You all know that I am all into Beyond Dreaming stuff and I always try to be open minded. I believe to promote Lucid Dreaming and to advance our self in its capabilities we need to stop lying to our self. We need to look for facts, patterns of what seems to be coincidence, proofs and so on. Add to consideration anything that is suggested or proven by science, gather experience from all over the community and try to achieve something new, something that nobody has ever achieved yet.
There are a lot of experienced lucid dreamers on this community, I am sure you will understand me.
Fake Nightmare Shared Dreams and Why They Work?
I found several threads where people claim that they can invade others dreams and give them nightmares.
You all know how control of our dream works, our inner intentions and expectations are doing all the work. When those guys are offering you to get a nightmare, they ask you “what are you greatest fears?”. You tell them your fears, at the same time you already image how would it look like, to make it even more intense, they will tell you their version of how it would look like. Intentionally or unintentionally you will think of it, you will imagine how would it look like. So you basically program you self to have a nightmare.
That’s not all, when you go to sleep, somewhere deep inside you expect this to happen, even you you are a total disbeliever you will keep a slightest possibility that it might be true. It gets even worse when you are a believer, you fear of what will happen with you during next sleep, what you do is you create pure intention to get exactly that nightmare that you asked for or that nightmare that you’v been told about. Take SP as an example, you can see how powerful is fear and what kind of intentions it does create. Fear is something very hard to control, you might not realize it but you create a powerful intention by simply being scared of something. Inexperienced lucid dreamers get scared of a SP phenomena and by that they are bringing their biggest fear into life.
Then you see people getting nightmares and saying ‘Woooah! He invaded my dreams and it was so scary’ and so on… They do not understand what brought that nightmare and they think it was a shared dream. Why shared? Because you expected those people to give you a nightmare and intentionally or unintentionally you believe they did it.
If you come to a point where you get this nightmare and get very scared you will loose all control of your dream. Advanced lucid dreamers know this feeling, I believe everybody lost control of their dreams due to fear when they were new to lucid dreaming. In this cases you will be even more convinced that somebody invaded your dream.
Fake Shared Dream With a Person You Know
Boundary between real shared dream and fake shared dream might be very small here.
When two people who know each other, try to get a shared dream they might get it, but is it really a shared dream? In most cases no. Two people who know each other, often participate in similar conversations, they participate in same events and share some beliefs. If they don’t know about shared dreaming, most probably they will simply consider it as another dream where they saw their friend. But give the a little idea of having a shared dream between each other and every time both of them dream of each other, they will consider it a shared dream, or a possibility of shared dream. Sometimes even conversations might match, because they used to talk to each other a lot. Often they do not recall complete text of conversations, when they start talking about it in real life, their mind fills the missing gaps with what they wish it to be. So in reality what many people consider a shared dream is simply a normal lucid dream about each other, dreaming of dream version of your friend.
I am talking about it from my experience and from experienced that I got in this community. I had a friend who was lucid dreamer too, both of us were lucid dreaming almost every night. At that time we already were pretty advanced and we often tried to have a shared dream. In the beginning it seems awesome, we thought it was that easy and we got so many shared dreams! But later we tried to prove that and failed all our attempts to do so. We had a plan to remember as many small details as possible, by comparing details we can know if it could the same dream. In every shared dream we found differences in some details, different hair styles, different color of clothes, different voices, different behavior, different details of decorations around us. We also tried to exchange information, we failed all attempts to do so as well.
I know you guys believe that numbers and text are hard to read, but don’t you think that it might be a bias to think so. Both me and my friend learned lucid dreaming on our own, we got the idea of how to do it and that was it, the rest we learned our self. We did not have any prejudice thinking about problems with text or number so we never had those problems in our lucid dreams. I know sometimes it is hard to remember the exact text because our mind is thinking different in dreams, you can always wake up and repeat that word or a phrase couple of times in order to remember it exactly how it was. I believe that the reason why the majority of people believe that text and numbers are hard or impossible to read is that because it was mentioned in few famous books about lucid dreaming and then this belief transferred to most communities. Look at beliefs in Russian community, dreamhackers. Most of them read the same Russian books about lucid dreaming and they all believe that they dream in the same location, they all have some labyrinths, gates and levels and same monsters there, they do not even understand that they can create their realms and so on. That looks funny to us right? But they are sure that it is the only right version. I guess I went little out of topic.
What is Real Shared Dream and How Can We Prove One
This questions always stays open for me, I would suggest some kind of data exchange like text and numbers, or maybe replace it with something more symbolic?
Remembering small details and then sharing them to each other, but not with the way of chatting, we need to develop some way to exchange information at the same time. For example if two users suspect that they might had a shared dream, they could send each other a detailed descriptions of what they saw, what happened, how they looked, colors, sizes of objects around them, any possible details. If they could send those details to each other at the same time, they would not be able to complete the missing gaps with what their mind with what they want to.
I would suggest some kind of online room, where they come, write their text and then 3rd party member unlocks both descriptions for each other at the same time.
*Update
Shared Dreaming, Fake and Real Shared Dreams - Part 2
Lately my opinion on Shared Dreaming was split in two. I feel like I have to go both ways at once, picking one path only, would be close minded in my opinion. Will see which one will bring more results, then I can decide what is the right way to go.
