Quote Originally Posted by dutchraptor View Post
Shadowofwind,
Do you mind sharing how you think dream sharing works? write as complicated as you want. I would like to hear side of the story. That's if you think you know.
Thanks
I don't know how it works. I can make some observations about my experience. However, trying to extend that into a 'theory' or explanation would be like trying to build a house out of a couple of toothpicks.

I'll describe more of the thoughts I do have about it, for OutlawPig also, and for anyone else who's interested of course.

The ancient Greeks and others had primitive, pseudo-scientific theories about chemistry and physics which were closely related to their theories about spirits and whatnot. Now we have very detailed and successful theories for chemistry, light, etc., but those don't cover any of the spiritual or paranormal subjects. As I see it, people who have affirmative ideas about such things as astral projection, etc. are to a significant extent thinking in terms of those old discredited theories, whether they are aware of the origins of the ideas or not. And what they are capable of experiencing is circumscribed by the limitations of those ideas. I think its very common for people to have objectively real experiences that are outside of what our modern theories can account for, but since they don't have a suitable framework of ideas to fit them into, they don't even know how to think about those experiences. So a lot of it just gets filtered out. And often they don't talk about what doesn't get filtered out, because they don't know what to say about it or don't want to be ridiculed by other people. I think that centuries of Christianity is partially responsible for this also, because the standard ideas about God, heaven, angels and demons are also often inadequate to interpret such experiences.

I spent a lot of time studying esoteric religious ideas in the mid-90's. Those spoke to a part of me that was bored, even starved, during my previous years of engineering study and work. In stages I rejected all of those ideas and settled into something vanishingly close to atheism as I returned to graduate school. I could never completely close the door on the mystical stuff though, every time I decided to conclude that something like the Richard Dawkins worldview accounted for the whole of reality, something would happen that didn't fit. Not enough to prove anything, but enough to leave a doubt. Over time, those anomalies increased and strengthened, to the point where I was getting accurate premonitions almost every night. I clung to my skepticism and cooked up all kinds of 'rational' explanations. Every time I post about this sort of thing people suggest possible fallacies as if maybe I hadn't thought of them. But I've been thoroughly over all of that, and then some. Eventually it got to where believing the rationalizations would have required vastly more faith than just accepting the experiences at face value.

One thing that seems essential to such experiences is an ability to move my sense of 'self'. If you want to learn this, read this Be as you are – The teachings of sri Ramana Maharishi, or watch videos by Gangaji on youtube. I don't believe their theology about there being a 'true self' which is falsely identified with the body and personality. But if you are willing to move into the mental space that they're pointing to, you discover that you can move your 'I' around, and that's useful. I would guess that a person can make a similar discovery through western psychological introspection also. It allows you to think on subjects that would be unreal to you from your former vantage-point. As you get stronger with this, one thing you can do is move your sense of identity to a place that is more general than your personal self. Most people do this already with their thoughts about race, tribe, political affiliation, etc. You might suppose that they're just manipulating a mental model of their place in the world, and they are, but there's more to it than that. Somehow they're also changing who they are. It seems to me that when I experience someone else's thought in a dream, or vice versa, there isn't some kind of signal being sent between us and decoded. I think that I am actually them to a small extent, with their brain, and vice versa. Maybe you can imagine why a lot of people would be uncomfortable or even terrified with this, and I think that's one reason more people don't have this kind of experience.

I think my exposure to quantum mechanics and topology helped too. None of this stuff is explainable by quantum mechanics, but the ideas are still helpful for analogy. Unfortunately, most of what I learned in my undergraduate 'modern physics' class turned out to be wrong. The reason quantum theory seems 'counter-intuitive' is its explained in a way that doesn't actually make any sense. For someone who doesn't want to spend several additional years in school, I think that Brian Greene's books could be helpful. Some of what he says is still wrong, for the sake of simplification, but probably I'm being too critical. For topology for a layman, undergraduate topology books might be doable. Or looking at a lot of pictures of fractals might help, to sort of break the sense that everything is like high-school geometry. I like the Mandelbrot set a lot, and there's a free downloadable program called Fraqtive that's good for exploring that. (I think anyone who likes math should love this program, whether you care about anything else discussed here or not. Make sure to go to 'advanced settings' and crank the iterations all the way up.)

