Thread: Dream Share,anyone did it?

There are a number of people who believe they can do it on this forum.

There are others, myself included, that are curious as to whether it's possible and are working towards trying to get it to work, over at the IOSDP.

I done it. I would say it can happen naturally with someone you have a connection to in life.

To honest it does seem very, very cool!

I'm not even trying to convince anyone that shared dreaming might be true but for me it is.
I've been working together with Windhover@ for about 2 years now and we've had several shared dreams and many many synchs. I also had a shared dream with another member on this forum (he went inactive without a reason) and a couple of my friends. Personally, I think shared dreaming is only possible with people you have a connection with. And you must be open-minded. The attitude for this should be "I'm going to believe that it's true until somebody proves me wrong" and not "I'm not going to believe in it until somebody proves me wrong". With the latter one you can only fail.
And I'm pretty sure that nobody can 'invade' your mind as long as you do not have a connection with that person.

Originally Posted by anime

Hi all
Is this even possible?
Do you have to see the person you want to share dream with?
What are the limits?

I am very experienced. I've never been able to achieve it. At least not with definite proof. You know passing some sort of info to prove it happened and not a dream representation of the other person. I'm still trying. I don't know if it possible or not.

Originally Posted by EricinLA

I am very experienced. I've never been able to achieve it. At least not with definite proof. You know passing some sort of info to prove it happened and not a dream representation of the other person. I'm still trying. I don't know if it possible or not.

Well I'll just pop in here (not at all for a debate) and say "Hey Eric, I really hope you don't give up. I mean if you can't do it one way, please try another way." Especially for someone with your level of experience. And if you wanna join the IOSDP the doors are open! I wish you success and if you need help thinking of other techniques for sharing information in dreams come to the IOSDP! We'll be glad to help! Hey if you want to start your own group we will help! We can be sibling group like sister groups or brother groups. Well enough of that, the point of this is just saying never give up.

I have done it once and have posted it in the forums,it's a couple of months old I think. My experience with collective dreaming was the most enlightening thing to ever happen to me in my dreaming career. I think it is a once in a lifetime kind of thing, there is just nothing like it. I can promise you it is real but almost impossible to recreate. Check out my post/story of my collective dreaming experience from a couple of months ago---http://www.dreamviews.com/lucid-experiences/137045-collective-dream-so-cool.html

We've still yet to find scientific evidence that indicates that it's possible. As no one provided it yet, you can read pretty much anything about it, like it requires a connection, it's very hard to do, you have X limitations and all sorts of stories people come up with based on their weird experiences or what they've read/heard around. In controlled settings, no one has ever performed it of course, so don't take everything you read about it too seriously.

It's a pretty interesting topic in the sense that we do seem to be slowly making some progress towards it. For example, a few decades ago we discovered a way to communicate from and to a dream, we also have several experiments in which scientists control dream content. It isn't exactly clear in what terms shared dreaming would be possible though, as it possesses many of the problems telepathy does. Who knows if one day it will be possible, I surely would love to share adventures with people I know, imagine giving dream control lessons to a class right inside the dream!

Originally Posted by stonedreams

I have done it once and have posted it in the forums,it's a couple of months old I think. My experience with collective dreaming was the most enlightening thing to ever happen to me in my dreaming career. I think it is a once in a lifetime kind of thing, there is just nothing like it. I can promise you it is real but almost impossible to recreate. Check out my post/story of my collective dreaming experience from a couple of months ago---http://www.dreamviews.com/lucid-experiences/137045-collective-dream-so-cool.html

Thanks for the info. Did you define anyway to prove it really happened?

Originally Posted by zoth00

We've still yet to find scientific evidence that indicates that it's possible. As no one provided it yet, you can read pretty much anything about it, like it requires a connection, it's very hard to do, you have X limitations and all sorts of stories people come up with based on their weird experiences or what they've read/heard around. In controlled settings, no one has ever performed it of course, so don't take everything you read about it too seriously.

It's a pretty interesting topic in the sense that we do seem to be slowly making some progress towards it. For example, a few decades ago we discovered a way to communicate from and to a dream, we also have several experiments in which scientists control dream content. It isn't exactly clear in what terms shared dreaming would be possible though, as it possesses many of the problems telepathy does. Who knows if one day it will be possible, I surely would love to share adventures with people I know, imagine giving dream control lessons to a class right inside the dream!

I have control in my dreams as I think I can get just to control the dream itself. But connecting in a dream is something else. If it is possible I have to depend on someone else, besides myself. I guess it is just frustrating since controlling a dream totally comes to me so easily now. If it is possible to connect I hope it doesn't take another 10 years.

