize how much more there is. For a reason I don't think this is a coincidence, many people whom I know who are into shared dreaming and starting to think of a model, are getting interested in afterlife model instead of SD model.


I think it is too early to build a schema, we need more practice, we need more patterns.

^^ So what are some of those thoughts and ideas, if you'd like to share?

It may be too early to build a correct schema for the nature of SD, but I think it isn't too early to consider it, along with the potentials and possibilities that would accompany it...including, I imagine, a model for the afterlife, which might share SD's transcendental physics.

Here we must take one of at least two distinct paths.

1) We consider a problem of the physical world, and consider distance, amplitude of some energy, a physical formation in the structure of the brain capable of trasmitting some pattern of energy over distance, and such lines of thought.

2) We consider a universe based in a format ?above? the normal physical model. For instance a simple structure for discussion is the movie The Matrix. While I do not think a physical computer is the correct answer, the movie sets up a common ground for the discussion of a non-physical world. In Hindu thought the computer would be a highly advanced entity capable of "dreaming" the matrix we see and controlling factors such as physical law, just like the computer system in the movie.

In this second line of thought, we open many doors to what is otherwise unexplainable. We now would be faced with 'distance does not actually exist,' so distance can be removed from the complicating factors. And so on.

Physics tells us that there is the physical realm of solid particles and the quantum realm. We're all familiar with the physical, but if this is true, why should the quantum realm be cut of from us. I personally think the dream wold is the quantum realm, and according to those rules, shared dreaming is not that far fetched.

You guys can discuss this until you're blue in the face. But while you're busy discussing, what you're not doing is researching. To ignore all history and demand your proof happen since you've started paying attention is the height of arrogance. There is a metric crap ton of shared dream accounts out there. Instead of wasting your time discussing, perhaps you should take the time to track some of those down and study them objectively. Otherwise, all you can discuss is your preconceived notion.

^^ Actually, nobody is demanding proof at this point, and as OP I was never demanding it.

Every discussion does not require proof, The Cusp, and any discussion can be about things we cannot prove; people do that all the time. You may not have noticed, but I offered as a given a couple of posts ago that we accept that "crapload" of shared dream accounts and move on... I was hoping to step past the predictable exchanges that accompany the "proof" argument.

Back on topic: Can you explain how you feel the quantum realm applies to dreaming, since I was under the impression that that realm is restricted to the subatomic.

Seeing (the fact that you are an observer)

Contact (the fact that the observed is affected by the observer)

Attention (the fact of choiceless observing)

Perception (the fact everything is a mental construction)

Desire (the fact that of causes and conditions unique to You)

This is the basic tenet of all experience. I believe what creates the kind of experience you have is intention. Now, intentions only purpose is to be fulfilled thus the intention [must be true] to work. Either, the intention is there or its not. Be conscious of this point.

"Our-Dreaming-Mind" begins teaching (in a light, fun and friendly way) as soon as we participate in a (light, fun and friendly) dream game.

My new dream buddy has just begun and

"WhaMbang (!!!)"

"Our-Dreaming-Mind" immediately began teaching.

Only my Dream Buddy has pmed me requesting we pm from now on and I said ok.

But I'd prefer to keep most of "It" public so folk can see that it is truly Effortless . Because not us but "Our-Dreaming-Mind" that quickly joins in to show us how it is done.

Sigh

Here is what I mean:

***

http://www.dreamviews.com/lounge/156...m-buddies.html

***

Check out post #22

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ So what are some of those thoughts and ideas, if you'd like to share?

It may be too early to build a correct schema for the nature of SD, but I think it isn't too early to consider it, along with the potentials and possibilities that would accompany it...including, I imagine, a model for the afterlife, which might share SD's transcendental physics.

---

I don't want to post something big and is not ready, something that I am not sure of. Time goes and I am getting more experience and doing notes, trying to build this schema in my head.

I believe to understand how SD works, we have to look at more fundamental questions. What is the nature of our life, what happens when we die and how we are born.

There are questions that I am afraid to ask.. If you experience what I experienced and that is the reason why I think there is something after we die, then you will inevitably ask you self, why live longer? Why don't just let your self go next time you will be there. Now when you experienced and felt this incredible 'future', what is the reason to stay here? Don't get me wrong, I am not being suicidal here. But this is something that I had to answer on.



To support your topic, here is a link. Chinese Physicists Measure Speed of Quantum Entanglement - From Quarks to Quasars
If particles can interact on such big distance, 15,3km, then there should be an explanation why we can interact with each other.

Sivason

When did when did sageous dream of the Pink Elephants

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sivason

If you want proof than exchanging a pssword and all things reported exactly the same by two dreamers who have never met.

If you just want to believe: same time both occur, same theme on location, any events that happen, and weather. add in a common theme discussed that need not be exact.

Example:

Me and Sageous both report dreaming at the same time.

His dream: He calls out sivason and a giant furry spider appears and starts trying to drink off Sagous' cocktail. He asks"sivason?' and the spider becomes a human dc looking however sageous imagines me. He notices a parade is now going by is front porch,

and

an elephant is painted pink
.

Sivason complains that he has not drank nearly enough to see

pink elephants.


My dream: I am looking for something and shrink down to tiny to dart through a mouse hole. I see a guy drinking what looks like a masterful cocktail. I float up and stick my whole head in it and guzzle. I hear 'sivason?' I see the DC is different and called me by name, so I enlarge to full size. It is sageous as I picture him. Suddenly a handful of pot belly pigs and cats start marching by, Monkeys start riding them. I say :I am not so drunk as to warrant monkey riding anything.

That would be enough eveidence for the two who had the dream, but would be meaningless to any who want 'proof'

---

Sivason and Sageous

On the 31st of March on another site called "PsiDreams" I posted this

O-o C...

I woke and during my breakfast I grabbed that envelope off my CareBear and here is what was in it.

Envelope one was

♥♥♥

https://www.flickr.com/photos/debraj...n/photostream/

♥♥♥

And today's envelope (envelope 2) is

♡♡♡

https://www.flickr.com/photos/debrajane/16776295947/

♡♡♡

3 happy, tippsy, PINK Elephants strolling across the 1935 (green) Windsor Castle Hotel.

