Thread: What's different about your dreams?

Hi Venryx, yes I have pictures. Btw I don’t really believe in shared dreams either. I have a few other examples of seemingly precognitive dreams I have evidence of from my journal but again they could just be odd coonicdences. Going back through our messages it does look like my friend and I had spoken previous to our dreams and there were some differences but there were some interesting similarities. She dreamed of a solarium with transforming little animals and I dreamed I was in a room with glass walls with transforming little animals. The definition of a solarium is a room with glass walls that allows light in. I know this type of speculation is sort of frowned upon in this forum so I don’t really want to post all of the stuff here. I’ll send them privately. Email is easier for me if you’d like to give me that as I’m having trouble figuring out how to easily upload images into a private message. I tried a little while ago and I’m not sure I did it correctly.

Frowned on only by some people - most are very open minded and you'll find quite a few who believe in shared dreaming, in different ways. I used to not believe in it at all, until I experienced it myself a few times and also learned about dream telepathy, which is a slightly different take on dream sharing. The idea is that telepathy happens between people but when they're awake the conscious mind isn't aware of it, and then it informs the dreams when you go to sleep. So people don't need to be asleep at the same time - it isn't a realtime shared experience but more like an idea or image that's been shared that then spawns dreams in both people that night. And the people won't dream exactly the same things - more like each one dreams their own interpretations of the idea. The solariums and the animals and many details might have looked very different in the 2 dreams, but it does sound like the same idea spawned dreams for both of you.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

So people don't need to be asleep at the same time - it isn't a realtime shared experience but more like an idea or image that's been shared that then spawns dreams in both people that night.

That seems less like telepathy and more like memetics to me.

Originally Posted by LabyrinthDreams

That seems less like telepathy and more like memetics to me.

From Wikipedia:

The term meme was coined in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene, but Dawkins later distanced himself from the resulting field of study.[2] Analogous to a gene, the meme was conceived as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.) which is "hosted" in the minds of one or more individuals, and which can reproduce itself in the sense of jumping from the mind of one person to the mind of another. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief is seen as an idea-replicator reproducing itself in a new host.

Yes, that sounds right, but what would be the transfer media? I think he was talking about ideas getting to large numbers of people via something like TV or the internet or water cooler conversation. But what would cause people to dream the same thing without any such media connecting them? Unless the people had spoken to each other or seen the same show or movie or something, telepathy would have to be the connecting medium. And why would 2 people share the same dream and immediately think of each other and email each other about it? I suppose it would be a telepathic meme. But of course some people will accept that as a possibility - at least theoretically, and some won't.