Originally Posted by EricinLA

If it is possible to connect I hope it doesn't take another 10 years.

Here's some possible good news you'll like to know

Well of course there is no way to prove it unless I was able to bring back a physical object to prove that I was. But I can assure all the Lucid dreamers out there that it is indeed possible and can happen, but the chances of it happening is slim to none. You just have to be in the right place at the right time, I don't think we will be able to harness it because we just cannot simply prove that it happens.

Originally Posted by stonedreams

But I can assure all the Lucid dreamers out there that it is indeed possible and can happen, but the chances of it happening is slim to none. You just have to be in the right place at the right time, I don't think we will be able to harness it because we just cannot simply prove that it happens.

Not quite right. It's quite possible to prove it if you do it under proper conditions like specific information that is rather immune to association data, but no one did it so far, and for very good reasons (how can you transfer specific sensorial data between two brains without any kind of interaction, especially during a state known to shut down most of external sensorial input?). Claiming that you can do it acts nothing more than as anecdotal evidence, and while it may blind you into thinking that it is an actual fact, is does not hold any recognizance for science, which is the same enterprise that enables you to make use of incredible technology due actually testable explanations. Even though this sucks (imagine a pair of person that could actually do it due, let's say, a pair of conjoined twins with very bizarre brain connections), it's the way evidence works, otherwise we would have people claiming they could fly if no one was watching them. I think people forget about the history of lucid dreaming: for many many decades we also couldn't prove it, even though it was possible in theory. But dream telepathy is not something like lucid dreaming, because it involves more than just brain chemistry. The most likely scenario is that if we ever reach it, it will be due technology like the one I posted in the previous post.

Well of course there is no way to prove it unless I was able to bring back a physical object to prove that I was.

You don't even have solid evidence for shared dreaming and you're already throwing another impossible concept into the discussion. Shared dreaming proving has nothing to do with bringing objects from the dream, that just makes the question even more complex. Wouldn't you agree that it's way more fascinating to work towards this in order to make it accessible for health-care, study advancements and recreative use than to claim (without any base reasoning) that "you have to be at the right place at the right time" ?

Originally Posted by zoth00

Not quite right. It's quite possible to prove it if you do it under proper conditions like specific information that is rather immune to association data, but no one did it so far, and for very good reasons (how can you transfer specific sensorial data between two brains without any kind of interaction, especially during a state known to shut down most of external sensorial input?). Claiming that you can do it acts nothing more than as anecdotal evidence, and while it may blind you into thinking that it is an actual fact, is does not hold any recognizance for science, which is the same enterprise that enables you to make use of incredible technology due actually testable explanations. Even though this sucks (imagine a pair of person that could actually do it due, let's say, a pair of conjoined twins with very bizarre brain connections), it's the way evidence works, otherwise we would have people claiming they could fly if no one was watching them. I think people forget about the history of lucid dreaming: for many many decades we also couldn't prove it, even though it was possible in theory. But dream telepathy is not something like lucid dreaming, because it involves more than just brain chemistry. The most likely scenario is that if we ever reach it, it will be due technology like the one I posted in the previous post.

It would be very simple to prove connecting in a dream if you used 3 people for the test.

1st person - Person to verify results

2nd person - Dream Transmitter

3rd person - Dream Receiver

Note: 2nd & 3rd person have no way of contacting each other or maybe not even know each other.

1st Person writes down some really random information and seals it in envelope in way that it can't be tampered with.

2nd person is told the information before going to sleep by 1st person.

2nd person tries to contract 3rd person in the dream and pass the information.

Next day 1st person contacts 3rd person to see if he has the information.
If yes the 3rd person writes it down. Then they both open the envelope together and compare it to what the 3rd person has written.

It if matches it would be pretty good proof.

Note: 2nd & 3rd person have no way of contacting each other or maybe not even know each other.

I like this, it would make up for any possible data that people could relate from the other person.

I think the content of the message would also have to be extremely specific. Not something like "a tree with red fruits", because a person can dream with that easily, but something like a series of numbers and letters that could no way have been accidentally incorporated in the dream (no dates or anything alike). On the other hand, it had to be fairly long to deny random chances, but not too long that the receiver could not memorize it. We have to take into account that dream recall isn't somewhat perfect. Oh, and one requirement should also be that the receiver either has amazing recall and notes the dream down before there's any discussion about the message, or they would have to do a WBTB, have an alarm for the end of the next REM cycle (during which the transmitter would "send" the content) so that the sample would be very precise and we could avoid large chunks of meaningless data.