One thing that I learned from physics study, which I've mentioned before, is that nature is strongly under-determined. In other words, there is tremendous freedom, more than most people realize. Imagine history as a braid of countless causal chains. Current physics theory only requires a kind of local consistency within the chains. The braid of causal chains is partially restrained within itself, but the whole braid is floating. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in known natural law that keeps the present state of reality from drifting in almost arbitrary directions, so long as the record of what came before, which is a part of the present state, moves with it. In other words, history can change as long as your memory changes with it, in which case there's no physical evidence that it changed. Moreover, although this global consistency is assumed, and is strongly consistent with common experience, it isn't actually in the math so far as I can discern. So it is possible that individual causal chains can branch and join in weird and objectively verifiable ways. I think there's something frightening about what I'm saying here, if you understand the implications. Its as if you can trust nothing. Being completely insane, as bad as that would be, might be rock-solid comforting in comparison to the potential chaos of reality itself, were there no love to support it. I'm not suggesting that anyone push these ideas to their logical extremes. But I am saying that if you poke at them a little bit, you see that a lot of what you thought was rock-solid fact is actually held there by your imagination. Much more is possible, none of which actually violates 'known physics'. For example, interpretations of quantum mechanics can be causal and non-local, or non-causal and local, but in either case there are strong restrictions on things like time travel and action at a distance. Those restrictions only apply within the model however, they say nothing of anything outside the model. Suppose you dream of a train crash, then that morning the train your sibling commutes on crashes. I think its a fallacy to say "physics prohibits knowledge of the future, so it must have been a random coincidence". Physics prohibits that kind of knowledge only within strictly physical systems, and by physical I mean only the aspect of physical reality which is described by that model. When you move your awareness of identity, you're outside of that model. You 'know' this, in part because results follow which would be impossible strictly within that model. If you deny the first experiences, you shut it down. I'm not suggesting to assume that such experiences are real either, you can easily make yourself neurotic that way, where you're looking to reflections of your own thoughts to tell you what to think. I'm suggesting a skeptical outlook, but without the unreasoning denial.

As I have posted previously, I tend to take a dim view of drug experimentation. I guess for a lot of people the benefits might outweigh the price you pay. But just by exploring these ideas, you can change your experiences every bit as much as you could with LSD, as far as I can tell from other people's descriptions. And you don't have to defy your reason or become all flaky and incoherent. The essential thing is to examine what you really know, to become aware of what you're assuming without evidence, and then relax some of those assumptions.

With a fractal like the Mandelbrot set, a piece of it is in some sense its own complete thing, yet at the same time there's no line that divides it from the larger whole. And there are different, non-mutually exclusive ways that you can identify individual parts. This is particularly clear if you include the associated Julia sets as one four dimensional object, which you can sort of visualize from two dimensions if you display both and move the mouse around on that software I mentioned. I apply this same kind of idea to identity. Similarly, there are a lot of different kinds of non-fractal geometries besides 2 and 3 dimensional spaces that are isometric to planes and volumes. For instance, imagine the front of a piece of paper is everywhere in contact with the back of itself. Stretch it enough and its equivalent to a donut shape, and a donut is easy to imagine. Now do the same thing in 3 dimensions, so that you see your own back 5 meters in front of you, and your feet above your head, and the top of your head below your feet, and your left to your right. Such as space is imaginable and locally things in it can be measured in the same way we measure things in our space. But it can't be embedded in our standard Eucliean space - try to fit it inside our world and you can't. (Though you can fit it inside 4 flat dimensions.) After you think about this sort of thing, you have more ways of understanding relationships between things which don't map to our familiar spatial relationships. Suppose that the relationship between you and another 'self' is somehow like one of these other ideas. Now you can become aware of it, where you wouldn't have been able to previously. With a few exceptions I can't say specifically what is like which of these other ideas, but it was by thinking about these things that my dream experiences changed.

