Lucid/shared dreams

Hi everyone, just found this site a couple of days ago. I have been having LDs since childhood (though I didn't know what they were until recently) and shared dreams since the mid 'sixties. I am not able to LD when I want, it just happens sometimes (c. 3-4 times per month), though I shall be trying out the techniques given here and hope to improve on this. My interest in dreaming came about from my research into psychic/paranormal phenomena, which I have been involved in for over 30 years - I believe that [some] dreams are a result of the mind accessing the 'astral plane' and I've been looking for a way to do this in a controlled manner. It may be achieved through drugs, but this is risky and generally illegal - I was very interested to read a post from I H8 Reality (in the Research forum) about using electrical stimulation, though he will probably need to use a current source and bipolar pulses (I could draw a schematic - I'm an electronic engineer by trade) or he will get polarisation of the electrodes. Possibly a better solution would be to use TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation).

I was also interested in a post by WakingNomad (in the Beyond Dreaming forum) about the idea of having a shared LD with 3 or more people, or even the whole world. It seems one way to get 'shared dreams' is to synchronise brainwaves - this is fairly easy to achieve if the other person is in the same room, but rather more difficult if they're 1000km away, though the Internet plus a GPS time reference might be able to achieve this. Just an idea to kick around - perhaps we (the Dreamviews community) could start a project to look into this, if there's sufficient interest.

How do you synchronise brainwaves in the first place? If there's going to be research on shared dreaming, which I think would be a good thing, we/you should start simple. Let's start with proving it's possible, actually there was someone on the forum who was going to do just this, but I don't know how that ended, I can't find the link either.

I did some work on this when I was in the UK - if you feed the output of an EEG into a PLL (phase-locked loop) to smooth out the noise fluctuations, you can use the output of this to synchronise another persons' brainwaves. I was using an IR strobe, but I think TMS might be better - direct electric [current] stimulation struck me as being a bit risky. I wasn't able to do enough on this to say that it definitely 'enables' shared dreams, though it seemed to work - I was looking at ways of doing this remotely, but unfortunately circumstances and [lack of] finances prevented me from going any further. I think a remote setup would be nescessary as people (who might like to participate) are not generally in the same location.

Cool. You're in China? What's your nationality? British?

Anyway, I have a theory on the shared dreaming physical proximity idea.

You sleep with someone in the same bed, or same house, you talk about your dreams with them the next morning when you wake up, because there they are.

There are actually two users on here, Ezzie_Ezz and mrdeano who had a shared dream and didn't even know it until they randomly found each other in chat. She lives in Europe, and he lives in North America. They had never communicated previous to the shared dream.

Your electronic experiments are interesting. I am an electronics technician by trade. Have you ever seen Dreamscape, the movie?

Let's share dreams together.

Yes, I'm British, though I haven't lived in the UK for about 7 years - I moved to France in 2002, with the intention of retiring there, but things didn't work out and my [then] wife decided to divorce me in 2007 - so I had to sell my nice house in the Vienne, and ended up in China where I'm currently married to a Chinese woman.

I initially thought physical proximity might enable shared dreams (as most physical interactions obey the inverse square law), but practical experience has shown otherwise - it is just as easy to 'link up' with someone 10,000km away as it is with someone in the same bed. I think such mental connections may operate by quantum entanglement, though I don't have any evidence for this. If you live with someone you're more likely to get [statistically] invalid results as you will tend to discuss any dreams on waking, as you said, and possible influence each others' recollections. I have only had a significant number of shared dreams with someone who lived with me with one person, and we would not discuss any dreams until we had both written them down. I've also had shared dreams with someone whom I had not had any previous contact with, we subsequently met or texted each other (on an unrelated subject) and discovered we had been 'in touch' previously.

