Thread: hollow shell, or- POOF! ?

When your sharing a dream with someone, entered their dream world or vise versa, what happens if one of you wake up? Does it leave behind an astral "vehicle" without awareness? or do you sort of blip out of the scene..?

I'm sure this thread will be moved to Beyond Dreaming. You'll get better answers there.


But anyways, since I'm here.

To answer your question, you'd basically blip out of the scene... or exit the scene in some way.
Just remember that in any of these dream worlds and astrals, is that the information is always going through your consciousness. Heck, it IS consciousness.
Doesn't matter if the thing you're looking at is real or made-up, it is always being translated by your own mind.

A person might suddenly wake up, but to you maybe it looks like they are walking into the distance.

Also time isn't linear, so it's kinda hard to connect when a person wakes up to when they leave a scene.

I dunno. I've never shared or projected, so I can't speak from experience, only what I've picked up from others.

Buggery-double

Shared dreaming is just fiction (my view), so there's nothing mysterious happens.

Of course if you could prove that shared dreaming is real, using a double-blind method, I would change my view and you would get very rich

In my experience shared dreaming doesn't work the way people think it does. It isn't a realtime shared experience, but rather what's known as dream telepathy. To understand it, you need to keep in mind the way the subconscious works. It's always running, except maybe when you're in the deepest levels of sleep, but when you're awake it runs on the backchannel so to speak. I liken it to the stars, which are always there but in the day the sun is so bright you can't see them. So with that in mind, dream telepathy works like this:

Two or more people share a telepathic experience. They don't need to be asleep at the time, and I don't know why or how it happens, but a group of thoughts and feelings seems to make itself known to them all. It seems it needs to be processed while you're sleeping, just as much of your normal waking thought processes do (that's largely what dreams are). So the shared telepathic experience remains quietly in the background until you're dreaming, at which time it expresses itself in your own terms and imagery.

What I mean is that each person won't dream exactly the same thing, and they can't really talk to each other or anything, not in 'realtime' or interactively. Instead, just as dreams do normally, they will dip into your memories and ideas to create appropriate images. For example, if a doorway is important symbolically to the experience, one might dream of a particular door they've seen before, while the other might see it as a cave entrance or the front door of their own house.

The way you discover that you shared a dream telepathy with someone is to discuss your dreams with people - which is a big part of what DreamViews is about of course. People can read each other's dreams in the Dream Journal section, and sometimes you'll find that one or more people had dreams very similar in some ways to yours.

Of course, as with all subjective phenomena, some people have pre-determined ideas of how they think it should work, or they have a fantasy that they think would be really cool, and shared dreaming seems to be one of the things people have rather weird ideas about. People love the idea that it can be a realtime interactive experience, so many people refuse to even entertain any other possibility. While it doesn't seem to work that way, there is still a very strong sense of contacting an intelligence when it happens. The other person seems to be more 'real' than normal dream characters, even if they're presented cartoonishly or very strangely in the dream.

In my experience shared dreaming doesn't work the way people think it does. It isn't a realtime shared experience, but rather what's known as dream telepathy. To understand it, you need to keep in mind the way the subconscious works. It's always running, except maybe when you're in the deepest levels of sleep, but when you're awake it runs on the backchannel so to speak. I liken it to the stars, which are always there but in the day the sun is so bright you can't see them. So with that in mind, dream telepathy works like this:

Two or more people share a telepathic experience. They don't need to be asleep at the time, and I don't know why or how it happens, but a group of thoughts and feelings seems to make itself known to them all. It seems it needs to be processed while you're sleeping, just as much of your normal waking thought processes do (that's largely what dreams are). So the shared telepathic experience remains quietly in the background until you're dreaming, at which time it expresses itself in your own terms and imagery.

What I mean is that each person won't dream exactly the same thing, and they can't really talk to each other or anything, not in 'realtime' or interactively. Instead, just as dreams do normally, they will dip into your memories and ideas to create appropriate images. For example, if a doorway is important symbolically to the experience, one might dream of a particular door they've seen before, while the other might see it as a cave entrance or the front door of their own house.

The way you discover that you shared a dream telepathy with someone is to discuss your dreams with people - which is a big part of what DreamViews is about of course. People can read each other's dreams in the Dream Journal section, and sometimes you'll find that one or more people had dreams very similar in some ways to yours.

