Thread: Finding yourself in Other People's Dreams

Has anyone experienced what I like to call “Other People’s Dreams?”
By that I mean you are in a dream (even when lucid), and nothing about the dream seems to have anything at all to do with you, your life, the people you know, etc. All the dream characters are strangers, the setting is completely unusual, and the plot of the dream relates to nothing in your life, your fantasies, or even, as best you can tell, waking life residue. I do not mean that you are watching the dream like it’s a movie, as that can regularly relate directly to the dreamer.

I have experienced this countless times, and even investigated it while lucid -- for instance, while aware that I was dreaming, and who I was, I would ask dream characters who they were; also, I would carefully examine the scenery to see if there is anything at all I find familiar. Oddly, when I questioned dream characters, they often looked at me like I was insane, but would not provide an answer. Also, these strangers in my dreams often acted as if I were an old friend.

I wonder if all this might be some form of accidental dream sharing…anyone have thoughts about this, or similar experiences?

Also, and this probably belongs in another thread, I have found that strangers in my dreams (even those dreams that started out as mine, and not seeing like someone else’s dream) seem to make great efforts to curb my lucidity … ie, when I am in a state of strong lucidity and seek to eliminate the dream around me in order to change it or pursue other things conscious, I often find the dream suddenly crowded with strangers clamoring for attention, and occasionally grabbing my legs should I try to fly away....

Fascinating. I have read other people's reports of dreaming they were different people. I have had similar dreams also.

thats pretty cool, it could just be a messed up dream you have no control over, but you coooooooooooould be shared dreaming as well

Originally Posted by Sageous

....I have found that strangers in my dreams (even those dreams that started out as mine, and not seeing like someone else’s dream) seem to make great efforts to curb my lucidity … ie, when I am in a state of strong lucidity and seek to eliminate the dream around me in order to change it or pursue other things conscious, I often find the dream suddenly crowded with strangers clamoring for attention, and occasionally grabbing my legs should I try to fly away....

This sounds to me like the 'people' in your dreams represent thoughts. They're trying to stay in your stream of consciousness, sort of like kids trying to stay in a stream of warm water. The reason they don't know who they are when you ask, is as thoughts they are not aware of that.

I would guess that many of these thoughts belong to other people, and some of the ones that act more familiar are shared between you and other people, sort of like cats that have multiple homes where they are fed occasionally.

I've had a few clear instances of other people's thoughts in my dreams, and a couple of cases of my thoughts in other people's dreams.

You can't enter someone else's dream, you're always in your own dream, even during a shared dream.

The DCs you described just sound like normal retarded dream characters.

Wrong, i know better.

YES!
I have never visited any sort of dreaming website or ever done any reading on the topic. I'm a complete newbie. Please forgive my greenness. I found this website when experiences I've been having finally started bothering me enough that I typed the words, "other people's dreams" into Google.
I have a medical problem that causes me to faint more often than most people. I have noticed with more and more clarity lately that as I am gaining consciousness after fainting I seem to be experiencing the exact sort of dreams you described. I don't know the people or have any feelings toward them. I am an objective observer, but I am in the room with them. The surroundings have none of the familiar things that my normal dreams have. I don't know the people or events they are talking about.
Although untrained, I am able to practice some lucid dreaming. For example I can cause myself to go back to sleep and dream a more positive ending to an unsettling dream I've woken from. I am also aware in my dreams that I am dreaming and know I have control over what happens in my dreams. I've never tried this with these "other people's dreams." I think I am in a deeper state of unconsciousness when I have them (because of the fainting) and don't seem to have the same control.
But I completely get what you're talking about. It's nice to know I am not the only person on earth who has experienced this.

Welcome to DV, Katherinel, and thanks for sharing!

The primary reason I started this thread a while back was to shine a light on a peculiar experience many of us might be having, but we fail to notice (or care) when it does... Or, perhaps, we choose to attach meaning to DC's and schema that seem at first to have no place in our lives (waking or dreaming), as this would make the strangeness a bit more familiar.

Perhaps your fainting issues are opening a curious door for you. Since you are approaching consciousness when you have your "other people's dreams," it could be hypnagogia gone wild (my "other people's dreams tend to happen at the other end of sleep, though I have had them near waking as well), or perhaps something else. Who knows?

