SD

I'm sure the topic of shared dreaming has been discussed before, but I'm new here. I'm just curious what has been tried, if there has been any success or progress towards success, and to a lesser degree I'm curious what the prevailing ideas are on how SD could even be possible.

I also often ponder on the potential ramifications which could result from SD being solved. I'm not sure if the potential benefits outweigh the potential risks.

We had lots and lots of long discussions and arguments about this here about eight years ago. I wasn't on the site before that, but my impression is that there was even more active shared dreaming activity connected to this site prior to that, but it tended to have a manipulative, personality cult kind of twist to it, and was unhealthy for many of the people involved.

I think that there are no theories about how it is possible that make any sense. Some psychologist researchers at Berkeley suggested it works through electromagnetic fields, but I think that any physicist would consider this idea ridiculous. One poster on this site suggested that premonitions work through temporal entanglement, and if that's true, then telepathy would have to work in the same kind of way. Maybe that idea is ridiculous too, but its less obvious because we understand quantum theory less well than electromagnetics? Forming a 'scientific theory' about something like this requires being able to control it well enough to perform precise experiments, and shared dreaming does not lend itself to that.

Proving that it exists would be vastly easier than coming up with a plausible description of how it works. Working on that would be career suicide for a number of reasons though. I also think that the bad effects of proving it would likely outweigh the benefits. I don't think there's a risk of 'solving' it in the sense of determining a mechanism, I don't think that's remotely within reach.

Being aware of the bad results that would follow from proving it don't make me stop wanting to prove it, they just make me not want to push very hard. I guess it will happen when it is time, more like a flower opening and less like taking a crowbar to one's third eye.

As a related side topic, I've been interested in finding some updated metaphors for 'spiritual' topics in general, since New Age ideas and lingo are mostly based on misapplications of 19th century science, and I find them to be grossly lacking. Maybe this goal isn't very important either though.

I think that telepathy is a natural effect of empathy. I don't think we're desperately in need with ideological help with that. Everyone already knows how to do it, and ideologically motivated 'love' is screwed up anyway. I'm also skeptical of the idea that empathy is an unmitigated good. I don't think that it is. Too much empathy creates a lot of problems that we are unable to resolve, at least in the near term. That's part of why people shut themselves off. Selfishness and greed are big reasons for a lack of empathy, but they're not the only reasons. And if people were able and willing to give up the greed, that part of the problem solves itself. If they're not willing to give it up, then having more conscious power to bully and manipulate other people would not be a good thing.

In my view, another reason it may be better not to prove shared dreaming to society at large, is other closely related and difficult to control magical effects are possible besides telepathy and precognition. People are too dishonest, irrational, and ignorant to deal with magic much differently than they do now, in my view. And the main approach now, in our society, is a combination of suppression, mostly through a kind of disengagement, and trying to keep a clean heart. We can't do much better than that in my view. All people are a little bit magical in my opinion, but its subtle and mostly subconscious, and it would be a very bad thing if it were stronger and more overt.

Some of my concerns result from things being taken to their most extreme outcomes. Like in a world where everyone can enter a sort of internet v2.0, logging in to a mass shared dream network simply by falling asleep. A place where time perception can be warped to extremes, where someone can fall asleep for an hour but dream for millenia.

If taken to its' most extreme, could potentially have things like unimaginable torture, untraceable assasinations, mass suicides/murder/genocide, body stealing/swapping, even some lovecraftian horror psuedo-god hivemind birthed from some dark corner of reality that enslaves all human minds, turning our bodies into drones for whatever usage it wants.

Maybe this seems crazy, but putting all the pieces together and predicting what could follow from opening this pandora's box, from my perspective we could create our own heavens and hells, and humanity seems to have a tendency to weaponize whatever it can, which could potentially allow for some very extreme outcomes.

I think you're putting too much weight on our thoughts about shared dreaming. I think that people are already mildly telepathetic, but tend to keep it suppressed and mostly subconscious, as a way of protecting themselves and staying out of trouble with it. What people believe about this affects it, but only to a limited extent. Yes, a world where we had easy shared dreaming would have all kinds of horrors as you suggest. But that kind of world won't happen as a consequence of choices we make about shared dreaming, because that kind of wrong tends to be self-limiting. The bad effects of the corrupt use of the telepathy tend to undermine our power. I think that if a dystopia of the kind you suggest is possible, its one we fall into from a higher state than we're in currently. Most of our magical power is paralyzed or pissed away, since before the dawn of time so to speak, and that isn't going to change any time soon. Right now, we have about as much power as we can handle, and its limited mostly by our bad tendencies that undermine it, not by our having not yet discovered or constructed a means of exploiting it.