Of course, as with all subjective phenomena, some people have pre-determined ideas of how they think it should work, or they have a fantasy that they think would be really cool, and shared dreaming seems to be one of the things people have rather weird ideas about. People love the idea that it can be a realtime interactive experience, so many people refuse to even entertain any other possibility. While it doesn't seem to work that way, there is still a very strong sense of contacting an intelligence when it happens. The other person seems to be more 'real' than normal dream characters, even if they're presented cartoonishly or very strangely in the dream.

That's such a loose definition of shared dreaming that I don't think it really counts.
Sorry to be blunt, but just redefining shared dreaming to be just individual dreaming influenced by common waking life experiences is a bit of a cop out. I have no problem with what you are describing at all. In fact it's what I would argue IS a normal "shared dream experience", but it's not what most people think of when you say "shared dream".
I can see that there might be scope for real shared dream experiences in the future when we have more sophisticated brain implants. Then we can have real direct thought interaction, and then why not dream interaction?

Originally Posted by Goldenspark

In fact it's what I would argue IS a normal "shared dream experience", but it's not what most people think of when you say "shared dream".

Well, as I say, this is a type of shared dreaming I have experienced, and can say is real. The other kind I think is a fantasy. I believe it's a simplistic idea of what shared dreaming could or should be like created by people who haven't experienced it, and just expect it to be similar to face-to-face encounters. I could of course be wrong - but I'll never know unless I experience the other kind myself, will I?

Sorry Darkmatters, didn't mean to come across like that in my previous post. I agree with your loose definition of shared dreaming, it's just that most people want to believe in the fantastic version.
I would go a bit further and say that a closer form of shared dreaming might be possible for two people sleeping in the same room. Clearly there is a bit more scope for some real interaction in that scenario, where some subliminal communication is possible.

Goldenspark, I just re-read what you wrote, and it seems like you missed the telepathy aspect of what I described? You said "just redefining shared dreaming to be just individual dreaming influenced by common waking life experiences". It would be more correct to say "a telepathically shared experience expressed individually in each person's dreams".

I side-stepped your telepathy inference, because I don't think there is any evidence for telepathic communication. I do understand that two people can arrive at a common vision given various waking life clues, which you could say is, in the widest definition, "telepathy", because it doesn't directly result from the 5 senses, but it's not telepathy in the recognised sense.

For me, telepathy takes us back into the fantastical, which doesn't really help explain the shared dreaming we were agreeing on. I'd prefer to look for more down-to-earth explanations for what is clearly a real phenomenon, even if it's difficult to prove.

If you can't accept telepathy without a mechanism to explain it, why do you accept shared dreaming? Seems like they would use pretty much the same mechanism, no?

Hey, It looks like I'm randomly jumping into a thread related to this topic again. But I find your inferences of how it may work interesting. Also, I kind of wanna chime into the conversation. Anyways, when I read Dark Matters post on dream telepathy I felt like it made sense for dream sharing to work that way. On the other hand, what GoldenSpark mentioned about waking life clues brought up a question to mind. Not that I didn't think of waking life clues before but the question pretty much is this. If our dreaming mind can come up with the best scenario due to waking life clues, whether it be on the forum or with others we know, than what kind of clues would cause that sync?
Also, what are the types of syncs that can be proven without waking life clues?

This is pretty much why I'd like to build on my past experiences with new ones. I know I've had syncs before but as time passes you don't really remember if anything could have caused it. Based on this it seems that the ones that are pretty much concrete proof as of now, are the dreams that convey info to the dreamer that wasn't known before. I can only recall three dreams like that , that were very short and where I only learned a name of a person someone else knew, the type of dog my nephew would get, and i saw a specific place that another dreamer knew. However, i suppose you could come up with ways to call them coincidences too. Nonetheless, If shared dreaming is like a lost skill, like how lucid dreaming is hard for some, i'm not surprised I've had so few concrete experiences. Even so, I do want to experiment with it again. If I fail a good amount of times after experimenting again I will leave it up to possible future dreaming machines.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

If you can't accept telepathy without a mechanism to explain it, why do you accept shared dreaming? Seems like they would use pretty much the same mechanism, no?

No they don't share the same mechanism, if you define shared dreaming as just two people dreaming about very similar things because of waking life cues, and telepathy being direct communication not using the five senses. I don't accept the existence of the type of shared dreaming that is real time and relies on some form of telepathy, but I can accept a lower level form of shared dreaming that doesn't.

Ok then, we're not talking about the same thing.