I suggest that now that you know you're not alone in this, that you consider exploring the experience as best you can. Maybe you'll learn something new and fantastic -- which I hope you'll share here -- or maybe you'll discover truly familiar things, like day residue you forgot, and have an opportunity to prove to yourself that these are "just dreams," and nothing more. Either way, you'll have answers, and a firmer grasp on your wits the next time one of these dreams wanders into your sleep.

In any event fear not, you're not alone in this -- there are at least two of us, and likely many, many more...

Most of my dreams seem to be a combination of my thoughts and other people's. I usually have some sense of how much something is mine and how much its not. Whether that sense is accurate I don't know, the only way 'objective' way to verify is when I find out about stuff from people afterwards. I've never had a dream that didn't seem to be 'mine' at all. Usually my own thought is the strongest current, and when its not it stands out. But my own thought is always in there at least some.

Here I need to be a little careful, as what I am about to say will make some people angry, others may think I am crazy or a lier. To those people, feel free to discount everything I say, God Bless you all. There are basically two types of lucid dreams. First, the ones we will all agree on. That is a dream inside your own head. You may have alot of contol or your brain may throw psycology or randomness at you. We can all agree here. The next part, I will not debate, and everyone can think I am making up, if they choose to, I am after all just some random guy.
The other type would be any dream that crosses the boundry of your own mind and involves mystical experiences. You may have the dream you described in either type of dream. To the skeptic I say the dream may just be a confused random event based on your own inner workings.
Now for the 'crazy' stuff. If you get good at dreaming, it can be used as a portal to what are basically mini-dimensions. A location established by powerful beings. The nature of these can be amazingly varied. You may be contacted by someone who notices your developing powers. and with out you knowing it, be escorted to a simple entry level mutual play ground. Other dreamers may be there as well as basically pre-school teachers of the dream area. You will not be allowed to run recklessly through someone else nice dream city or floating island or what have you.
You may find that your lovely powers to control everything are seriously dampened. This is because of two things. First such a playground is a shared experience based on the thoughts of all the other people and beings. You can start a fire in your hand for instance, but may not be able to make someone disappear. Likely they are looking at you like your crazy, because they are just as confused as you are. The second factor is that these locations will have established physical rules that dictate the shared experience. They will likely have an established down direction, an outer boundry, and may even have weather. These factors can not be modified by the students.
What happens in a place like this can be as varied as imagination. The instructors will likely throw small challenges at you to see how you react. There fore, in the case of you attempting to eliminate the dream, they may find that rude. When they all clamor around you or grab your legs, I would not suggest flying away. I would suggest calmimg yourself and asking out loud. "Ok, well what are we supposed to be doing?" The dream may then refocus into something not of your creation or understanding. Then do not attempt to be the God of the playground, but make your best attempt at understanding what the theme of the place is and try to participate. It may be that someone is giving levitation lessions to those who can stay focused, or that you are supposed to learn to interact through some sort of game, like capture the flag.
Sounds very, very crazy, but why would I lie. If you have gotten to one of these places, you are about to experience some fanastically weird and confusing stuff. Bear with it, even if some of the instructors keep you confused and do upsetting things. They must test you for many years, before you will be allowed to run free in a larger setting like an established city.

Sivason... I have had exactly such an experience a number of years ago. Here is my dream journal entry describing the scenario (please forgive the rambling nature... I just type these entries as fast as I can when waking) :