( when added to your "remember your future, elephant") maybe BobV Saying, "Don't forget to Remember Me"

BEE GEES LYRICS

Oh my heart won't believe that you have left me
I keep telling my self that it's true
I can get over anything you want my love
But I can't get myself over you

Don't forget to remember me
And the love that used to be
I still remember you
I love you
In my heart lies a memory to tell the stars above
Don't forget to remember me my love

On my wall lies a photograph of you girl
Though I try to forget you somehow
You're the mirror of my soul so take me out of my hole
Let me try to go on living right now

Don't forget to remember me
And the love that used to be
I still remember you
I love you
In my heart lies a memory to tell the stars above
Don't forget to remember me my love

♥♥♥

Bee Gees - Don't Forget To Remember Me (original): https://youtu.be/uBZCyuLuMEU

♥♥♥

:)

I think that speculating about mechanisms is hopeless. It would only work if some mechanism which is already known in another context could be recognized as potentially applicable here. But I think we can rule that out, no known mechanisms are even close to fitting the symptoms. And new mechanisms don't become known by speculative discussion, without having the tools to take something apart and study it. It would be like trying to derive the physics of how a semiconductor works from scratch by talking about it at a coffee shop, without ever working in a lab. Or figuring out how our kidneys work by talking about it without already knowing a lot of biochemistry. You can't do it. Dream experiments are helpful and necessary, but this isn't what I mean by lab work either, because we're still not dealing directly with how it works. And after a while we exhaust the pool of potentially new anecdotal clues that we're capable of generating also. Personally I've mostly given up on that topic too. Not that other people have to give up, I'm just saying what I see. I still believe in progress, but think it has to come in other areas.

^^ Speculation here on this subject was meant to be fun, and perhaps stir our imaginations. I held no assumptions that we were going to unearth the mechanics of shared dreaming on this thread, and I certainly do not feel that must happen in order for a conversation to be had at all. In some venues (forum threads, for instance) discussions about, say, how kidneys work, could be a lot of fun, even if no truths are uncovered and everyone is wrong.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Speculation here on this subject was meant to be fun, .

---

Pixies. Pixies may have something to do with it. Maybe it does not matter if we say Fairies, Pixies, or Angels. However, perhaps some form of intermediary little spirit could act to take the images back and forth. Sort of like this. Pixie, tell Sageous I said, "I am not nearly drunk enough."

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Speculation here on this subject was meant to be fun, and perhaps stir our imaginations. I held no assumptions that we were going to unearth the mechanics of shared dreaming on this thread, and I certainly do not feel that must happen in order for a conversation to be had at all. In some venues (forum threads, for instance) discussions about, say, how kidneys work, could be a lot of fun, even if no truths are uncovered and everyone is wrong.

---

Amen to that. In so many threads some people are after the proof and not willing to even entertain possibilities unless they are proven by science or whatever. What's wrong with just discussing the possibilities? Daydreaming of sorts. We are dreamers afterall, right?

Something like pixies is definitely involved in my case. No pixies, no dreams of that type.

One reason people drink at parties is so it doesn't seem as pointlessly boring when a bunch of people are talking without really communicating or learning anything. If an approach doesn't seem to be working, recognizing that can be one step towards finding an alternative. But it is not as if I have a satifying suggestion about what to do instead.

I have many, many dreams every night, and can't recall ever having dreamed of the same thing twice. What do you dream after you've dreamed of everything that is in you? For better or worse, my pixies don't seem to like repeating themselves, they regard my memories of what they said before as enough. Rather than say something less true for the sake of saying something different, maybe it is better just to wait.

I know I'm not contributing much, I'm just doing the best I can with the content I have. Also, understanding the 'pixies', such as they are, and what drives them into action, seems relevant. Their actions take different forms and aren't always apparent.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shadowofwind

What do you dream after you've dreamed of everything that is in you?

---

I wanted to make a thread on it long time ago, I saw your question and now decided to make it :)

http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...uld-dream.html

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Speculation here on this subject was meant to be fun, and perhaps stir our imaginations. I held no assumptions that we were going to unearth the mechanics of shared dreaming on this thread, and I certainly do not feel that must happen in order for a conversation to be had at all. In some venues (forum threads, for instance) discussions about, say, how kidneys work, could be a lot of fun, even if no truths are uncovered and everyone is wrong.

---

That is the only reason why I participate in this conversation. I have said enough of what I experienced, that alone can push some ideas. but I don't want to come up with a ready solution now, because I know I cannot, it is too early.

The process of sharing your own thoughts and reading what others have to say about this subject is always useful.

Interesting topic. I know you don't want to hear anecdotal stuff, but shadow of wind and I recently had similar dreams about beards.maybe on the same night. I thought it was at least an interesting coincidence since we are not buddies or anything and have pretty different perspectives on almost everything. Both dreams are posted here in beyond. Shadow? Did you notice the feeling of our dreams being awfully similar?

Kadie,

I don't remember that, though if it was a year or more ago I could easily have forgotten.

Mark (my real name)

It was just in February this year. I can't add them to this post but ill bump one to refresh your memory.

Thanks, I forgot about that one.

Sorry Sageous. Looks like I killed the thread.:(

My thought on the subject is perhaps we humans are not individual organisms but one interconnected. Like the aspen tree. Perhaps one at one end of the grove so to say can affect the growth and formation of one at the other end of the grove. Also, maybe our thoughts and ideas and dreams are also the thoughts, ideas and dreams of every other person just happening at different times. Maybe when we share dreams or have premonitions, we are connecting with the other end of the grove, but we are still connected as one. How we connected to one another is the difficult part. Is it something in our genetics or is it something energetic. I guess only time will tell as science figures it out.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kadie

Sorry Sageous. Looks like I killed the thread.

---

That's okay Kadie; I'm pretty sure it was dead already, if not stillborn. It seems people have little to no interest in exploring this subject anymore; even exchanging anecdotes has apparently gotten old enough that the experienced or knowledgeable few still around these forums feel that discussing anything is redundant and dull. Maybe it is.

Oh well. I guess shared dreaming has entered the LD'ing lexicon as a real phenomenon, and nobody really cares about how or why it could work, just that it does, because they (or someone they know or read about) are sure they have done it. And forget about discussing the implications to reality itself if something like shared-dreaming were as common as the folks here have accepted it to be. Apparently shared-dreaming is what it is because it is, and any discussion of it is boring and passé. I guess such an anecdotal echo-chamber is both the rule here now and becomes boring pretty quickly; not a good foundation for a debate.

