Thread: Inception- Is it possible?

Originally Posted by Xei

I've already explained this a few times. Experiments to test for shared dreaming would be very inexpensive and easy.

Yet somehow, you seem to be biased about whether the "very inexpensive and easy" method is going to be reliable. I should be giving you the impression that, in most successful cases, it quite likely is.

Uh yeah if you actually have any evidence of this happening.

That, in itself, is the form of the evidence. OBE's are very personal experiences, they're not about picking a flower while out of body and waking up in bed with it. It is experiential, and as for what you might have implied, collecting information about that experience is sufficient, provided that the patient is honest and has good memory.

And of course you have to be careful about people retroactively embellishing their memories, and about confirmation bias which leads people to pick up on one small detail which was shared but forget the myriad other things which were disparate, when it could have been just chance.

Like I say. If there's so much anecdotal, statistically noteworthy evidence out there, why can't anybody replicate that solidly and unambiguously in a lab? It's really pretty obvious why.

You seem to have a biased presumption about all this. For what good is putting these people in a lab? That sounds expensive and misguided. But let's say you put them in a lab. What do you think is going to be different or beneficial? The Monroe Institute is already quite suitable.

Originally Posted by really

Nice, you got any links for that?

Here is the study:

Originally Posted by Abstract

Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/07/13/1008662107

And the article

Mind meld: Brain cells synchronize during good conversations - Science Fair: Science and Space News - USATODAY.com

Yet somehow, you seem to be biased about whether the "very inexpensive and easy" method is going to be reliable. I should be giving you the impression that, in most successful cases, it quite likely is.

I don't know what you're talking about. I've not said anything about cost or ease making an experiment any more or less reliable.

That, in itself, is the form of the evidence.

...what is? What evidence are you talking about?

You seem to have a biased presumption about all this. For what good is putting these people in a lab? That sounds expensive and misguided. But let's say you put them in a lab. What do you think is going to be different or beneficial? The Monroe Institute is already quite suitable.

Putting them in a lab is just a metaphor for doing a proper experiment.

These conversations always seem to end up turning into lengthy exercises in misdirection. It's really very simple: if you have any evidence with some kind of standard rigour about it of shared dreams or OBEs, tell me about it. Otherwise, I have no reason to believe in them (and neither do you).

Applicable to shared dreaming.

<3 Tim... I made a thread on him a while back. I love the 'Storm' one.

Originally Posted by Xei

I don't know what you're talking about. I've not said anything about cost or ease making an experiment any more or less reliable.

...what is? What evidence are you talking about?

Putting them in a lab is just a metaphor for doing a proper experiment.

These conversations always seem to end up turning into lengthy exercises in misdirection. It's really very simple: if you have any evidence with some kind of standard rigour about it of shared dreams or OBEs, tell me about it. Otherwise, I have no reason to believe in them (and neither do you).

It is quite simple and I don't know what you have a problem with.

We were talking about shared dreaming and OBE's, but I went into more detail about how OBE's are more reliable than dreams, in terms of evidence. You say that it is very easy to produce evidence/collect data in either case, which I am not disagreeing with, yet despite this, you seem to be implying that nothing I've said counts as evidence. My questions: Do you have a better idea? And what is the beneficial difference of using a laboratory or "proper experiment", if obtaining evidence is already so incredibly easy and sufficient?

You haven't posted any evidence for chrissakes. What evidence? Just some kind of record of an instance in which two people clearly shared a piece of information.

The benefits of a properly controlled double blind peer-reviewed experiment is that it eliminates the possibility that people are just bullshitting; a possibility which has constantly become a reality uncountable times throughout history.

Again, misdirection. It's simple: if somebody has ever confirmed shared dreaming in a controlled experiment - a controlled experiment which is extremely cheap and easy to set up, and which has a massive incentive for the participants - tell me about it. If there isn't one, then nobody has cause to believe in shared dreaming (unless they've experienced it themselves, in which case for their sakes they should contact an academic institution pretty sharpish).

Originally Posted by Xei

You haven't posted any evidence for chrissakes. What evidence? Just some kind of record of an instance in which two people clearly shared a piece of information.

Both sharing information and collecting information, which is fine for me. It is all about the experience.

By the way, did you get a good look at that link Dajo posted? On the site, there is a tab called "Research", which you should check out if you haven't already. That is to do with OBEs in general, but I presume what I said about shared OBEs still holds.

Edit: Here's just an example, which is a three part Youtube video. Not a great example because of the amount of mixed talk, but there are instances where she describes correlations with other participants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8lIH8CpuY0

The benefits of a properly controlled double blind peer-reviewed experiment is that it eliminates the possibility that people are just bullshitting; a possibility which has constantly become a reality uncountable times throughout history.

Right, well 'collecting information' would probably fit into that category wouldn't it? It is easy to say that a lot of participants, especially new ones, have no clue about what things they will encounter (apart from what is suggested), and that includes the actions/behaviors of their friends, including any communication.