Bizarre lucid dream about controlling oher people's dreams within a concrete brick walled locker room panted white with navy blue paintings of bricks scattered over the walls, painted in varying perspectives. The white paint was very thick and glossy, very similar to swimming room change-rooms or locker rooms. The ceilings were fairly low, and there were visible corridors going up to slightly raised levels, with other parts of the locker room stretching off into these areas as well. In this room there were a few others lucid dreamers, congregated (around a large Persian rug?) on the floor who were entering other people's dreams. While their minds had jumped their bodies were left meditating, laying down, or even levitating. But somehow I was told that they were away, influencing other people's ordinary dreams and I was offered the chance to try to do so myself, so I sat down on the floor and practiced the instruction. Most of the dreams that I jumped into, during my instruction, are forgotten since my wake-up was a bit distracting. All I remember is that they were mostly people I knew, but didn't know too well, like old school friends or former colleagues from Vancouver. I do remember the instructor asking me to do nothing but observe the dreams I was jumping in. But for the last dream, I was asked to change something in the other person's dream. The last dream that I had jumped into and influenced was Dad"s, he had a dream that he was a child, sitting down in a tree looking up at his childhood treehouse window in the upper branches, I had the idea that I would startle him and try to wake him (curious to know what might happen), without doing anything too disturbing, so I made a monkey with cymbals come out the treehouse window and surprise him. He jumped down the tree quite startled, but I kept making the monkey pop out of everywhere to keep surprising him and to wake him up. I guess I eventually woke him up because I was out of his dream and somewhere in-between the brick locker room and the real world. I could see my sister's real bedroom (I'm in Canada, back for a vacation ) but I couldn't control my limbs. When I closed my eyes I could see the brick locker room again. I opened my eyes and was back in my sister's bedroom. I tried turning my body to roll out of the bed so I could wake up, but it wasn't working. But when I closed my eyes and returned to the brick room I was floating and spinning in the air in the same direction I was trying to roll, due to trying so hard to roll out of the bed. Slowly I gained control of my limbs and could move, but as that happened I wondered if it took me so long to gain control of my body because my mind had been in another place and took a long while to get back again.

I've never returned back to this lucid locker room, but I've wondered about it ever since... now I'm curious to try and re-find this type of place and continue whatever training was being offered.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks

-j-

^^ Now that, Sivason, was the sort of answer I was looking for when I stared this thread last year! And thank you Katherinel for reviving a question that I often wonder if more than a few of us might be askingI

Now, Sivason, that was a great idea, and I don't believe a word of it -- currently. I will try to follow your advice next time I'm in this "pre-school," and step back for as long as I can to see what someone might be teaching me. Everything you said might be, and likely is, wrong, but what if it's not? I feel obliged to not take that chance...

Maybe I should also try to clarify....I think that my previous post will probably seem as if I'm lecturing you about stuff you already know. I know that you already know those things, and didn't mean to imply otherwise. It was more on the lines of explaining where our areas of confusion and disagreement are, so you would understand the nature of the questioning a little better, and not worry about prefacing everything with trust disclaimers. Personally, there probably isn't much you can say where I would say "I don't believe that", as if the experience is unreal. But I might differ about an interpretation of an experience. For example, some people assume that if they have an insight that they later read in a book, that the fact of having independently had it first proves that the insight is true. To me, all it proves is that the insight was not truly independent, that there was a precognitive aspect to it. So I might question the assumption that telepathy proves authenticity, and might question the truth of insight itself, but will not question the claim of miraculous experience. I think its probably a fair guess that Sageous is coming from somewhere similar.

Originally Posted by shadowofwind

I think its probably a fair guess that Sageous is coming from somewhere similar.

Yup.

Sivason,

Most people who post a lot here believe in shared dreaming and/or something like 'dream planes', so there's nothing remarkable about your statements in that regard. An area of disagreement is to what extent a particular person's interpretations of these experiences are fundamentally true, and to what extent they're metaphors that aren't quite adequate to capture what's really going on.

Your 'instructors' sound to me like what are described elsewhere as 'elementals' or even 'thoughts', and are well known for trying to stay in your stream of consciousness because they feed off of your attention. It makes sense that you could learn things from them, but I have a hard time applying the 'instructor' moniker to something that would cling to my legs to keep me from leaving a classroom. Also, even though they have a little knowledge and and experience that may be new to us, in most people's experience their minds are in many other regards much smaller and weaker than those of their 'students', which again doesn't seem to me to fit the 'instructor' metaphor very well. Similarly, the interpretation of the power that creates the dream experience also seems to be highly subject to personal interpretation. In varying degrees, all of my dreams are created in a manner like what you describe, by another entity or will that's not my own. Yet I've never experienced a 'spirit guide' dream character such as many other people do, and it appears to me that these spirits are not objectively real in the same sense that people and animals are, with different people encountering different beings. I think its more like we're encountering different aspects of the same kinds of things, which are presenting themselves differently depending on who we are. A further point of confusion is that the 'knowledge' that I get in such dreams seems to a large extent to be pilfered from my own future, and from the minds of other people I know. It doesn't seem to merely be a matter of things only being presented to me when I'm ready for them. The pool of knowledge seems to be built up through the minds of people, with the 'teachers' not even knowing anything outside of that. Even the idea of these dream schools, for instance, is something that has been around for at least a couple hundred years, and I doubt you would be having the experiences if other people had not already been thinking about very similar experiences. This is why, as I indicated earlier, I'm interested in expanding our library of ideas a little bit, so that we won't just be independently discovering the same stuff over and over.