1st way
Shared dreaming that we’v been talking about in this thread. Two people who have some kind of connection, most probably better to have some emotional connection. Trying to meet in some location, would it be a place familiar and close to both dreamers, or it could be just a point on the map, some coordinates and photos attached. Looking for some scenario sync’s in dreams, looking for some symbolical sync’s, finding some logic. Probably exchanging some data like passwords or numbers. Moving forward step by step until we reach some good success.
2nd way
Random Shared Dream or simply ‘RSD’. This idea mostly came up to me due to my experience in SDing. Both of my what I consider genuine Shared Dreams happened with an unknown random person. Everything what happened in my life before and after could be coincidence, could be and most probably is the same ‘fake shared dream with a person you know’ that I was talking about.
My first Shared Dream:
I did not write a single DJ in first 5 years of lucid dreaming, this was my first posted dream on the web. It was my The Final Dream | flow of my soul
At that time I was still shocked of this dream, this was the dream that made me to decide to quit lucid dreaming at that time.
I first posted it around 1 year ago on some forum that was not even connected to lucid dreaming. After few days, one girl pm’ed me and said that she had exactly the same dream at around the same time. I did not know her at all, at that time I did not know anything about her. At first I thought it might be just another similar dream, but it wasn’t. I asked her to share some details, and what she wrote was amazing.
This RSD had everything to prove for me that Shared Dreaming does exist. What she wrote were small details that I never mentioned to anybody, she described the same objects in room, their size and color. She described the same smell. Both symbolical and emotional syns’s were here. She felt exactly the same I did, she had very similar thoughts on what was happening there. She knew all details that I did not post in that topic. It was like another ‘me’ telling me the same story. She had little bit different interpretation of few things, but those were really small thoughts. And it was impossible to get more sync’s that I got in that one single LD.
My second Shared Dream:
This will sound weird to you, but I do not have a single proof or sync about this dream. It is one sided experience, unless the second party will ever find and contact me. The reason why I believe it was a Shared Dream are simply my feelings, my intuition and my experience in lucid dreaming. Here it is - Random Shared Dream | flow of my soul
I am very advanced in my dream control, and I usually know why and where things happen. I know when they should not happen, in 6 years I got enough experience in Lucid Dreaming, taking the fact that I LD almost every night and all dreams are lucid.
All DC’s are usually like NPC’s in games, some of them seems to be active, but I always see some robotness in them. There are unique DC’s, but still they do not behave just like humans do. What happened in this dream was out of order. Girl in this RSD was behaving on her own, noting affected her. None of my thoughts or intentions could control her. I have one of my spells that I call “clearness” this is when I do not like something in my dream, or I am not sure and I simply use ‘clearness’ and every single DC in my dream disappears. When I saw her doing the same thing, I was very surprised. I could never think that one of my DC’s would use that kind of trick. When she did that ‘clearness’ spell of her own, I was pretty sure she is not one of my DC’s and this is something different, maybe another LDer. When she took my hand and we walked through the door and appeared in another place, I was also shocked, because she did it fully intentionally, she knew where we are going and what for. Also I knew that she did not expect me to control her dream, she was very surprised when I teleported us back to the hotel.
How Can We Recognize a Shared Dream?
I believe this is one of the main questions that we have to answer in order to succeed in Shared Dreaming.
Think for a second, we might be missing Shared Dreams every second night. Both Shared Dreams with people you know, people you want to dream with or just Random Shared Dreams with people you never saw or heard of. Other dreamers might be somewhere really close to us, they might be one of our DC’s, they could be one of our Dream Guides, they could be somewhere near us but we do not pay attention to them or we fail to recognize that they are unique. We might be missing so many opportunities to meet some random people in our dreams, both lucid and non-lucid and invite them here to DV or simply give them idea of our nickname.
Shared Dream Check(SDC) and All Night Awareness(ANA)
So how can we recognize a shared dream, how can we recognize another dreamers?
First of all we have to understand that we will be looking for both, Lucid Dreamers and Non-Lucid Dreamers, they would behave completely different. I think we can develop a habit similar to that one that we developed when we achieved our first lucid dream, the old-school reality checks and reminders, as well as the ADA of meeting other dreamers. This might sound complicated, but I believe it is possible and only looks complicated for the first time. When we were not lucid, we also thought that lucid dreaming is complicated, but when we learned how to do it, it does not look that complicated anymore.
So, can we develop a habit of seeing strange patterns in behavior of all DC’s?
Can we develop a habit of seeing strange patterns in behavior of our dream world and see or feel the difference when our dream world changes in some weird way, that might be unintentionally or intentionally controlled by other dreamers?
Just like you did you first unintentional reality check inside your dream that made you lucid, we can develop a state of awareness of other dreamers inside our dream that will someday trigger that Shared Dream Check tool. Just like we became lucid, we can become aware of other dreamers inside our dreams.
I think this will be too much to mix both, awareness of reality and awareness of presence of other dreamers in waking life. We should develop All Night Awareness, that would be focused on finding strange behavior of DC’s and strange behavior or changes in Dream World. Combined with Shared Dream Check, we can learn to recognize other people(dreamers) in our dreams. Shared Dream Check should be done in Lucid Dreams, might be even done in Non-Lucid’s as both, way to become lucid and way to recognize a shared dream. This is like second level of awareness.
