Originally Posted by
Darkmatters
I used to scoff at the idea of shared dreaming, but then I had some experiences that changed my mind. It absolutely is one of those "some people believe, some don't" kind of things, because it happens entirely in people's minds, so there can be no real objective evidence. Science isn't capable of studying the qualia that can only be experienced subjectively in one person's mind. It deals only with empirical results where things can be measured precisely, and you can't do that with dreams.
What I now believe is happening is dream telepathy, which isn't how I used to think shared dreaming was supposed to happen. At the time I thought shared dreaming meant 2 or more people had pretty much exactly the same dream and that if they would all write it down you'd easily be able to tell. But what I experienced was different. Here's the first one that started to convince me - I had a dream involving me as a midget who couldn't speak properly and I saw a girl wearing a see-through top who then flew away (or did she just disappear in my dream? It's been a long time - the memories are hazy now). In fact, right now I don't remember if I was aware of being a midget in my dream - maybe I just experienced it from a low viewpoint, as if I was a child? I used to read the dream journals of many other people in here, and on the same morning a girl posted a dream that she saw some kind of weird deformed guy who was really short and didn't speak well, then she took off her top and flew away. However there were many other details in her dream that were very different from mine, and the dreams only coincided in these particulars. She saw the midget and I think she walked away for a while and had other things happen, then later she saw him again, and that was when she took off her top and flew away. For me these events happened immediately one after the other. It doesn't coincide exactly, but it's more like we both shared certain ideas that we interpreted somewhat differently from each other. In the same way that people will tell the same story differently even if they all saw the same thing happen, only more so because dreams are more subjective than seeing a real event take place.
This same kind of thing then happened to me several more times involving different people on the board. In each case I first wrote my dream in my dj then discovered somebody else who dreamed something remarkably similar. The first time I just thought it was a freaky coincidence. But after it happened 4 or 5 more times I became a believer.
My natural skepticism kicked in again when I realized that sometimes I wasn't asleep at the same time as the other person, but someone explained dream telepathy and it made sense. It works as if both people have been told something that they then interpret in their own way. And the message itself - the part that is actually shared, doesn't need to happen when both or either is asleep. It can happen while awake, but the message is very subtle and quiet and doesn't make it to awareness through the noisy hubub of waking consciousness. Instead is is just there in the background until you begin to dream, at which point you have dropped into that more subtle consciousness of dreams.
I think of unconscious thoughts as being always there - the way the stars are always there, but they're dim and can't be seen while the sun is blotting them out. But once it goes down (the sun of course representing waking consciousness) then the sky darkens and the stars become visible. That's one of the meanings embedded in my sig pic. So if we do receive telepathic thoughts or ideas or whatever they are, they remain in the background until our mind quiets down enough to process them in dreams. And we do all seem to experience telepathy at times - like when the phone rings and you know who it is before you answer.