One of the things I recognized a couple of years ago, is that every time I get a premonition someone else's thought seems to be related to it somehow. Every time someone wanted something from me, and there was some intersection between what they wanted and what I wanted, I'd get strong premonitions in bunches. In the absence of that, no premonitions. In trying to make sense of these experiences, and the thoughts associated with them, questions naturally arose about what was or was not 'me'. Suppose I feel afraid. Which of my thoughts is responsible for that? Is it necessarily me, or am I picking up on the fear of the person that I'm talking to? At first I assumed that everything that I was aware of in my mind was 'me'. But that model doesn't work very well, I can't make sense of everything that way. Now I think its all 'me' at least in some sense, but that 'you' is also a part of 'me' in a very small way. And I think I've gotten better at distinguishing 'you' from 'me'. One clue to this is just familiarity. If some aspect of a dream seems alien, to some degree unlike any part of what I usually feel, then I start looking for someone else to connect it to. Often there's a helpful clue of some sort, some name or object that helps tie it to the other person. Or often it just feels like them. Then if I talk to them and they confirm that yes, that seems like their personal thought, then I gain confidence in my sense of this. Its never clear cut though. For example, if I dream of my sister, I'm generally not just dreaming of my sister, I'm dreaming of a part of myself that's like my sister, and also about another person that has some sister-like relationship to me. Always there are many analogous meanings contained in the same dream experience. This is because the identities are all in one another also.

I think that many if not all people deal with this sort of thing, but its largely subconscious, in part because they don't have ideas they can use to explain to themselves what they are doing. Often when I'm talking to someone about shared thought experiences, and I run into some kind of wall of incomprehension, it seems like its because they're trying to partition identity into a me/not-me or higher/lower-self dichotomy that doesn't fit what I'm trying to describe. If there is a strict me/not-me split, then I don't see how you can shared dream. Hence my math analogies - we have a lot of clear, well understood ideas in math that don't involve that kind of delineation. This reminds me of one of my first dream premonitions, which I think I've mentioned previously, of a missile strike on a bus on a bridge in what was then Yugoslavia. I'd just learned about antipodal points in a model for elliptic geometry. These are points on the opposite side of a sphere which are in a mathematical sense the same point. I dreamed of being antipodal points, and saw what was happening at the other point. I don't think the math analogy very well captures whatever I was actually doing, which is why I can't give a theory for how any of this works. But the idea of two places being as one place was sufficient to allow something to happen, apparently.

I'm describing this with joy and enthusiasm because I love math and these kinds of ideas, but inside I am also terrorized and crying, because I feel the people on the bus. The capacity to feel is critical to all of this. So developing that is critical also. I did this by thinking about psychological subjects, and just by being open to myself and allowing myself to feel what I feel. That's worth doing for its own sake I think, and is probably more important to shared dream experience than all this math stuff.

'Spiritual teachers' piss me off, in much the same way that obvious-patent wielding corporate monopolies piss me off. I share all this is because I don't want anything that I may understand to be 'mine'. None of this sort of thing belongs to anyone. That openness is a significant part of what brought what I value in my life. In tension with this, I would not want for other people to learn anything about thought sharing from me, or anyone else, and then use that to abusively manipulate other people. And God knows there are a lot of people who would eagerly do just that. Unfortunately, it can't be stopped entirely. Fortunately, there is a blessing and a curse attached. The curse is that if you twist any of this around in a bad way, that twisting changes you and makes you pay. The blessing is that this cripples you in a way that prevents further harm to yourself and others, and the attendant suffering is just what you need to learn not to do that any more. Partially I'm making a threat here, or am pretentious enough to presume to relay one. Partially I want to point out that honest motive is really important for developing any of this. An earnest and dishonest person can get far in some ways, but in other ways becomes painfully stuck. A less talented but honest person can do a lot if they stay with it. Don't drop the ball, if you get an insight, think about it, and it will form the seed to the next one. To me the most important thing is to face yourself, like what Sageous calls self-awareness, and to sincerely try to treat other people the right way. (Not like I was yesterday!) Then you become safe for shared dreaming. Other people feel that safety, the spirit that is both of you feels that safety, and it starts happening.

I hope some of that helps or makes some sense to someone in some way.