If the experiment could be replicated several times with different people it would also be a success. I don't know exactly how they perform these experiments, but there's certain organizations that offer large amount of money for people that can prove them. So far no one has ever claimed any prize, but I've read that those who tried are subject to some control conditions. It would be nice that we could know the specific rules they had, or we could just make them ourselves.

But yeah, if the content was very very specific, I don't see how it wouldn't be solid proof. Especially if we do it multiple times with several people.

The problem with them not knowing each other is that most people that have dream shared say that you need a deeper connection with the people. I would recommend the people knowing each other, but not being able to contact each other.

^ If what I've experienced is real dream sharing, and I'm feeling 75% sure that it is, then you don't need to know each other - this is also what I understand from a few other people like shadowofwind. I mean you don't need to know them in person - just talking online is enough. I think all that's needed like you say Brandon is a connection, but all it has to be is something like a shared interest. It probably helps if it's an interest that at least one of you feels very strongly. But apparently some people who have a natural ability for it (shadowofwind for instance) can do it without need for anything like that.

To the skeptics *CoughZothCough* () knowing is very different from proving. Thousands of people for instance knew about lucid dreaming well before science was able to prove it. Funny though - I can't help but realize that a couple of weeks ago I would have reacted pretty much exactly the way you do. I now feel like all my skepticism was an armor or a shield against things I just couldn't believe or maybe didn't want to, and now it's been opened up.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

To the skeptics *CoughZothCough* () knowing is very different from proving. Thousands of people for instance knew about lucid dreaming well before science was able to prove it. Funny though - I can't help but realize that a couple of weeks ago I would have reacted pretty much exactly the way you do. I now feel like all my skepticism was an armor or a shield against things I just couldn't believe or maybe didn't want to, and now it's been opened up.

I think you continue to misinterpret the definition of skepticism. Skepticism does not refer to the rejection of ideas, it reflects an attitude of holding your position or believes towards a subject until you have enough evidence to reach a conclusion. Besides, we are all skeptic of something, yet you seem to talk like "skeptics" are a specific group of people. The funny thing to me is that you seem to distort skepticism when you (and many others) would probably make full use of it on similar problems. Wanna see an example?

Let's say that I went into general discussion and posted a thread in which I claimed that lucid dreaming causes severe neuronal damage. My reason for this opinion was because I was diagnostic with brain cancer after practicing lucid dreaming for 6 months. Do you think the majority of people would take my claim seriously without asking for more evidence? Should we all stop to lucid dream because someone "knows" that it causes brain damage? You sure are right about one thing: knowing is very different from proving. And the most important thing is that knowledge may be wrong. Just like people interpret (still nowadays) episodes of sleep paralysis with alien abduction, many others tend to interpret their dream experiences as events like shared dreaming without any kind of valid reasoning behind it.

But let's be fair: if you're first reply to some positions (I can't find the thread now) is "Prove it!", then why wouldn't people ask you the same when you make claims about shared dreaming? Yes, claims that you cannot substantiate with anything else than "I know because it happened to me and to people I know".
Now imagine we were in a court-law. If a judge heard that I stabbed someone in the neck and 50 people testified for it, would it be fair to give credit without further analysis? Would the judge commit me to jail without requiring solid evidence other than the fact that the 50 people "know", or most importantly, think they know? As you can see, these "I know, it happened to me", as valid as they may seem, don't stand for a moment in the real life. Of course it sucks, and sure look at people like Keith Hearne and Stephen LaBerge that had to walk a long and hard road to prove lucid dreaming, but without valid justification for one's claims, our education system would be a complete mess. People learning about "facts" that were told in the basis of "the janitor had a precognition, so precognition is true!". Just like the janitor, you cannot substantiate your claim that "you don't need to know them in person - just talking online is enough". Even worse, imagine I was not a skeptic and look at this thread: how would I know if BrandonBoss or you was right about the connection required to perform shared dreaming? Both of you (at least you Darkmatters, can't really affirm the same with 100% certainty about BrandonBoss) are talking merely about experience (yours and/or from others). So you see, it's very easy to go through the last 5 topics in shared dreaming and find conflicting information about every topic like shared dreaming, precognition dreams, among others. If I was not a skeptic, who should I trust? The person with the highest authority, the one with the best written reply, or ultimately the one who presents solid evidence? It's not a hard question Especially because I'm not even evoking the argument that experiences and perception are so obviously vulnerable to errors that since a very long time we stopped taking things we see for granted.

