Thread: How to Prove Shared Dreaming Scientifically

Originally Posted by JussiKala

Shared adventure... Unless these two people are completely stranger to each other, this presents an issue, since they could have talked about it before the test and agreed to tell the researchers something.

Originally Posted by Marsupilama

If I were the researcher, I'd give one of the dreamers a quest to go on together with the other. That way they couldn't lie about a shared adventure since they both didn't know what the quest was in the first place.

..

^that is easier to fake. And most likely more difficult to perform in dream, but whatever.

I was in a shared dreaming study earlier this year, and it was similar to this. We all sent our dream reports to the researcher and we were not allowed to communicate with each other. It was pretty hard because I didn't know any of the people in the study. After each attempt, and once all reports were sent in, they were posted so that the dreamers could compare and see how we did. We made I think about 5 attempts total, and we did them once a week. The results were very good in my opinion. I wanted to post the final paper here, but when I was sent a copy of it, they requested that it not be shared publicly (besides that, it's 70 pages total). If and when it is peer reviewed and published, I'll be able to post it here.

This may be redundant to what has already been said, but here are a few observations about why shared and precognitive dreams are not studied scientifically, having been on both sides of this:

1. With very rare exceptions, a scientist can only study what they can get funding for. If there are scientists who want to study these things, they can't unless they can get someone to pay for it. There are rich people and government program managers who believe in things like shared dreams (I know a few), but it does not benefit them personally to fund such inquiries, so they do not.

2. That first item is sufficient to prevent such research, so I could just stop here. The next most important consideration is risk for the researcher. In general, its hard to study anything that doesn't have a high probability of producing results which will lead to continued funding. Scientists who aren't conservative in this regard tend to fail to maintain streams of funding, in which case they cease to be scientists. The remaining scientists are more practical/cynical by natural selection. Paranormal dreaming is a bad gamble in this regard, even for someone who believes in it. Another facet of this is risk-adverse control exerted by the organization a person works in, even aside from funding and personal risk issues for the scientist.

3. Fate has to cooperate, Scientifically demonstrated paranormal dreaming would have both positive and negative effects on society, and these would be highly non-linear or unstable. Rightly or wrongly, destiny seems to be against it for now. (I think that fate can be 'wrong' about stuff, our shortcomings have distorting effects there also. But at the same time, it does have access to a lot of history that it can judge from, so to speak.)

4. Of course ignorance and egotism on the part of scientists is a factor, though I think the first three issues mentioned here dominate.

LaBerge's guinea pigs, before they went to bed, were assigned a special eye movement (up, down, up, down, left, right) to perform while lucid, as the eyes are not immobilized.

The eye movement could be given to one of them. Then, in the shared dream, he/she would relay this to the other and then they would BOTH perform the eye-signal.

If it really is a shared dream they would both do the correct eye-signal, at the exact same time. This done several times would definitely ease my skepticism.

Things like exchanging passwords or eye movements don't translate well into shared dreams. Often the "sharing" part isn't to that degree of specificity. The elements, scenes and general ideas/feelings are shared more often then exact words.

Anyone catch Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman? One episode this year talks about a 6th sense, morphic fields etc. Dr Michael Persinger Michael Persinger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia constructed an experiment with 2 people in separate rooms with a special head piece that regulated the magnetic field around their head, and when one person saw a flashing light in one room, the person in the other room with no flashing light saw it. Pretty wild stuff, if true, shared dreaming is definitely possible.

In Germany we have Society for Anormalistics. They left the CSICOP because they considered them as too close-minded and wanted to do open-minded research.

But for prooving the shared dream effect scientifically you need the help of a institute of a university. By the way: ever tried contacting Stanley Krippner? He has already published books about Dream Telepathy.

For evaluating the shared dream experience you need someone who is into statistics and stochastic.

I think it's quite difficult.
For example Person A dreams about dogs once per week, person B dreams about dogs once per month.
Both report a dream about dogs. Coincidence?

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

All I can do is repeat myself at this point.

If you ask me, it seems that too many people hear about shared dreaming (thanks Inception) and jump on the "Let's try and do it together!" boat, negating first mastering lucid dreaming. You know.. it kinda being the main prerequisite and all..

Which is why most people won't successfully have shared dreams and rage quit. People want to sprint before they learn how to crawl. Learn the basics people. Nomad has been doing this for years upon years. Naiya has been religiously lucid dreaming for well over a decade.

It may be "OMFG THIS IS COOL!!!" to you but it won't be anything worthy of the scientific communities time if you don't clock in the training hours these guys have clocked.

I don't think that could have been put any better Jeff, pretty much the only thing in the Beyond Dreaming section is questions and attempts at shared dreaming. People are quick to dismiss it and call it impossible after having tried and failed, while they're still a beginner. I've tried and had a somewhat small similarity, but no real success. Reading the shared dreaming journals between Nomad, Raven, MoSH, they're what make me believe it's possible.

Two people have to go into seperate rooms. They meet at an agreed location in the dream world, and then one person (determined before going into his/her room) takes the other to four new locations, which he/she has written down before going to sleep. The other person wakes up and then writes down the locations they were taken to. If the two match, then it was successful. I hope nobody has already written this, as I haven't looked through all the pages

WARNING! - - - - An obscene amount of text incoming - - - - WARNING!