Okay, nothing.

I'm sorry, but I don't see any way to obtain objective evidence pertaining shared dreaming. It just seems this one will have to remain outside of science for now. In the meantime, could we please refrain from pretending to know for fact whether or not shared dreaming is possible?

Also, I don't see why people keep bringing up the fact that there's no experiment we know of on shared dreaming. That is no evidence for either side. That means no scientist thought it would be worth theIr while (how many scientists usually buy stuff like this) or didn't believe they could gather objective proof.

There's no way you could have said any of that if you'd actually read the posts.

No way to prove shared dreaming? How about asking one person to give a code word to the other through a shared dream? That would do it. Easy. Seriously, how hard was that to think of? And how hard would it be to do?

There's plenty of evidence for being sceptical. Like the fact it contradicts everything the evidence tells us about how brains actually do function.

Nobody's ever run an experiment to find if there are any teapots orbiting the sun. Do we think that there are any? No.

Originally Posted by Xei

No way to prove shared dreaming? How about asking one person to give a code word to the other through a shared dream? That would do it. Easy. Seriously, how hard was that to think of? And how hard would it be to do?

Even more bulletproof would be to have one person carry out a highly specific action, such as drawing a giant smiley face in the sky using fireballs or rearranging the stars, since some people have trouble recalling specific dream dialogue. It'd be kind of hard to miss something big like that.

I know it's old thread, but I heard that DreamHackers from Russia managed to share their dreams. I think that They were much more better in LD than anybody here, because they WOULD BE ABLE TO CURE PEOPLE IN REAL LIFE BY ENTERING TO LABYRINTS. They also said that there are so entities in more specific LD world were they CAN HURT YOU IN PCHISICALL WORLD WITH DISEASES.

Hmm it seems there is alot of conversation here.

Inception is possible and is easier than you would think.

You don't even have to do it in dreams.

Shared dreaming is real but obviously doesn't have all those weird rules they made up in inception.

peoples thoughts effect one another.

If thats possible than surely inception is possible.

we are often influenced by outside sources and are not conscious of it.

I dont think its very realistic that the deeper u go the slower time goes... Because actually it wouls mean that if you go so deep yo dawg cant form a proper sententace, ur brain would need to imagine so fast it would liek maik magnetigal field and overheat

1. No. Shared dreaming is a load of shit, and Inception was even more illogical than that concept alone.
2. Get your ass over to Deep Dreaming

Not sure about shared dreaming as shown in the movie (peeople showing up in each other's dreams as whole avatars), but another possibility is telepathy between two dreamers, of which there has been some evidence of. If anyone was ever on Lucidity.com, there was an article posted about how a test subject viewed a Christian-themed picture (IIRC it was Jesus feeding the crowds, with boats in the background, etc), and somehow made a connection with a sleeping person, who's dream journal the next day had dreams involving boats, fishing, Christianity, etc. While the picture in it's original form did not appear in the dreams, concepts of it did. Maybe that is a possibility of shared dreaming? Where dreamers share details of each other's dreams telepathically?

EDIT: Here it is:

The most famous among these were the experiments in dream
telepathy carried out in the Dream Laboratory of the
Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn by Dr. Montague Ullman and
Dr. Stanley Krippner in the late 1960s. These dream
researchers monitored sleeping subjects. During the periods
that the subjects were in REM sleep, a person in another room
focused on an art reproduction and attempted to
telepathically transmit an image of the painting to the
sleeping subjects, who were awakened for dream reports at the
end of each of their REM periods. Afterwards, judges were
able to match which picture went with which dream report with
an accuracy significantly above chance.

One night the target picture was The Sacrament of the Last
Supper by Salvador Dali. The painting shows Christ at the
center of a table surrounded by the twelve disciples, with a
glass of wine and a loaf of bread on the table, and a fishing
boat visible in the distance on the sea behind them. Dr.
William Erwin was the subject. His first dream was about an
ocean which he commented had a "strange beauty about it..."
Remembering his second dream, he said, "boats come to mind.
Fishing boats. Small-size boats...There was a picture in the
Sea Fare Restaurant that came to mind...It shows, oh, I'd say
about a dozen or so men pulling a fishing boat ashore right
after having returned from a catch." Erwin's third dream
seemed to relate to the Christian theme: he was looking
through a "Christmas catalogue." His following three dreams
were about doctors (Christ the healer and spiritual
physician?) His last two dreams of the night dealt with food.
In the morning Dr. Erwin's reflections on his dreams put the
pieces together in a way that is very suggestive: "The
fisherman dream makes me think of the Mediterranean area,
perhaps even some sort of Biblical time. Right now my
associations are of the fish and the loaf, or even the
feeding of the multitudes....Once again I think of
Christmas...Having to do with the ocean-water, something in
this area..." [6]

Dreaming, Illusion, and Reality

As for other aspects of Inception (time dilation and dreams-within-dreams): Been there and done both.

My $0.02.