It would be interesting to try to share a dream with you, though I don't know whether this would work - of all the shared dreams I have had, nearly all have been with women (several hundred in total, with about 5-6 'strong' contacts vs. only 3-4 with other male friends. I don't know if this is because women have more 'psychic' ability, or because of physical/sexual attraction, as I am not in the least bit 'gay'. We would need to agree on a 'meeting point' - do you think we should pick an existing physical location that we both know, or try to 'build' somewhere on the 'astral' - although the more people that are involved [in the latter] the better the chance of success. A bit like 'second life' but based on the 'astral' and not in a server somewhere - although it might still need a computer to establish a 'link' reliably.

I haven't seen Dreamscape - I've just Googled for it, and it sounds quite interesting, though how can you assassinate someone (for real) in a dream?

Well, kelisi, a few of us meet on the Moon. We have built some dreamscapes there: A Biodome and a Dark Tower, a Temple in the City of Nowhere in the Land of Nod, and Dark Castle... I would suggest focusing on the Biodome, though. We have a description of it in the thread in my signature.

I agree about having a shared dream partner of the opposite gender, regardless of sexual orientation. I think it's about ying-yang energy, like north and south magnets.

I have to look up some of the phrases you used such as inverse square law, and quantum entanglement, though I am reading "Entangled Minds," albeit slowly.

Pretty amazing that you have had shared dreams with hundreds of people! I have with maybe a dozen or so (not including people from other dimensions.)

I do not believe that you can kill someone's phyiscal body from dreams, but you can definitely induce nightmares.

I think you misunderstood my earlier post - I've had hundreds of shared dreams, but only with 5 or 6 different people, and that was over a period of more than 50 years.

I'll read up on your Biodome, and see if I can locate it. Why did you pick the moon? It produces associations of a barren inhospitable place, which it certainly is in real life. When you say 'people from other dimensions' do you mean extraterrestials or people from other 'worlds', like Tir-na-Nog and the Tuatha de Danann? I've never had the fortune to 'meet' either sort.

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Originally Posted by kelisi

I think you misunderstood my earlier post - I've had hundreds of shared dreams, but only with 5 or 6 different people, and that was over a period of more than 50 years.

I'll read up on your Biodome, and see if I can locate it. Why did you pick the moon? It produces associations of a barren inhospitable place, which it certainly is in real life. When you say 'people from other dimensions' do you mean extraterrestials or people from other 'worlds', like Tir-na-Nog and the Tuatha de Danann? I've never had the fortune to 'meet' either sort.

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Ah, I see. Still hundreds of shared dreams is awesome.

Raven Knight and I picked the Moon initially, because we thought there would be no people there for us to get confused about, since she and I have never met physically. Also, if you find yourself on the Moon, it's probably a dream since you can't breathe there!

I don't know those pronouns you refer to, but I mean extraterrestrials, and people from other worlds.

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Originally Posted by kelisi

I was also interested in a post by WakingNomad (in the Beyond Dreaming forum) about the idea of having a shared LD with 3 or more people, or even the whole world. It seems one way to get 'shared dreams' is to synchronise brainwaves - this is fairly easy to achieve if the other person is in the same room, but rather more difficult if they're 1000km away, though the Internet plus a GPS time reference might be able to achieve this. Just an idea to kick around - perhaps we (the Dreamviews community) could start a project to look into this, if there's sufficient interest.

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If you're serious about continuing your research I might be able to look into the software necessary to transfer the data over the internet.

If you're into Windows programming and USB protocol that would be much appreciated - my expertise is mostly in hardware design, and although I've written a fair amount of 'C' code this has only been for MS-DOS and various micros. If this project is to progress, we would need to develop a 'black box' that was connected to the [users'] PC via USB, as most modern PCs don't have serial or parallel ports. I think it would have to be an external box, as modern PCs are PCI or PCIe [bus] based and developing hardware for this is difficult and expensive (as it requires either custom chips or FPGAs) - also a lot of users would be hesitant about installing an [internal] expansion card.

