I think it is possible based upon an interaction I had with a forum member a long time ago when we had the shared dreaming project going.
but I really would need to try more things to verify.
The thing to remember is dreams by default are generally your OWN mental content, it would be more of a practice in meditation and disciplined focus to deliberately find a real person in your dreams… whereas running into someone by chance and having an SD with them would be more likely, if you know them in person.
I mean like, two dreams I have strayed away from the default scene with deliberate goals in mind to come to find family members sitting at tables wanting to talk to me.
In both instances these family members called me the next day… I do not get calls from my extended family very often, either.
So what is this? Is it just me predicting probable futures? Possibly. Is it that our minds are linked subtly? Possible. Both make sense, and it also makes sense that because such dynamics are so extremely subtle that deliberate shared dreaming would be a rather challenging thing to do.
Think also of the nature of thoughtloops. When you encounter a DC you generally have an impression about them, either “he’s real” or “he isn’t real” (generally only the latter if you’re lucid) so let’s say you’re lucid and you find a DC, from the moment you find him you are assuming that he either is, or isn’t, (or both) real… this is going to bias the content of your dream.
The proper thing to do in my mind would be to stare this dream character down, keep your mind blank (meditate basically) and see if this dream character does anything.
This does not mean you expect him to do anything, or you expect him not to, you are just observing him. If he is a real person he is obviously going to then start doing things (now that you’re more in his dream than he is in yours [speculation, read between the lines]) real random that you wouldn’t normally encounter in your dreams.
I do not know if Retro still posts here but we tried to SD once and though we both dreamed of meeting each other, none of us could understand each other’s code words. If my theory is correct this would be because our minds were clogged with our normal dream thoughtloops and expectations that, though we dreamed of each other, we were not able to connect with each other per se, we were just dealing with mental modelings.
(my throat was blocked up and I couldn’t hear what he was saying, so if you believe in chakras, work with the throat and third eye to increase your likelihood of shared dreaming occurences).
But to sum it up, I think it’s more than possible, I’m fairly convinced that I can from time to time dream with real people, but I do not know if it’s just because my mind is predicting future interactions (such as the phone calls… ) or if we’re really dreaming.
But if you go to this thread you can read an account of how I ran into a lucid dreamer in person after dreaming about talking to him the perviousish night.
https://community.ld4all.com/t/the-lucid-look/16156
Also one parting word, if you base your world view on only what is ALREADY scientifically proven, you’re going to be missing out on a lot of things that have yet to be so.
I mean, think about it. Cavemen sat around and looked at birds. Flight was 100% impossible for them. They couldn’t even begin to think of the most abstract notion of how to fly, of what it was to go about flying, that they could make machines that were capable of lifting them up off the ground.
Science has nothing in particular to do with the mystic or religous, it does not attempt to disprove… keep an open but questioning mind about all things.
There are STILL people who vehemently believe that lucid dreaming is completley impossible, and it is only jsut recently that we’ve been able to prove it scientifically to people.
Before then, if you had not experienced LDs, you would have had to simply rely on the faith that those who had were being honest with you. It would have seemed like superstitious nonsense to most people in contemporary societiies. Keep this in mind.