I went through another round of shared dreaming attempts recently, with my high level lucid dreaming friend I mentioned in my previous article. While success eludes us for now, our attempts did produce some rather interesting results. Before I get into that though, here’s our “techniques” for sharing dreams:
Both picture the same environment and try to meet there.
Try to meet in the dream counterpart of our real world place of residence.
Stepping through a mirror with the intention of being where the other person is
Googling where the other person was to locate them.
That last one was my friend’s idea, I thought it was rather funny. While I failed to become lucid during the week or so of attempts we did, she was lucid every night, so we got to see potential issues and troubleshoot rather quickly. Here’s a brief synopsis of the interesting events:


In one of my non-lucid dreams, I was trying to board a train to get to my friend’s apartment. I was at a different location then where my house should be, and I was waiting for the train. However, whenever a train got close, something stopped me from boarding it. Lacking a ticket, a last minute change of destination, and the most blatant dream-fighting-my-intention block: The platform spinning around when I would get to the end where the train was.


My friend tried to google me. She said that it kept changing and she eventually lost me before she could leave to get me. I guess I was having a particularly turbulent dream that night. She also tried stepping through a mirror, but that she said that had the same result. She would lose me.


The closest we got to success was a dream in which I remembered getting up in my friends apartment. The physical place was unaltered, except there were two cots in the kitchen, one of which I was sleeping on, the other was also occupied. I remembered doing a few things in the apartment. My friend had a dream that night of me and another person waking in her apartment, and then walking to campus. It was a very interesting coincidence, the disappointing (or perhaps not, depending) problem was that our descriptions of the third person weren’t very similar.


I won’t go into the different conclusions you could draw about the person showing up differently to each of us. Your view on the source and reality of dreams will influence the various interpretations you draw. There are many, many, interpretations. The simplest, which is what I’m sticking with, is that we weren’t sharing a dream, and that it was coincidence. If I err on the side of failure, any success will stand out all the more.


The most interesting effect of these attempts was that my friend found that the more she tried to find me and to connect to my dream, the less and less control she had. This effect continued to increase over the week of our attempts, until she decided to quit after we both decided the experiment was having a negative impact on her own personal dreams as well as our shared attempts.


This result has big ramifications! It suggest that if you were to mix the dream consciousness of two people, you would get a kind of average of their awarenesses, instead of two separate consciousnesses in a shared environment. It also helps to outline what might be necessary for two people to share a dream: a like mind and a sort of connection (to avoid a jarringly different joined conscious) as well as relatively equal and high levels of lucidity.


I am looking forward to our next experiment.

-Hatter

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A little while ago I had a long conversation with one of my friends about lucid dreaming. She has what I termed “Transcendent Lucidity,” or complete awareness in every dream, as well as high levels of control. Enough lucidity to essentially life your life in dreams, and abandon waking reality. Upon my discussion with her however, I noticed a completely different point of view then the one I held and still somewhat hold. She thought it was selfish and sad to live your life in dreams. I argued that there’s nothing selfish nor sad about it, you can still live your normal life, as a normal person, or that even if you didn’t really function in daily life, who cares? It’s an intermission in between a lifetime of unlimited potential and another lifetime of the same.

How would being able to be completely lucid every night for as long as you want change the way you lived your life? Here’s a few that came up in that conversation:

Positives:

-It would give you anything you wanted every night
-it lasts as long as you want
-You wouldn’t have to worry about the normal waking life.
-You wouldn’t want expensive luxuries nearly as much, because you already have everything every night.

Negatives:

-Daily life becomes a drag after having achieved everything you ever wanted.
-You would be dysfunctional in waking life, as it would just be an interruption to dreams.
-It may feel like however long, but in reality it’s just like normal memory when you wake up. (The only thing is, there’s nobody to remind you of it, so it fades away until something does, or unless you write it down. I doubt anybody is going to write a lifetime down in a day)

Questions to ponder and discuss:

When you’re spending more conscious time in your dreams then your waking conscious, which one is your reality?
Is it selfish to spend your life dreaming?
Could you somehow spend that time in the dream with another person from waking reality? (effectively achieving a lifetime with another person)
(This sharing would allow you to discuss what happened with another person, improving your recall)

What’s your opinion on Transcendent Lucidity? I’d like to have a discussion with my readers on this topic, as more points of view will bring new avenues of thought and discussion. Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

-Hatter

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I was mulling over my dreams last night, and I was doing my routine check with a friend to see if it might have been a shared dream. As usual, no connection whatsoever. At least literally speaking. That’s when an idea hit me.

If dreams could be considered symbolic, what’s to say that all dreams aren’t shared, but with different symbols?

Maybe that sounds impossible, but think about it. If every person has a different perception of the same thing, it’s feasible in most ways. I was just thinking about it and I can’t really think of anything that might disprove it. (Not saying that this makes it true, as that’s a logical fallacy, just that it remains a possibility in my mind right now.) Something that is necessary for this idea is another idea: That we all dream together in something akin to the collective unconscious or a world of dreams. But the first idea begs the question:

What are actual shared dreams?

Under this concept, a dream in which people successfully communicated and experienced the same thing would be when they aligned their mechanism of perception. This way, they perceived the same things in the dream and could communicate as well as remember something similar.

This is just an idea that struck me, not based on experience or something I’ve read or anything like that, just an idea. What do you think of it?

-Hatter

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