This box - I think I shall coin the name SynBox ('synchronisation') - would combine an EEG amplifier, PLL, micro, and [software based] PLL to generate an accurately phase locked signal, using the time reference data from a GPS receiver. This would be used to synchronise the users' brainwaves either by an IR strobe, direct electrical stimulation, or TMS - this will need a bit more investigation. I think it would be better to have a GPS receiver [chip] built in to the SB as most people won't have a GPS receiver, and also a lot of these often don't have the 1pps time reference signal accessable without 'hacking' into the unit. There is not much data to be passsed over the Internet, since it can't be used for the actual 'sync' timing pulses - only an unsigned int for actual [master] frequency, which is received by the 'slave', and information to ensure that this gets to the correct recipient. Other users' IP addresses could be got from www.dyndns.org - it might need to access the dreamviews site to get users' dyndns names and perhaps permission to 'link up'. A user interface a bit like Skype, perhaps? It would be interesting to run this with Second Life (though it would have to be a separate process) using the latter to provide the visual cues to 'link up', and perhaps induce a WILD.

I could do all the hardware design and code for the SB, and build a couple of prototypes - then if this idea takes off, I could organise kits, or complete assembled units (it might be worth looking into the cost of getting a CEM to build these units, if there was sufficient demand, as this is very cheap here).

-is thoroughly impressed by all the big words- I'm not sure what most of what you just said means, but if you follow through with this then that would be awesome. It's about time someone scientifically experimented with/researched shared dreaming.

Oh, and welcome to DV Kelisi. ;)

Kelisi,

I think you might enjoy reading "Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements."

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Originally Posted by kelisi

If you're into Windows programming and USB protocol that would be much appreciated - my expertise is mostly in hardware design, and although I've written a fair amount of 'C' code this has only been for MS-DOS and various micros. If this project is to progress, we would need to develop a 'black box' that was connected to the [users'] PC via USB, as most modern PCs don't have serial or parallel ports. I think it would have to be an external box, as modern PCs are PCI or PCIe [bus] based and developing hardware for this is difficult and expensive (as it requires either custom chips or FPGAs) - also a lot of users would be hesitant about installing an [internal] expansion card.

This box - I think I shall coin the name SynBox ('synchronisation') - would combine an EEG amplifier, PLL, micro, and [software based] PLL to generate an accurately phase locked signal, using the time reference data from a GPS receiver. This would be used to synchronise the users' brainwaves either by an IR strobe, direct electrical stimulation, or TMS - this will need a bit more investigation. I think it would be better to have a GPS receiver [chip] built in to the SB as most people won't have a GPS receiver, and also a lot of these often don't have the 1pps time reference signal accessable without 'hacking' into the unit. There is not much data to be passsed over the Internet, since it can't be used for the actual 'sync' timing pulses - only an unsigned int for actual [master] frequency, which is received by the 'slave', and information to ensure that this gets to the correct recipient. Other users' IP addresses could be got from www.dyndns.org - it might need to access the dreamviews site to get users' dyndns names and perhaps permission to 'link up'. A user interface a bit like Skype, perhaps? It would be interesting to run this with Second Life (though it would have to be a separate process) using the latter to provide the visual cues to 'link up', and perhaps induce a WILD.

I could do all the hardware design and code for the SB, and build a couple of prototypes - then if this idea takes off, I could organise kits, or complete assembled units (it might be worth looking into the cost of getting a CEM to build these units, if there was sufficient demand, as this is very cheap here).

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I would need to educate myself if we were to this, so getting someone else who already has the knowledge would be more efficient.

Also if we'd do this with EEG it would be too expensive and impractical for regular use. It probably wouldn't generate good quality shared dreams either: it would be like when you're dreaming when for example the TV is on, I heard that's very annoying. If it would all work out to begin with. I'm more interested in 'natural' shared dreams.

Thanks, Hidden - I think more research should be done on a whole range of 'paranormal' subjects, but the scientific community in general ignores such things, or tries to pretend that they don't happen (or that such effects are caused by fraud or trickery). I got into researching this field by observing that psychic phenomena often affect the voltage of a charged object inside a Faraday cage, something that electromagnetic theory says is impossible. I was initially 'gobsmacked' but decided to investigate it further, and I have now developed a fairly comprehensive theory to explain such effects.