This may seem an attack, reason which I dislike and avoid posting in many threads of beyond dreaming due the concern that I might be perceived as someone that is merely posting to disrupt the topic, but my skepticism only indicates one thing: the fact that I'm humble in saying "I don't have solid evidence for shared dreaming". That does not mean that the topic does not interest me, that I'm not interested on finding a possible way of proving it, or that I think every people that disagree with me is wrong. No one so far showed any more information that we currently possess, and it's very likely that many people already tried to prove this phenomenon and failed. So saying "I know it's possible" sadly (but maybe for the best interests) does not hold enough evidence if we're talking with reason and logic.

PS: Luke skymatters, come back to the skeptic side, you can still consider shared dreaming because we're just as curious as the "believers". And you can have cookies !

Very interesting zoth (which switches over to Sith on my phone because you aren't in my dictionary, and Sith is). I am very very interested in shared dreaming, but as you have said, you have seen no proof, and I have no proof.

I can think of "scientific" ways that it could work, that are above our science to test or control now, but that is a mere theory that doesn't contradict science. But the theory that it doesn't exist also doesn't contradict science. So I can in no way say that I believe in it 100%. I think it is about 50%. The main doubt is that it hasn't been proven. Like with LDing, in a lab someone as smart as Laberge proved its existence. So even if we can'tfind the "why" like with dreaming, we should be able to find the fact that it is there.

Another problem is that there is absolutely no way to say that it 100% doesn't exist. Because you can always say that it isn't in the grasp of nowadays science.

My 2 cents....

If shared dreaming or dream telepathy are possible, the mechanism is outside of current scientific theory. There's a psychologist at Berkeley who thinks it works electromagnetically, but he obviously doesn't understand electromagnetics. Maybe quantum entanglement has something to do with it, we're not communicating remotely so much as selecting one reality from among many random possibilities. But I doubt that explanation is adequate, and even if it was, someone would have to work out the details for it to be considered within the realm of existing theory.

Methods of 'proof' such as work well in other areas of research do not lend themselves at all well to proving paranormal dream phenomena. And they don't even work very well for a lot of conventional research (xkcd: Significant).

If you are a skeptic and you want personal proof, you may be able to get that without giving up your skepticism, but you probably have to stop worrying about what the scientific community thinks. They're all about reputation and funding. I've written successful and unsuccessful grant proposals, and in my experience and understanding of the process, its very, very difficult to find a way to study something like shared dreaming.

I think that trying to brainstorm a test for shared dreaming, based on your thought of how it would work, is the wrong approach. Find out about it for yourself first, then you'll see that most of those approaches won't work. Or if there is an approach that will work, find it by doing shared dreaming first. Otherwise you're likely looking for it in a form that doesn't exist.

If you want to prove it for yourself, maybe you have to start with what you already experience that you don't completely understand, and just keep inquiring in that direction. This is how dream telepathy started for me (that's probably a better phrase than shared dreaming in my case). It started with a few weak premonitions, not strong enough to convince me they were real, but just strong enough that I couldn't completely write them off as having other explanations. So then I kept asking questions about how something like that would work, and they got stronger and more objectively defined in response to my pursuit of that. Eventually I noticed that there is always another person involved with the thoughts connected to the premonition, that its never just me. So I started paying more attention to that aspect of it, and so the awareness of sharing thought became clearer. Its not like I'm sending a message to another person, or receiving a message from someone. Its more like there is one meta-thought, and both of us have interrelated personal interpretations of it. When we dream our sense of identity moves around a bit, and we can sort of extend ourselves into the other person's part of the thought, producing a partial synthesis of their thought and our thought. We can be sure that its real, because a lot of times there's information in the thought that we could not plausibly have extrapolated from prior experience.

For me this works best with people I have just met or will soon meet who I don't know yet. There isn't as much potential for new thoughts in relation to people I already know.

In magazines like Skeptical Inquirer, the phenomena which they debunk are usually straw men. For instance, they might say that astrology is BS because the gravitational influence of the planets on people is negligibly small compared to the influence of nearby objects. Well that's nice, but generally speaking, astrologists don't believe that astrology has anything to do with gravity, so its irrelevant. (And its a simplistic approach to gravity also. Subtle though it may be, the positions of other planets have a quite measurable impact on the earth's orbit, for instance.) My point is that if you want to take a skeptical approach to something, it helps to understand what you're opponents are talking about. What Randi and others like him have been doing for decades is not that. (Even aside from that, the details of his 'challenge' were a bit bogus, for instance requiring a level of statistical significance that most scientifically accepted phenomena wouldn't pass either. That may be desirable to avoid the jelly-bean fallacy, but its not a reasonable criteria for branding something like shared dreaming as unreal.)