I think that this is an abandonment of a topic that might have springboarded us to discussion of more interesting, metaphysical things. Or not, I guess; but it would have been interesting to at least test the waters for this potential.

Sorry; ranting a bit. Conversation and big-picture curiosity seems to be out of favor at DV lately; if it's not about a technique or a proven theory, then the thread is invalid or a waste of time. I guess I was hoping for a quality that might not be available just now.

tl;dr: No Kadie, you didn't kill this stillborn thread; it was just an uninteresting idea. That said, I did like your aspen grove analogy; that is an interesting idea... maybe folks will prove my rant wrong and actually discuss it...

Well I guess it's time to throw in my two cents, since I really don't want this thread to die (yet).

What I'm about to write is purely personal experience and in no way do I pretend that it must be the truth. Nevertheless, it has become my truth over the course of the past three years.
Beware, it's gonna be a wall of text :P

Three years ago, I met another member here on DV. Her name was Windhover@. We both got to know each other just after the founding of the IOSDP by Atras. Starting from that day, we used to exchange daily PM's and we really got along well. We participated in all of the experiments of the IOSDP, but we soon felt like it might not be the right way to attempt shared dreaming.
We started experimenting on our own and after a few weeks we had the first results.

Our dreams started to have more and more syncs and similiarities, but we still were a bit skeptic and thought it might have been a coincidence. Sadly, we were really bad at lucid dreaming back then, so we could only ever attempt to share non-lucid dreams.
A few months into those experiments, we had our first shared non-lucid dream which convinced us was not a coincidence. We both dreamed the exact same dream, but from different perspectives.
The scenery was the same, the events that happened, the DC's and even the details. We never really cared much about proving that SD exists, especially after this dream erased all doubts.
So instead of trying to prove SD, we continued to experiment and tried to figure out ways on how to do it consistently.

In the IOSDP, we came up with several group-experiments. One of the most interesting (to me) was that all members should simultaneously focus on me (I was chosen as the target) in the same night and try to 'enter' my dreams somehow. We didn't have a method, we always just assumed that focusing on the 'energy signature' of a person would suffice. By energy signature, I mean this faint feeling you get when you think about someone/talk to somebody/read somebody's text. It's this feeling which you associate to the person. Just like you have a certain impression of me right now while reading this.

This experiment was mindblowing to me, since I never had such intense dreams before in my life. I had one confirmed SD with a member I knew for a long time and several synchronicities with the other members. But again, there's no way to prove that this actually happened. Everything I'm writing here is solely personal experience.
Up until that point, my partner Windy and I have never managed to become lucid in the same night. A few weeks later however we did. And it was the first (and only) shared-LD experience I had in my life.

It only lasted for a short time, but basically what happened was that in my dream, I tried to summon a portal to find Windy and appeared in my house. Suddenly somebody knocked on my door, and it was Windy. She and I have never exchanged pictures of each other IRL up to that point. We also never told each other anything about our appearances, since we wanted to see if it's possible to 'see' the other person in the dream.
In the dream, she had slightly red-dyed hair. We hugged and I woke up. When she sent me what happened in her dream that night, I got shocked. She was lucid and she tried to find me. She came to a house and knocked on the door. When the door opened, it was me and we hugged, then she woke up. When I told her about her red hair, she was even more shocked since this was her actualy hair-colour at that time.

This was the only instance ever where we both managed to be lucid in the same night, which is kinda funny since it's now three years later and we are still struggling with this.
So before this wall of text becomes even bigger, I'll skip to the present. Over the past three years, we've been maintaining pretty much daily contact with each other, sharing our knowledge and attempting to have shared dreams every once in a while.
Just a couple of months ago, we were joined by another member. He was very very skeptic and always wanted to find scientifical proof for everything. We told him that we don't have proof, but he was open minded and joined our attempts anyway. Now even he knows that for some weird reason it is possible to share (at least) details of your dreams, we just don't know why yet.

Obviously we came up with many many theories, discussing them on a regular basis and trying to figure out just why those observations of ours happen.
What we observed so far is the following:

-When we don't attempt, we rarely ever share any details
-When we do attempt, we almost 100% share details, and I'm talking about trustworthy details like all 3 of us dreaming about being in the metro.
-The most successful 'method' to make those syncs happen has always been just focusing on each other's energy
-This 'connection' is improved a lot when you actually feel sympathy towards your partner(s)

It might still be a coincidence, but after hundreds of attempts the number of results just overweigh the doubts.
Those syncs are now happening on such a frequent and reliable basis, that it has already become something natural to us and we are not even surprised anymore, which is probably also why we never really cared much about proving this to anyone. To us, it's not about proving it, but rather figuring out which possibilities this opens up for us.

Now, there's probably a lot more I could elaborate on this topic, since after all it's been three years of continously experimenting, but this post is big enough already.
I hope this story will provide another perspective to this debate :)

Just a funny side note: We read a lot of books about those 'supernatural' events and also compared different religions and what they believe in.
It all seems to come down to this aspen grove analogy: We are all connected.

Cheers :D

So, as many other people have said before, focusing on a person or their energy signature is productive. Maybe the energy we use to connect with one another is so fine that it can be tuned into with subtle energy. Still something science has yet to explain.

*Thanks Sageous.

Katsuno, I saw a lot of similarities in the way your thoughts developed along that path compared to our sd group experience.

One difference is that when we do not attempt, we still pick up each other dreams and waking life events. What matters the most is emotional importance of the event, that alone can guarantee results.

I also agree with kadie, I always had that feeling that we are all connected.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by flowofmysoul

One difference is that when we do not attempt, we still pick up each other dreams and waking life events. What matters the most is emotional importance of the event, that alone can guarantee results.

---

That is very true for us as well. Back when we first got to know each other, it went as far as becoming ill for the same period of time, having nightmares in the same night, etc. Basically anything that involved a lot of emotions (positive or negative) was carried over to the other person to some extent.
The funny thing is that we're living miles apart, I'm from Europe and she's from the USA haha

cooleymd, here is your post #34

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by cooleymd

Tho I work as a computer programmer I lump myself into the Biochemist/Molecular Biologist category :) as most of my many years of college are in that field.

I think that science is relevant as my position is clearly that shared dreaming as I define it (same dream, same time, from brain to brain via a conduit) doesn't exist YET!