In another thread, someone suggested that the higher self is like the mother ship, and we're like explorers down on the planet surface, and we call up to the mother ship for access to charts and maps and whatnot. I think that's a great metaphor, and extending it further, I think that the charts and maps were originally all drawn up by people down on the planet surface. If we just look to heaven as an effortless source of knowledge, while being active in will but passive in idea generation, eventually we stagnate because our collective foundation of knowledge isn't expanding. At the same time of course we can't do anything without the higher self, aside from previously stored knowledge (some of it bogus, depending on what we're calling on), it also beams down energy and other supplies, so to speak.

Anyway, thanks for the thought. Also please don't take the critical aspects of what I say personally, its not meant in that way.

Of course I wont take anything you said critically. It is all valid too some experiences. I gave one example from my own knowledge of what his experience may have been. What I said is so extreme that i hardly expect one of a thousand people to take my word for it. I can say that my first entry into this sort of dreaming, was about 23 years ago and has developed into very detailed and specific things, so much more intense than what I listed above. Three small items I will add, knowing that likely this will sound like a sci-fi fantasy, and may be laughed off.
First, I have had maybe 1000+ dreams of this nature sinse the crazy ride started. Some lasting upto 2 hours with very concrete details. Some charectors have become fixtures and reoccured a few hundred times. The apparent rules of these realms did not come happazerdly at me and change. They built upon themselves and stayed consistant for 23 years now. I give to all skeptics, that this could be a very peculiar function of my own brain, playing a 23 year long practical joke, but that is more far fetched to me.
Second, I have an explaination for Sageous' experience with them treating him like an old friend, that I think meshes with everything Shadowofwind just said. That is these realms are not in a form your brain can really understand, so your own interpratation of confused input determines how you will see the people, items, and events in these dreams. If a being (who is not really human) is kind, female, older than you, and protective, you may visualize that it is your mother or favored school teacher from when you were five. The other dreamers may have seen him as an old friend of their own. If you come to an outer boundery, your brain trys to make sense of something it does not understand, so you may see a cliff, a wall, a chainlink fence, a force field, while the dreamer right next to you sees it as a road closed sign or something. Very much a case of the dreamer's interpratation affecting their experience. If your journey here is like mine was, you will make an ass out of yourself dozens of times, and be horribly confused 90+% of the time for a few years.
Third item, based on the idea of the teachers grabbing his legs, or being clumsy pathetic guides, or having weak minds ect... You interprate their actions in the confused manner I stated in #2. A crowd grabbing his legs may be a misinterpation of a gentle restraint while saying 'hold on a monent, lad' His fear and confusion would color what his brain filled in as detail. Also, consider, not every teacher is wise, some are like that bad gymm teacher so many have had. Not all beings there will be teachers. Some may be school yard bulliess, or curious observers, or you may have a confused interaction with another dreamer, that you can not make sense of.
Have fun everyone. If your dreams only take you to a beach of your own making, safely inside your head, where you have full lucidity and god like powers,,, well, hell, that is wonderful! Good for you, it will be an exciting hobby your whole life. If on the other hand, you are a rare type who gets to be involved in the kind of strange things I am, hold on, if is very confusing, world view shaking, and bizarre beyond your wildest dreams,,,, so to say.

Jaquideon, Thanks for sharing that dream, very interesting. My suggestion is that these beings like to be asked for their services. You should make a point when getting ready to attempt a lucid dream to use the same inner voice you would for praying. Something like this, "I don't know who you are, but I am ready to learn what you have to teach. Please show me more."
One method I used to make contact with the group that has been the most helpful, was to call out, while in a LD. Get lucid and when you are good and stablized call out something like, "I am ready to learn, please help me." This method however requires some skill at getting lucid and remembering you wanted to do this. Either method is where you should start. Good luck!!!

15-20 yrs ago this discussion would have been very unlikely, prior to the web.
And now we can meet & discuss topics that no one would have dared mention in public or share with most friends.