So in summary, you can be a skeptic and find out about shared dreaming, but to a large extent you have to approach it on its own terms. It will let you keep your skepticism and objective honesty. But you also have to be open to approaching it in a way that's different from how you're accustomed to thinking about things.

I don't mean this as a criticism of any particular person or any particular thing that anyone said. If I seem to have just rehashed what you said, then we're probably already agreeing, and I'm not trying to insinuate that you are saying something different.

Quite interesting post shadowofwind!

If shared dreaming or dream telepathy are possible, the mechanism is outside of current scientific theory. Maybe quantum entanglement has something to do with it, we're not communicating remotely so much as selecting one reality from among many random possibilities. But I doubt that explanation is adequate, and even if it was, someone would have to work out the details for it to be considered within the realm of existing theory.

The deal with quantum entanglement reflects the conclusion that if dream telepathy are possible, they are indeed away from our current understanding, but the problem starts already by the technology issue. Even though I'm not much into the topic, I think that the human record for this process is only of a few atoms. Now imagine the complexity of two minds, including the perceptual alternations that can arise during the input/output of the data. I agree with those that say that if we ever achieve it, it will be due technology like computers and brain-machine connection.

We do seem to have made progresses that are much more significant that many people think, like the japan team who is working in decoding visual input from dreams. This was actually taken one step further with the study of the famous monkey who was shown to control a robotic-arm using brain-machine interaction. But you see, it is technology that is allowing these advancements. One may argue that, even though they are different concepts, it was the cognitive science focus on dreams that made most (if not all) of the latest discoveries, with the obvious and growing help of neurosciences.

I think that trying to brainstorm a test for shared dreaming, based on your thought of how it would work, is the wrong approach. Find out about it for yourself first, then you'll see that most of those approaches won't work. Or if there is an approach that will work, find it by doing shared dreaming first. Otherwise you're likely looking for it in a form that doesn't exist.

Very good point. But after all this time, I still think we're pointed out in such a way that it's the understanding of the process that will allow future discovery on the field. Look at lucid dreaming for example. One might argue that people already knew that lucid dreaming was indeed possible (due having experienced it), but it wasn't only after the specific knowledge of REM ocular movements that they found a way to test it.

Its more like there is one meta-thought, and both of us have interrelated personal interpretations of it. When we dream our sense of identity moves around a bit, and we can sort of extend ourselves into the other person's part of the thought, producing a partial synthesis of their thought and our thought. We can be sure that its real, because a lot of times there's information in the thought that we could not plausibly have extrapolated from prior experience.

That's much more realistic than the wide-spread claims of specific data, I'll give you that. The deal is, taking biases out of the way (that I'll agree happen even in respectable science communities, due certain interests), we need some legitimate way to incorporate a falsifiable aspect in the experience. In what basis do you assert that you're not being victim of perceptual interference/other processes? I'm completely sure that someone like you already considered them, but do you react to them? The fact is that dreams, as a multi-faceted experience, relate extremely often to memory biases. Due that, whether way we choose to analyse it, we can't go with somewhat abstract data, that would defy the purpose of the experiment due obvious reasons.

My point is that if you want to take a skeptical approach to something, it helps to understand what you're opponents are talking about. What Randi and others like him have been doing for decades is not that. (Even aside from that, the details of his 'challenge' were a bit bogus, for instance requiring a level of statistical significance that most scientifically accepted phenomena wouldn't pass either. That may be desirable to avoid the jelly-bean fallacy, but its not a reasonable criteria branding something like shared dreaming as unreal.)

I have an article that goes specifically on about dream telepathy and this issue that shadowofmind presents. For those interested, click here

I'll leave the reply like this for now and head to bed, I got a serious problem of not being able to delay responses to topics that interest me, so I skipped a lot of probably needed study, especially about quantum entanglement (it's interesting but so complex!), but hopefully the discussion will continue ^^

Zoth & shadowofwind = both skeptics. Think about that. (for the record so am I by the way)

I'm a skeptic, which why I can say that I do not believe in shared dreaming simply because it has never been proven in a scientific setting. And because of that, it's easier for me to believe two people had 2 oddly similar, but completely separate, dreams than to believe that two people formed a magical telepathic connection to eachother so they could join eachother's dreams. Is it truly easier for you to believe the latter rather than the former?
I do not mean to offend, but does the latter not sound completely absurd to you?
Again, I do not mean to offend anyone, but why can't coincidences simply be coincedences?