So these dream machines seem relevant to me.

If shared dreaming is defined some other way then I don't think it means much. For instance I had a dream about Kiira Korpi before I ever met her, if you dreamed of her too is that a shared dream. Is it a premonitory dream? Guess if I go to her next ice stating competition but we end up at a construction site and then take a train ride across Russia, it will have been, but until then I'll remain on the fence. Interestingly I didn't even know who she was when I had the dream, but maybe I had seen her on the web or news and just didn't remember.

I'm not one of those people who has a weird dream, and then thinks my dreams can't be weird there must be something wrong with the world and everyone else in the world. NO, I'm pretty sure that dreams are weird and people who want to infer great meaning and purpose from every stray thought they can remember while sleeping are the ones far beyond the help of science.

---

Scientific research on shared dreaming happened without a conduit in 1960's

Checkout Post #14 of my thread called "What are your thoughts on this?" The link is in my signature.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

Paragraph 11

(Calvin) Hall also extended his explorations in another direction that produced interesting results.

"Sometimes, the sleep of two subjects was monitered on the same night.

The subjects slept in separate rooms which were located on either side of the room in which the EEG (Electroencephalograph) was kept.

Occasionally, the two subjects would have REM periods close together in time, and in two instances a striking congruence between the dreams reported by the subjects from these REM periods was was noted".

(...)

Subject A dreamed of receiving a special delivery letter and subject B dreamed that his sister was writting a letter which was to be sent at a special rate.

On another occasion,

Subject B dreamed of going into a store to buy something.

(...)

Subject C reported a dream in which he went to a store to buy something (p. 157 - 158).

This finding of dream of dream to dream correspondence was also investigated in a sleep laboratory by A. Rechtschaffen and will be described later in this paper.

Extensive non-laboratory studies on mutual dreaming have been studied by Linda Magallon (1997) and on Group Dreaming by Jean Campbell (2006)].

---

Post #23 is not about shared dreaming, cooleymd, but a girl dreaming about what a lab tech was reading.

Paragraph 15 (a)

A few sentences later Foulkes reported:

"I have experienced a personally impressive instance of apparent dream telepathy**in another laboratory study ostensibly unrelated to ESP.

While working one night on our continuing study of children's dreams, I was watching for the appearance of a REM period in the sleep of an preadolescent girl ...

I picked up and began editing a review of an article on the effects of*thirst*on the sleep cycle.....

The reviewer's second point was that:

"The*cheese and crackers*bedtime snack added a new and seemingly unnecessary aspect to the deprivation condition"....

The subject was now in a REM period and I initiated an awakening (p. 237):

She reported a dream in which a man came to her house and had a*snack*and someone asked the dreamers father if he wanted*a beer.*Her father decided he wanted one, even though he was a strict teetotaler. Then there were* these three boxes of crackers *...

one box of crackers had two white pieces, white crackers, and then a little piece of*cheese between, a whole pack like that, and then the other box of crackers was white and the other packages were brown, and each of the three kids got one, and we kept trading around with them" (p. 237).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

Foulkes noted that this girl had no dreams of thirst-cheese-crackers in any of the other 25 nights they had observed her dreams, nor had

"this particular combination of elements ever occurred in hundreds of dreams we have collected from other children in the same study in which the subject was serving" (p. 237).

Foulkes admitted;

"an experience such as this keeps alive one's spark of interest in telepathic dreams , whatever the outcome of his own more formal experiments... The atmosphere was quite in contrast to the highly self-conscious "we're-all-on-trial" environment in our first formal replication study" (p. 238).

---

Post #28

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Chicago, is a noted pioneer in the field of sleep research.

He was invited to present an experimental design for a 1968 conference in France sponsored by the Parapsychology Foundation on Methodology in Psi Research.

---

Post #29

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

In his opening remarks, (Rechtschaffen, 1970) stated:

"I was assigned the job of presenting a design of an experiment in ESP, based on current sleep and dream research...I thought I ought to do an ESP experiment before I presented a design.

So

during the the past month I ran a little pilot study together with a student of mine, Mr James Kahn...

The basic idea of the experiment was that if a psi signal is best recieved during an altered state of consciousness, perhaps it is also best generated during the same or similar state.

Therefore,

we wanted both the signal and reception to occur in an altered state of consciousness, namely a dream. ...

We noted a good deal of correspondence, quite anecdotally, between dreams occurring about the same time in the night by two sleepers (p. 87-88)."

The best example of this was the following, recorded with two subjects who knew each other quite well:

---

Post #30

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

"In the first dream,

one subject dreamt about students singing in Russsian and the other subject dreamt about students doing some kind of interpretive singing.

In the second dream,

the first subject was taking a violin lesson and the other subject was learning a guitar melody.

In the third dream,

the first subject was watching a James Cagney gangster movie, and the other subject reported a dream about a recent gangster movie, Bonnie and Clyde (p. 89). ..."

---

Post #31

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

As the subjects knew each other, the possibility of collusion, which we really doubt, could not be rulee out.

So

...

---

Post #32

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

So ...

We had to go on and introduce experimentally an external stimulus into the dream.

We did this by post hypnotic suggestion.

---

Post #33

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

Before the subject went to sleep for the night, he was hypnotized,

and

while he was in trance we told him that during the night, he would have a certain dream.

---

Post #35

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

"The very first night that we tried it, we told the subject that he would dream the death of Martin Luther King and of a fear of riots,

and

He dreamt that Martin Luther King had been shot and that somebody threw a rock and they were afraid a riot would would start.

The other subject, who had not recieved any suggestion, dreamt of a Negro policeman who was beating another man and he was afraid that sombody would throw a brick and start a riot."

---

Post #36

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

"On the other night we told this subject to dream he was in an amusement park, having a very good time.

He dreamt that and specifically he dreamt about riding on a merry-go-round.

The other subject had a dream of people laughing and running in circles and there were 'grining funny looking horses' in his dream."

---

Post #37

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

Rechtschaffen then decided to use hypnosis to investigate the possibility of inducing SIMULTANEOUS dreams.

He reported some very striking correspondences between these hypnotically induced dreams.

---

Here is the page

♥

http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...houghts-2.html

♥

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EbbTide000

Scientific research on shared dreaming happened without a conduit in 1960's

---

Cooleymd was correct in including "conduit" in his personal definition of SD, I think.

