Thread: International Oneironaut Shared Dreaming Project

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

a little bit.

Man... Two and a half years. That's how long it has been since we first dreamt up this beast. Two and a half years, and look at it now. What was once a Megaladon in the ocean is now a washed up skeleton on the beaches of forgotten dreams.

It was all so full of life back then. We were naive, and we had absolutely NO idea what we were doing. And yet, that never held us back. Its origins are humble, not much to talk about really. Hprib012 is technically the founder of this whole group, though Atras is the man who gathered the money to make this group into the symbol it is today and therefore gets all the credit. Anyways, hprib012 started a thread on Dream views about an experiment in dream sharing (The beginning!). Atras and I were the ones most interested in this little experiment, and I think there were two other dreamers as well. The goal was to arrive in New York City and find each other. We would look at pictures and maps of New York, memorizing as much as we could, and try to meet at the Empire State Building.

Suffice it to say, we failed. But instead of accepting our defeat and backing down, we redoubled our efforts, looking for explanations as to why this failed, and how we could improve our strategy. Maybe the place we chose was too big, too many variables and random associations with the place. So we began to get creative with our location choices, even taking a vote with other interested dreamers as to where we should focus our minds to. All we really had to work off of in the dream sharing field was the trio of DJ's written by Waking Nomad, Man of Shred, and Raven Knight. We had heard of a group of Russian "Dreamhackers" and found their forum, but we couldn't read their posts and never tried to communicate with them.

Waking Nomad was an excellent booster to the newly-founded International Oneironaut Shared Dreaming Project, and hprib012 had suddenly dropped off of the face of DV, never to return (yet!) People began to appear in droves to this interesting project, and we suddenly had 150 members on our sign in sheet, where originally there had been 15-20. Personally, this is what I think killed the IOSDP. There was too much information being spread around, too many administrative functions to be handled, too many dreams to be sifted through for associations that it began to get impersonal, our spark started to fade. We began to lose sight of why we started in the first place, and it started to become a task instead of an expression of genuine curiosity.

Chichen Itza is, and will always be the symbol of the IOSDP. I'm not really sure of the symbolic value of Chichen Itza, but as a group we spent a good 6+ months attempting to share dreams. Nomad had some pretty amazing dreams as I recall at Itza, but as I say, there were so many people and conflicting reports that any genuine cases of overlapping and /shared/ dreams were washed under the rug and influenced by other peoples' dream journal submissions.

Personally I left IOSDP several times due to lack of interest and lack of partners to talk to and share experiences with. Katsuno and Windhover@ are a great example of a dream sharing pair: they frequently communicated between each other, learning each others likes and interests and becoming good friends, and in return had significantly more Dreamsharing "maybes" than almost everybody in the group. They encouraged each other to keep trying and to stay diligent.

The hardest part of any long term experiment like this is staying persistent and consistent throughout. Now, as I write this, I don't think it is possible to do an experiment as subtle as this with one's own willpower. You WILL quit by yourself. But if you have a dedicated group of people, of friends that are with you, then I think real magic can happen. Best case scenario: Open up an Oneironaut Academia to those willing to devote time and money (in other words, those truly dedicated) with groups of perhaps 3 or 5 people who spend a majority of their time together, learning and interacting with one another, and all the whole focusing and reminding themselves of the dream.

I just wanted to write this down because I fear this is the end of IOSDP, and thought those who have come to check up on it like newdreamer1 here would like to know what happened.

Cheers, and happy dreaming,
Aeolar
(or NonConformist)

I had one dream related to someone else and that was my only successful trip to the shared dreaming location. I recall it was about someone shooting fireballs at me and in the other person's dream, they shot fireballs at someone.

I lost interest because I wasn't the most consistent lucid dreamer and I actually joined in hopes to do something extremely crazy like blow the location up or kill everyone on site to see if it came close in anyone else's dreams. I know it wasn't the right idea, but after I got that one dream I never can stop thinking about it.

I am now very consistent in my lucid dreaming and it took a whole summer of no sleep to get me to miss this.

If this were to get revived I will gladly contribute and I'd like to thank all who got this started for inspiring me.