If passwords don't translate well, what about numbers?

There are two main ways to communicate with the external world while dreaming. A: Eye movements. B: Finger movements.

Having read a few of the adventures you guys have shared I am slightly jealous, but also curious to know how you "plan ahead"? For instance, one pre plan you mention "meet Raven at Hogwarts", what would happen IF (and I believe this to be a crucial aspect) you were able to meet up in a sleep lab and plan for a series of tasks to be carried out? Have you guys actually met up physically before and arranged to go to sleep at the same time/place before and do you know if this might affect the amount and clarity of information that could be transmitted?

A point on the construction of pass”words”. If words don't translate well what about numbers?

For numbers to be transmitted you wouldn't need to convey anything audible, you could for instance cause X amounts of tiny explosions by snapping your fingers, so if you were able to convey a message "Eye or fingers" (technically toes register as well but require more effort in the dream to produce a waking effect) and be given a series of numbers (XYZ, each being 1-5) for the receipient to produce either via eyes or fingers?

The above section is what I would consider strong evidence. The pros could be that you could actually discuss the locations and means delivering the information on tasks to be carried out in advance.

Could go something like this

”Yeah, gonna give you the first number on the moon , the next lot on the rings of Saturn... gonna do em all by making explosions” To prime the other person, if this could somehow help synchronise the dream.

for instance the number 524 delivered to you by experimenter as finger-finger-eye and produced by the recepient in the dream, would heavilly support your case.

The cons are that the specificity of information might be too complex, though I will await your answer if you have actually tested being physically and temporally close at dream/sleep onset

A simpler design could be gathering pairs of lucid dreamers at various intervals selected randomly from a pool to make sure no pre-arranging could be done. Gather your dream diaries while preventing any contact between you in the lab and making you prodouce eye/finger signals whenever you have a shared dream. Then have a board of independent judges (not fully introduced to the topic of the experiment, PM me for details) score which dreams are alike to see if these match up with the ones that have been signaled to the awaking world as shared by both participants.

Some potential problems though, as far as I understand not all shared dreams are remembered by both parties, and some dreams could involve the other dreamer represented as a ”mere” DC.


These are just a few designs, there are other problems more salient, already mentioned throughout the thread such as, lack of funding, fear of ousting from a given community (and means of living) in as much as a lack of population (meaning not only ”Good lucid dreamers” (classified as having lucid dreams once per week/month, but actually ”godly” lucid dreamers that can have 1+ per night)

Based on the last statement that could be interpreted as a result of how society works as a whole, the first appropriate step would be to define the population you are looking at. What characteristics does a shared dreamer posses? if this is not answered, you cannot randomize within a given population and it becomes difficult to replicate further than a few individuals.

Then an obvious answer is: Rather than in group-/out grouping ”the scientific community” become part of that community, familiarise yourself with it's theories on the topic of dreaming regardless of what you study.

To summarise: I am currently writing a finishing assignment in psych and it will be on dreaming and lucid dreaming. But for me to progress I cannot jump into the shared dreaming pool straight away unless I can provide solid empirical evidence of its existence. I won't be able to gather solid empirical evidence until I have a Ph.D. and is employed at the local sleep research centre, which requires me to ”play ball” within the restraints I am currently under about what is ”scientific”.

Sarcastically this can be described as: ripping the ass of (debunking) current theories until I have established enough credibility to say fuck yall! Having attention of the general population and have them just doing it (increasing the population of available data, forcing ”the scientific community” to acknowledge the phenomenon's existence!). Which can be accomplished by a number of ways not even remotely related to science, just so happens to be where I am.


It will be possible, in time, now is not the time, not enough people are doing it to be worthy of scientific exploration. The best way is to get more people doing it, and for that I am very grateful for the amount of time and effort you have already put into achieving this goal =)

Well i don't know about science but i thought the best way to prove shared dreaming to myself is ; as i did, ask a lot of lucid dreamers to attempt to dream share with me. Just think about it. If there's a bunch of people with decent lucid skills trying to meet up on the same person. It's bound to actually happen. This person should have good recall. And probably lucidity will help in order to cover all fields of dreaming.

There's no need for a password or anything like that. Once you read the dream reports it should be obvious if it's actually shared dreaming or something else. You can't prove shared dreaming without a leap of faith that someone truthfully writes their dream reports. Unless you maybe do it in a lab and all that crap, but that's just ruining fun isn't it.

And another thing about passwords, is that remembering dreams is hard. Often you only remember it in fragments. What are the odds ur gonna actually remember something pointless and trivial such as a password.

According to Jung, dreams are unconscious material, and the further we go back into the collection unconscious, the more similar our dreams become. Further, dreams come to tell us something we are consciously ignoring.

With that in mind, i would extend it to say that if a society's culture ignored an archtype, *everyone* would have the same dream, because everyone's unconscious would be sending the same message.