The conduit between dreaming minds doesn't need to be wires, radio, or some machine. It can be mystical, comprised of physical forces we have not yet discovered, or even some form of large-scale quantum entanglement, but there must be a conduit.

There must be some route that our thoughts take to move from one dreaming mind to another. Since there is no mechanical link between two people dreaming, and their brainwaves alone lack both the necessary energy to move more than an extremely short distance and cannot be aimed at specific people, there must be something to guide thoughts from dreamer to dreamer in order for SD to work.

I have a feeling that the science done in the '60's, and more recently for that matter, was first just trying to establish that SD can happen, and the search for a conduit for the SD would come later.

I think this lack of a known conduit is a profound problem with SD and at the same time discovering the conduit might be a world-changing event. So Cooleymd's inclusion of a conduit in his personal definition of SD was to me a very good idea.

tl;dr: there must be a means of connection, a conduit, between dreamers for SD to work, a conduit that need not be anything mechanical, and could (or perhaps must) be an as yet unknown force, physical event, or mystical event. Discovery of that conduit will have a major impact not only on dreamers, but on the world we know.

I have some speculations I would like to share with you.

I believe that humans have three minds: the Id, the Ego and the Collective Unconscious (or, as I like to referr to, the Overrconscious). And there's also another fascinating psychological element which is the Self.
I think it's pretty evident that lower life forms only possess the Id. They're moved only by instincts.
The Ego is a more advanced kind of mind. Some more evolved animals like apes, dolphins, and of course humans have it. The Ego opens new ways to interact with reality, through the development of comunications, objects manipulations and so on. In mankind the Ego has permitted to create sciences, enginering etc.

But in man there's also an Overconscious mind structure. It is not intended to work with matter, it's just the domain of symbols and ideas. Unfortunately not every human has access to this structure, necause his/her Self is still identified with the Ego.

What I'm trying to point is that reason(=Ego) is just an evolutionary tool, which I believe has the aim of making us interacting with space and time. But for non-spacial/temporal stuff it is impotent. And I find rational evidence of the existence of this stuff in the Jungian theory of the Collective Unconscious. And this could demonstrate that Shared Dreams simply shouldn't be researched in space-time and could also be a phenomenon we could "understand"(=honestly accept) only when our Self would move to the next step, identifying with the Overconscious.

Another cool clue is that in "The Elegant Universe" Brian Green says that M-Theory has some implications which shows that space and time don't really exist.

I want to underline that I use the word Ego with no deregatory intention.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Synergeon

I have some speculations I would like to share with you.

I believe that humans have three minds: the Id, the Ego and the Collective Unconscious (or, as I like to referr to, the Overrconscious). And there's also another fascinating psychological element which is the Self.
I think it's pretty evident that lower life forms only possess the Id. They're moved only by instincts.
The Ego is a more advanced kind of mind. Some more evolved animals like apes, dolphins, and of course humans have it. The Ego opens new ways to interact with reality, through the development of comunications, objects manipulations and so on. In mankind the Ego has permitted to create sciences, enginering etc.

But in man there's also an Overconscious mind structure. It is not intended to work with matter, it's just the domain of symbols and ideas. Unfortunately not every human has access to this structure, necause his/her Self is still identified with the Ego.

What I'm trying to point is that reason(=Ego) is just an evolutionary tool, which I believe has the aim of making us interacting with space and time. But for non-spacial/temporal stuff it is impotent. And I find rational evidence of the existence of this stuff in the Jungian theory of the Collective Unconscious. And this could demonstrate that Shared Dreams simply shouldn't be researched in space-time and could also be a phenomenon we could "understand"(=honestly accept) only when our Self would move to the next step, identifying with the Overconscious.

Another cool clue is that in "The Elegant Universe" Brian Green says that M-Theory has some implications which shows that space and time don't really exist.

I want to underline that I use the word Ego with no deregatory intention.

---

Nice thoughts, a agree with the most here. I am glad you mentioned Ego. Earlier I was pointing towards this direction, but did not want to say anything unless I see somebody who got similar flow of thoughts. I wrote this to another person last week, will copy paste here :)

"To understand such a complex picture like shared dreaming, we have to think of fundamental questions. What is life? I see a tendency of shared dreamers to think of death and what is after death. I think the reason for that is that it is impossible to understand black without knowing white, same way it is impossible to understand life without knowing death. So we are naturally getting interested of what is death. Now when we step on that way, it drags us far into the unknown and we stay there. Like an anchor, we are attached to fear of the unknown. I remember when I had my 'final dream', nothing was wrong, everything was right. There I accepted death as something neutral, I did not have any good or bad feelings about it. I think the same should happen now in order to let to continue. Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about dying or etc, I am talking about the acceptance of death, a harmony between life and death. And it wasn't an easy thing to do. The main problem is ego, we think of our self as a priority when thinking about death. So to accept death we should let go off our ego, at least for some time, to be able to look at this from a different angle.

So I think I've done that a week ago, then lost it and now trying again. I also understand that by trying I am doing it only worse, so I am trying without trying, staying somehow neutral to it. And when I reached that moment where I didn't feel myself as a person, but myself as part of something bigger, It felt amazing. It was felt like having dream thoughts in waking reality. So this is where I have ended up, I have more thoughts, but not ready to form a ready idea about them yet. I feel like I am going through a complex spiritual upgrade or path, don't know how to call it.

Ever felt like you know everything in your dream? But then you start asking yourself questions and it seems like that knowledge is slipping through your fingers. This is exactly what I felt on final dream and what I felt a week ago. "

That is a short way to describe it, but I think you will understand me.

Yes, basically I want to say that we're rational, but there's no a priori demonstration that reason is the ultimate explaining tool. So we should move on :)

I want to add that by the way I've not had any shared dream, I'm just trying to justify their possibility, but I'm not declaring they're true abecause I lack in experience.

I'm busy right now so I haven't read all comments, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume this hasn't been brought up. I think the best way to determine the possibility of SD is with the exchange of objective information. If that can happen, perception of the rest of the dream doesn't really matter as far as whether or not sharing dreams is possible. Two people can have a similar dream by coincidence, and it is even likely that they'll shift their memory of the dream once they realize similarities. However, the chances of a 5+ digit number being transmitted accurately from one person to the other just by coincidence is extremely low. Even less so if it's done several times. I myself am a skeptic of SD but desperately hope for it to be possible. So along the lines of what I've just said, has anyone here had SD where objective info was transferred without any chance that it happened outside of the dream? That's what it'll take for me to be convinced. I would attempt it myself of course, but I've still yet to have a LD at all. Testing for SD is one of my first objectives, and I plan to carry out the tests in a scientific manner which leaves no room for doubt.