I agree that using a commercial EEG system would be too expensive, but building a circuit that will detect/amplify such potentials only costs c. $20 in components - I don't think the total cost of an SB would be more than $100, the most expensive part would be the GPS receiver module (c. $40), it isn't practical to build this. I don't see why [this technique] shouldn't generate good quality shared dreams, but this is something that can only be found out by trying it - I certainly intend to carry on with this project, if possible.

I probably would enjoy reading Advanced Lucid Dreaming: The Power of Supplements if I could get hold of a copy - the bookshops here won't order Western books, and firms like Amazon won't ship to China. Maybe there's a pdf version that I could download.

I have a pdf version of that book, but I'm somewhat illiterate when it comes to that sort of thing. Would it work to just attach it to an email?

The Faraday cage thing reminds me of something I read in a book called Mastering Astral Projection. Apparently this guy was getting some sort of scan (that I don't remember the name of) and he did energy work while being tested, and the results were all messed up. They said it was because the machine was broken, but it worked for the person directly before him and directly after him. Sorry that wasn't terribly specific--I don't really remember the details.

OOO, this is too much for me

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Originally Posted by kelisi

perhaps we (the Dreamviews community) could start a project to look into this, if there's sufficient interest.

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Already in progress my friend, already in progress. Welcome.

Tell me more... what do you think of my SynBox idea, or are you guys planning to use a non-technical, i.e. purely mental approach?

You're the first person I've seen who's approached this in a technical way. I haven't looked in BD/Research (not sure where it is) a whole lot though. Until I saw your post, I didn't know that sort of thing even existed.

Cool. So, you have EEG equipment. It must be 'coincidence' that I have met you because outside of hypnotherapy; the other thing I will eventually be certified in is biofeedback. I am particularly interested in EEG, of course. How do you use the output to synchronize the other person's brainwaves? Once it comes out... where does it go and how does it affect the other person. One might use hypnotherapy and watch for the waves to synch via the equipment. This is exiting! :) Even though we are not in close physical proximity, if we could share ideas and experimental design and such we could collaborate efforts. I will have EEG equipment. All of any funds that I bring with hypnotherapy go back into hypnotherapy and biofeedback training, equipment, etc.

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Ummm... that may have been a bit presumptuous. I will not have equipment for a time and the training and certification will not come for a while either. I'm so exited about this and have spent so much of my life thinking about it that I may have got ahead of myself. There is a biofeedback technician at the Center that I work at but he would think I was insane...lol. Good luck and let me know if there is a way we can work together. I will probably design a hypnosis script to use for this or similar purposes. I am in grad school right now, doing hypnotherapy, raising a family, and working a full-time job (one of the most stressful jobs there is) but this is certainly my passion. Sort of my 'life mission', I think :D

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Originally Posted by kelisi

I did some work on this when I was in the UK - if you feed the output of an EEG into a PLL (phase-locked loop) to smooth out the noise fluctuations, you can use the output of this to synchronise another persons' brainwaves. I was using an IR strobe, but I think TMS might be better - direct electric [current] stimulation struck me as being a bit risky. I wasn't able to do enough on this to say that it definitely 'enables' shared dreams, though it seemed to work - I was looking at ways of doing this remotely, but unfortunately circumstances and [lack of] finances prevented me from going any further. I think a remote setup would be nescessary as people (who might like to participate) are not generally in the same location.

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My EEG amplifier was a 'home brew' - a commercial machine would be far too expensive. It's not too difficult to design if you're an [electronic] engineer, the main issue is safety as it must be totally isolated from any mains powered equipment - this also helps with noise rejection as the signals are very small.

I like the idea of using hypnosis to achieve LD/SD, I was wondering if would be possible to combine this with biofeedback, i.e. achieve a hypnotic state in a feedback loop with a computer - this would need to play wav files, or flash images/messages on a screen to induce a hypnotic state - since it isn't really possible for all the people participating in such an experiment to each have a [human] hypnotherapist with them. Anyone done anything along these lines? Is inducing a hypnotic state possible without a human hypnotherapist?

Yes, it's possible. I would have to take out a few of the elements which I feel is important to the research... BUT, it would increase the population participating and give more data.