John Lilly wrote of some outrageous dream & astral stuff in The Scientist & other books dealing with tutoring by ET's he received. Not classroom style though.
As did Robert Monroe.
In consciousness , all rules are off, and anything goes ,is possible... whatever scenario- format serves the end can be created for us.

Can't say I've experienced this sort of situation, being in an anonymous dream, but again, why not.

Most of my dreams, I suspect, were created FOR me, to explore-learn in.

Here are my thoughts. I believe dreaming is always changing, normally all made by your own mind. As I read these forums more and more, I believe shared dreaming is a possibility.
I skipped 1-2 posts in the middle of this, but I will give my ideas on sivason's post.
I believe that if you recognize places in your dream, then it is your dream. If you see places you can't recall ever seeing in waking life, you are most likely in a shared dream(but not always). If you see places and people you never recall seeing, in a completely different situation than you have ever been in, it is very likely a shared dream. I believe in a shared dream, the original dreamer has control of the environment, but not the other dreamer(s).
I believe there can be a place like the Eiffel tower, or a street in japan that may have another dreamer lurking around(not always), and you may not even see they are there/recognize they are a dreamer. I am not saying that if two people in the world are thinking of the same place, they will both be there. I am stating that if two minds are somehow connected in dreaming, through whatever means, they may be able to meet each other in the dream. If various people go to bed at the same time, thinking about the same place, with the same events in mind, and plan on seeing each other, I believe they may be able to meet each other.
Please do not take my post as fact, these are just my opinions, and in a way, I somewhat hope I am wrong haha. I just assume all dreams are 100% in your mind, and stick to that. I am just stating that there is a possibility of shared dreams, and in the little bit that I believe they are true, that is how I expect they are like.

I once read somewhere, (maybe it was here?) that we project out our dreams ahead of us, much like how a car's headlights illuminate the vision field ahead. I thought about this and had a dream, the only dream I can recall offhand where a dream guide was showing me something. I witnessed dreamers dreaming, from a perpendicular angle at some distance, dreamers projecting their realities ahead of themselves. Bright colorful realities, sometimes briefly intersecting, and fading off into the dim void behind them.
Of course this too, could of been just a dream!

^^ What a great image.

Coincidentally, I had another "other people's dream" just this morning, and, though I was semi-involved in the plot , it -- in retrospect -- had a real sense of witnessing events "perpendicularly," as if they were passing by like distant traffic. The details were too precise for that wonderful headlights metaphor you offer, but I got a similar same feeling of watching another other dreamer project her visions before her, in full technicolor, and then I saw her "catch up" to her projections, consequences and angry DC's waiting in the dimming wash of her "headlight's" expectations. All from a distance, even though my dream body was in the same room with her.

Not exactly the same,I guess, but still a very curious experience!

Actually, your description is very much like what I intended to describe. The headlight analogy is a bit flawed, but the best I could come up with at the time.

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ What a great image.

Coincidentally, I had another "other people's dream" just this morning, and, though I was semi-involved in the plot , it -- in retrospect -- had a real sense of witnessing events "perpendicularly," as if they were passing by like distant traffic. The details were too precise for that wonderful headlights metaphor you offer, but I got a similar same feeling of watching another other dreamer project her visions before her, in full technicolor, and then I saw her "catch up" to her projections, consequences and angry DC's waiting in the dimming wash of her "headlight's" expectations. All from a distance, even though my dream body was in the same room with her.

Not exactly the same,I guess, but still a very curious experience!

Yes, many times i have been in another person's dream, how i know is that there is certain things that i don't expect to appear in dreams, like people i used to know but yet i haven't thought of them often. My dream scene changes without me even doing it, and plots happen in odd stories that i wouldn't even think of. Usually i am a great dream contoller and scene changer but i know when things are done without me doing it.

For me, when things happen in my dreams without my conscious control, its almost always due to something more like a 'familiar spirit' than the direct involvement of other people. Also, thoughts have a kind of inertia, and cycle around again and influence things even if I haven't thought them consciously in decades.

Nice to see some life briefly breathed into this thread (my first!) again; and especially nice to feel that breath in the form of thoughtful posts and not useless argument about shared dreaming.

I think, obviously, that this is an important topic, and I'm glad you guys have chimed in with interesting, and very divergent ideas. I hope more ideas turn up, to help guide me toward understanding -- or at least having tools to lucidly explore -- the nature of these odd experiences.