The question that I always raise to myself is how SD might work if possible. Through what mechanism could objective information be transmitted wirelessly from one human brain to another. Well from a physics standpoint, this could only be possible if a signal was sent, if a connection existed. There are two problems here. The first is that we should be able to measure any signal being sent from brain to brain, the second is that there's not much evidence if any to suggest that I've brain could actually decipher the signals from another. So unless brains use a signal type that no piece of machinery can detect, there remains only one way it might work as far as I see it. That way is quantum virtual reality theory. To putnit very short and simply, it suggests that the physical universe doesn't exist but is a simulation. However it is not a simulation in a computer which exists in some other physical reality, rather there is no physical reality, only a quantum reality. That quantum reality consists of data being processed. If QVRT is accurrate, then this perception of reality is actualy jst the output of the quantum data processing. It's like this universe is the screen which displays what's happening on the quantum computer. What this means for SD is that we wouldn't have to be able to measure the connection like I said earlier. The connection could exist at the quantum computer level and be just as good without being measurable here. The best analogy is having a button in a game trigger some action withoutbthere being a measurable connection within the gameworld, rather the connection is in the coding. This model would also explain quantum entanglement very nicely and solves a lot of quandaries of physics. Well anyway that's some good for thought. I remain skeptical but hopeful that I'll be able to harness SD at some point.

I stumbled across this thread today (much to the doom of my productivity) and was very interested in a lot of the ideas that were brought up (surprisingly few of which were critically addressed). I'll organize my thought and make a post as time permits.

Fundamentally I believe that the issue here is that before we discuss does shared dreaming exist? we must first come to some sort of agreed understanding of what shared dreaming is, be that a concrete definition or otherwise. Consider the notion of the ego. Equally unprovable as shared dreaming and yet it is scientifically accepted and a useful tool when discussing psychology. Yes people interpret the idea differently but it's been defined to an adequate enough degree that productive discussion can take place.

Furthermore I think that we need to find some sort of common ground between the metaphysical/abstract and the scientific/logically. When discussing the nature of shared dreaming (and, as an extension, dreaming in general) the scientific among us will have to be willing to discuss and toy with ideas that are by no means provable. On the other hand, when discussing potential experiments, those who have experienced shared dreaming will have to take a step back from the abstract and focus on what can actually be measured. Consider how lucid dreaming was proven. Not through elaborate dream recordings of someone transforming a pencil into a dragon. Simple eye movements.

One really interesting idea that was completely ignored, in my opinion, was flowofmysoul's claim that the easiest way to 'communicate' in a shared dream is through emotions (as an aside I'm not sure why we are so quick to dismiss the experiences of those who claim to have SD. We should be picking these peoples' brains for all they have). While exchanging a password would indeed prove shared dreaming it seems to me that that is more closely tied to telepathic communications (as mentioned previously).

Anyway, what this claim immediately reminded me of was Lovheim's Cube of Emotion. The basic idea is that fundamental emotions can be directly correlated to brain chemistry. For example if someone is experiencing fear their brain will produce low amounts of serotonin and noradrenaline and high amounts of dopamine. This model is fairly new (2012) and not proven but if it were proven one could attempt to induce an emotion in the person they are sharing a dream with while having that person's monoamine levels monitored.

That's it for now. More to come if this thread livens up again.

There seems to be so many possibilities. Perhaps even consciousness itself is the common thread. Maybe we as the human race are just now exploring what consciousness can do and how we effect the tiniest things just by our acknowledgement of the thing. I remember seeing a thread somewhere about whether or not the universe is conscious. If it is, then it would not be hard to make a little jump in our discussion to include the nature of premonitions, remote viewing AP and other psi phenomenon . maybe consciousness is the common thread that ties all these things together. The common denominator. It transcends time and space. IDK. Just throwing it out there.

BrotherGoose

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by BrotherGoose

I stumbled across this thread today (much to the doom of my productivity) and was very interested in a lot of the ideas that were brought up (surprisingly few of which were critically addressed). I'll organize my thought and make a post as time permits.

Fundamentally I believe that the issue here is that before we discuss does shared dreaming exist? we must first come to some sort of agreed understanding of what shared dreaming is, be that a concrete definition or otherwise. Consider the notion of the ego. Equally unprovable as shared dreaming and yet it is scientifically accepted and a useful tool when discussing psychology. Yes people interpret the idea differently but it's been defined to an adequate enough degree that productive discussion can take place.

Furthermore I think that we need to find some sort of common ground between the metaphysical/abstract and the scientific/logically. When discussing the nature of shared dreaming (and, as an extension, dreaming in general) the scientific among us will have to be willing to discuss and toy with ideas that are by no means provable. On the other hand, when discussing potential experiments, those who have experienced shared dreaming will have to take a step back from the abstract and focus on what can actually be measured. Consider how lucid dreaming was proven. Not through elaborate dream recordings of someone transforming a pencil into a dragon. Simple eye movements.

One really interesting idea that was completely ignored, in my opinion, was flowofmysoul's claim that the easiest way to 'communicate' in a shared dream is through emotions

(as an aside I'm not sure why we are so quick to dismiss the experiences of those who claim to have SD. We should be picking these peoples' brains for all they have).

While exchanging a password would indeed prove shared dreaming it seems to me that that is more closely tied to telepathic communications (as mentioned previously).

Anyway, what this claim immediately reminded me of was:

★

Lovheim's Cube of Emotion.

★

The basic idea is that fundamental emotions can be directly correlated to brain chemistry. For example if someone is experiencing fear their brain will produce low amounts of serotonin and noradrenaline and high amounts of dopamine.

This model is fairly new (2012) and not proven but if it were proven one could attempt to induce an emotion in the person they are sharing a dream with while having that person's monoamine levels monitored.

That's it for now. More to come if this thread livens up again.