Well i guess it could be done by monitoring brainwaves of each person and if they are hitting REM periods or having similar brainwaves at the same time then they could be dreaming together.

This on top of each person asked to describe what they recall directly after waking up seperately and comparing results.

Also research should be done on lucid dreaming to see the different in brain activity and eye movement during a normal dream and a lucid dream to then see whether each person was lucid or not.

just an idea.

Also numbers and letters are always jumbled up in dreams, hence it being good dream sign, making any form of password, written time or note or maybe even speech a useless variable for evidence. it would be far better for each person to distinguish shapes, colours, feelings, events within dreams.

Ok so i don't know if any of you watch the show through the wormhole with morgan freeman but there was a segment about global consciousness. How humans are connected consciously.. they said that it also applied with birds and how they knew to fly in a V shape. That human thoughts would merge into a collective consciousness..
heres the episode: MEGAVIDEO - I'm watching it @ 11:50ish they start to talk about the collective consciousness and then at 21:00 they conduct an experiment.
They took two subjects and placed them in separate dark rooms and put a controlled magnetic field on their heads so they have identical magnetic fields, In one room a light flashes and when it flashed the person in the other rooms brain scan spiked and also she saw a flash in her right eye. This proves two brains separated from each other could have the same experience. I recommend you watch the whole episode, it's really something and i think that this would prove why shared dreaming would be possible. I hope i brought something useful to the table!

Tried clicking on the link but all it did was try to make me install DivX and then tell me my system was incompatible (I'm on a Mac). Here's the episode on YT:

Pretty cool stuff! I always wish I had this channel... it's not included in basic cable here and I'm too cheap to buy it

Nice to now I can watch episodes on YT. I must say, I'm skeptical but very interested, and I would love to be convinced! After all, fish use the magnetic field surrounding the earth for navigation, and we're evolved from them right? And if you know much about evolution, old systems can't be erased from the DNA, but only built over... which is why the brainstem still includes what's known as the Lizard Brain...

It would actually be kind of strange if our brains WEREN'T sensitive to that magnetic field.


The lizard brain wouldn't be sensitive to advanced thinking or even emotions except maybe those necessary to direct survival (most emotions are produced in the Limbic System - aka the Mammal Brain, a layer built onto and wrapped around the lizard brain and evolutionarily more advanced). So maybe a good experiment would be to try the "staring" thing like they did in the video, but first get a group of people with very different political or religious ideas together and let them argue until they're on the point of killing each other (hey, it's what they do all the time on reality shows, right?). When there are a few who definitely hate each other, then separate them into groups and let one be the "stare-er" who absolutely hates the subject, and the felling must be mutual. In fact it might even work better if the "stare-er" was someone who really intimidated the subject, so the actual element of fear is involved. This would sort of simulate a survival scenario where one fish might be frightened of a natural predator that wants to eat it. This way you can involve primitive basic survival instincts rather than simply mindless staring.

Might be interesting to also include people who are strongly attracted to each other. The mating instinct is also a strong primitive one.

I think one major problem in getting scientific proof is that the very nature of personal experience creates a bit of a catch-22. Eye-witnesses of a single event in real life often describe- not just slightly different accounts- but sometimes WILDLY different accounts of the same event. Our perception of an experience, whether in real life or in a dream, is affected by all sorts of things, including our past experiences, morals, and other presumed values.

This creates a catch-22 because an actual shared dream - as lucidmax stated in one of his posts - is recounted by the dreamers as extremely similar, but not EXACTLY similar experiences. This is normal and should be expected. However, this same slight variation - which SHOULD exist in a shared dream experience - is the very thing skeptics will point to when they try to poke holes in the proof. A real shared dream shouldn't be reported EXACTLY the same by 2 dreamers, and yet skeptics will point to the differences as proof that the dreamers only had SIMILAR dreams and not shared dreams.

Just a thought

Originally Posted by lucidmax15895

If a large enough number claims that shared dreaming is real, then they HAVE to believe it..

This is not how science works. The reaosn they were able to prove that real is because the scientists ALSO dreamed, and it can be observed BY THE PEOPLE WHO WRITE IT

Think about it -- scientists/philosophers disregard religion and have for thousands of years -- even in the days when 99.9999990452389058290289348964308% <made up but probably accurate number) of people believed religion.

Originally Posted by ashraen

I think one major problem in getting scientific proof is that the very nature of personal experience creates a bit of a catch-22. Eye-witnesses of a single event in real life often describe- not just slightly different accounts- but sometimes WILDLY different accounts of the same event. Our perception of an experience, whether in real life or in a dream, is affected by all sorts of things, including our past experiences, morals, and other presumed values.

This creates a catch-22 because an actual shared dream - as lucidmax stated in one of his posts - is recounted by the dreamers as extremely similar, but not EXACTLY similar experiences. This is normal and should be expected. However, this same slight variation - which SHOULD exist in a shared dream experience - is the very thing skeptics will point to when they try to poke holes in the proof. A real shared dream shouldn't be reported EXACTLY the same by 2 dreamers, and yet skeptics will point to the differences as proof that the dreamers only had SIMILAR dreams and not shared dreams.

Just a thought

You make too much sense.