---

That table interests me

It reads that

♡♡♡

1) - when I am experiencing shame and/or humiliation

The brain chemical Serotonin is low
The brain chemical Dopamine is low
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is low

2) - when I am experiencing anxiety and/or anguish

The brain chemical Serotonin is low
The brain chemical Dopamine is low
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is high

3) - when I am experiencing fear and/or terror

The brain chemical Serotonin is low
The brain chemical Dopamine is high
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is low

4) - when I am experiencing anger and/or rage

The brain chemical Serotonin is low
The brain chemical Dopamine is high
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is high

5) - when I am experiencing contempt and/or disgust

The brain chemical Serotonin is high
The brain chemical Dopamine is low
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is low

6) - when I am experiencing suprise

The brain chemical Serotonin is high
The brain chemical Dopamine is low
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is high

7) - when I am experiencing enjoyment and/or joy

The brain chemical Serotonin is high
The brain chemical Dopamine is high
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is low

8) - when I am experiencing interest and/or excitement

The brain chemical Serotonin is high
The brain chemical Dopamine is high
The brain chemical Noradrenaline is high

♡♡♡

I love dream Remote viewing laboratory's and share dreaming attempts like my thread:

☆☆☆

http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...-tutorial.html

☆☆☆☆ 3/243

because I get that wonderful interest and excitement feeling in the pit of my tummy as I fall asleep chanting, in my head, "what's in the remote viewing box" or "EbbTide000's avatar, take me to the sacred beach", (for share dreaming).

♡♡♡

Years ago I heard that the acient Tibetan's had named many more emotions than other cultures had named.

Then

Having a name for every emotion a human can experience, the monks learn how to observe them within themselves. Later they learn to stay in the emotional state of equanimity.

From this state of equanimity they can ... sort-of ... ummmm ... do anything (including amazing stuff) by playing their many, many emotional states like a finely tuned, exquisite musical instrument. Including ALL the so called psychic stuff, (remote viewing, precognition, share dreaming, and astral projection together, in groups).

The reason they don't talk about it to outsiders is because it takes years to learn the names of the emotional states available to humans and then control the experience of, the many, many different human emotional states. Even the bad emotional states that other cultures lump together under the one broad name of "depression or misery" are very powerful, when understood.

All my 55 years of life I've noticed that after a bad day of sadness/ misery/ depression etc, That's when I would get my most memorable, spiritual dreams and such. It feels to me that spiralling down into the empty void (deep misery) draws me close to ... enlightenment (???)

Here's a link that touches on this briefly:

♥♥♥

Tibetan Buddhism and research psychology: a match made in Nirvana?

♥♥♥

Quote:

---

Dealing with emotions

Buddhist monks have long been admired for their emotional control, and a previous MIT conference participant, Paul Ekman, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, thinks exploration of this skill may help psychologists better understand ways people can deal with unpleasant emotions.

Tibetan Buddhist monks, explains Ekman, practice intensive mental awareness through mindfulness meditation--where emotions and other mental events are recognized, but not reacted to. This training may give them the ability to weather emotional experiences--such as fear--to an extent unheard of in Westerners.

---

Quote:

---

In the course of his research, Ekman and Robert Levenson, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, may have found a man who cannot be startled.

In a series of yet unpublished experiments, Ekman exposed one Tibetan Buddhist monk to a sudden sound as loud as a firecracker and monitored the participant's

blood pressure,
muscle movements,
heart rate and
skin temperature

for signs of startle.

The Buddhist monk, possibly due to hours of practice regulating his emotions through meditation, registered little sign of disturbance.

"We found things we had never seen before," says Ekman, who is in the process of verifying his results through replication of the experiment.

---

Quote:

---

Emotions, explains Ekman, have evolved to "run our behavior automatically," especially in situations requiring quick response and little time for deliberation.

Buddhist monks, says Ekman, practice a fine-grained awareness of their own feelings through meditation "in order, in their words, to recognize the spark before the flame."

---

Katsuno, I might be interested in shared dream experiment if you are interested. A motive I have is that I want to do a demonstration/proof in cooperation with academic researchers eventually. I haven't succeeded in finding any interested, but for if I ever do, maybe I should not fall so far out of practice. Another related motive is I worry that part of myself will atrophy and die if I don't use it.

Sageous, I guess you know the reasons I don't post much on the topic any more. One is my wife is against my interest and activity in that area, so I'm caught in the middle that way. Maybe she's a good voice for much of the rest of the world in that regard. Also I think that further brainstorming about mechanisms would be a farce at this point, we don't know what we're talking about, and aren't even close enough to have speculative intuitions that have much real content to them. I can say more about how I think people's suggestions about quantum interactions or signals being sent don't make any sense, but constant naysaying is tiring, and I really don't have anything else to contribute.

I think there's a world, potentially, where shared dreaming is easy and commonplace. Whether there's a path from our world to that world I don't know. But I am fairly certain that fear or materialism or lack of interest or lack of evolution are not the reasons that our world is not that world. The fear is there for a reason. We have a problem with evil, and our psychological walls protect us just as our physical boundaries protect against infectious diseases. To solve the problem of shared dreaming, we have to solve the problem of evil. Then shared dreaming is no problem. Of course a major part of how we solve the problem of evil is by living, and for some of us exploring shared dreaming is a necessary part of living. But pursuit of shared dreaming isn't the most important part. It is like trying to build a healthy business in a corrupt society. You have to work on the business, but you also have to work on the corruption. To the extent that you don't have enough power to stop the corruption, at some point further efforts on the business are futile, and the criminal element ultimately perverts and harvests what you built up. Or to use a similar analogy, if most of your employees are struggling with drug addiction, that drags down the company also. Creating a healthier and fairer work environment can make it easier for people to overcome the drugs, but that has to happen too. My point is that I think that lack of dreaming prowess isn't what is holding me back spiritually, and I have to deal with whatever is holding me back, because that's also what holds back the dreaming prowess, and is reflected also in our forum stagnation. This is one reason that when I try to share a dream, the topic I always pick is redemption, because that is key to what ultimately supports shared dreaming. I know I've said this before. I'm not trying to argue or make a new point, I'm just saying where I'm at for the sake of sharing something.

A year or two ago I suggested that lack of time was preventing me from getting more involved, but that's not it so much any more. I find some time for pointless things like reading sports news, but don't find the motivation or emotional space for engaging more here. Maybe I can do better.

I just suck at it. If I wasn't such a bad dreamer I would spend more time doing shared dreaming. Mostly lack of sleep.

I find patterns in my dreams. The latest pattern I find is that when I am linked to a certain person. I can link to other persons through them. I.e. The ex boyvriend of a friend. Whom i've never met. Suddenly appears in my dream. I see this more and more. The links is like tunnels of thoughts. or tunnels of people. Which has been my infantile guess. I think we as a species are one-whole. And we can dream as a whole species. Or dream as our ego. We can do an infinite amount of things. But shared dreaming is just one step closer to dreaming as a whole.. Leaving all other physican and non-physical theories aside. This is what I think is going on. The entire thing is like a closed lightbulb. A learning stage for a much much greater reality.

relevart joined 3 years ago but I see no Threads or posts till 19-May this year. Then he opened this thread:
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http://www.dreamviews.com/beyond-dre...nvitation.html

★ 17 replies | 355 view(s)

This is relevart's opening post:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by relevart

Anyone who wants to dream with me tonight (or from today to sunday - 20.05.2015), sign in below with your nickname and the desire for a common dreaming. ;-) Do not worry about time intervals. :tongue:

I wish all the beautiful dreams.

Forum code:*http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...1958664041.jpg

:cheers:

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Post 17 is this

Quote:

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Originally Posted by EbbTide000

Hey

Gaea and relevart

Am a gunna catch the bus and go to my sacred beach tomorrow. Then, Am a gunna imagine the cute little donkeys (in this Youtube) frolicking between Grange Beach and Henley Beach Jetties.

♥

https://youtu.be/a7sKTEabsb4

♥(3:19) 751,754

These mini donkeys make great alternatives to ponies or regular-sized donkeys since they don't need as big a space to roam around in. Perfect for that little girl that always wanted her own pony!♥♥♥

I Can't be a sea horse because they live in the sea. If I try to be a sea horse out of the sea ... other dreamers might see a scary dragon.

So a friendly, lovable, miniature donkey, I'll "Be"

Oh!

I just discovered how brave and protective "I Am" in my dream-donky-form.

★

https://youtu.be/XbPRjZ9nEVo

★( 122,893 views

Bad Ass Donkey Saves Goat From Mountain Lion

Uploaded on Sep 20, 2010

News report

of a bad as anything donkey and the mountain lion that got his goat, or tried to.....

So when we meet on the beach, remember, I am not just a pretty face.

Forum code:*http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...2893959023.jpg

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But I didn't get to Henley Beach yesterday.

To day I bought some sprigs of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme form Coles. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I hope to bus to Henley Beach, nibble on my parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme while imagining my dream character Donkey frolicking between Grange Beach and Henley Beach Jetties.

The pungent flavors of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme will help me keep focosed on setting my intention to dream at relevart's dream location.

If any one reading this thread wants to come, here is the dream location again:

Forum code:*http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...1958664041.jpg

So when we meet on the beach, remember, I am not just a pretty face.

Forum code:*http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...2893959023.jpg

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

♥

https://youtu.be/Og7JS8mcp3c

♥(3:05)284,736 views

I'll try!

I read some things and I made a hypothesis. What if the shared dreaming is a way to early communication between children and parents? For example: Some animal had dangerous situation and feel a lot of fear, and the end of a day go to sleep with animal family. The fear involved a dream of this situation. Some strong animal attack the dreamer. By shared dreaming the family know that the enemy animal is dangerous. In future someone from family can meet this strong animal and know that he need to keep he on distance to be safe. I thought it's something like MEM, but after read definition I'm not sure. I read also about research where people with broken some part of brain didn't had REM sleep and also lost the motivation. So shared dream involved by positive emotion will enhance motivation. I think like you that the strong emotions had the primary role in shared dreaming, because brain don't want to share boring stuff :P and share emotions to teaching. What you think?

I would say that we dont need to prove the viability of shared dreams that the process of how and why is already out there the studies are just across different disciplines and in thousands of studies. I have been in the research stage for a documentary film on this very subject. the reason is genetic natural selection, the how is through bioelectromagnetic fields that we emit and hundreds of studies show this already. nrem states are generally for your daily grind while rem states are usually fear based and are designed for survival which depending on the type and severity will mark you genetically to be handed down to help the species survive. I personally believe the basis of animals in dreams is how we are helping each other to propel all of our species genetically though there is no study i have ever read regarding that.

I think the best evidence (outside of one's personal experience) can be found in the work of Dr. Allan Botkin and his Induced After-Death Communication (IADC) therapy for PTSD. For those unfamiliar with it just search his name, he's written a book about it. There's also a good introduction chapter on it in Fringe-ology which I reviewed in the book reviews thread. The therapy is an offshoot of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) psychotherapy which involves a patient recounting a traumatic experience while the therapist directs their eye movements left to right. This bilateral stimulation simulates the brains memory processing and integration function normally performed during REM sleep. IADC takes it a step further and induces a lucid dream state in which the patient is reunited with a deceased relative or friend (the same as lucid dreamers are able to do in my opinion). In one session Botkin's assistant sat in and also performed the eye movements along with the patient. The assistant was able to see the same visions as the patient. Other colleagues were able to do this with their patients in the same way. You can hear an interview with Botkin here: Internet Talk Radio | Seek Reality – Induced Afterlife Communications with Dr. Allan Botkin | WebTalkRadio.net The shared experience is explained at the 26:25 mark.

SD is definitely real. Me and my girlfriend shared dreams atleast 3 times a week for a year and a half. We shared lucid and non lucid dreams. Even when i moved to CA and she lived in VA we still shared vivid dreams frequently. I've shared dreams with other people though. Thirteen others to be exact. But only about four of them were lucid dreams. I woukd love to know more on the subject but so far im the only person i know who has had multiple or intentional SDs. Im actually on the site today looking for answers because I had one last night.

Welcome, Quazoo!

There is a lot of positive, occasionally informative stuff about SD on DV's if you look around. You might do a search for WakingNomad, the resident, if currently mostly AWOL, SD guru on these forums; he even has a SD tutorial.

Also, there is a forum set aside for SD, called the International Oneironaut Shared Dreaming Project; you might want to browse that as well; though it has been quiet for a while, there is a lot of interesting SD stuff there.

I notice you've been signed up for a couple of years, so you might already know about both these things, but I figured I'd share anyway, just in case!

Thanks I'll check them out. I enjoy speaking about this with people who dont think Im on drugs.