moved from Quest to stuff since it is about wether SD can be real or not - so doesn’t fit in Beyond 
2 people consciously in each others/one dream? that’s hard to believe, somone explain it.
It is hard to believe, and (in my own opinion) it probably doesn’t happen - our brains just don’t work like that.
However, I will add that if such a thing were possible, that would be way cool, and the discoverer of the phenomenon would probably get the Nobel Prize 
Lots of things are hard to believe for some. Intelligent extra-terrestrial life forms, post-existence, the astral, and so on… What I mean is that there’s much more to the Universe than we know. Don’t you think?
It’s your choice what to believe and what not to.
IMO shared dreaming is the combination of dreams and telepathy.
I’d love to believe it, and reading some experiences on Lucid crossroads i am starting to believe it, god the mind is so interesting xD i just wonder if the brain is able to anything else that actually shows in waking life, such as intelligence traits or something, although probably not possible…
Coming out of the shadows to make a reply. Just look under the Beyond Dreaming section Blessedspirit. Ludacris some of the posts there, no?
If you’re one who believes that dreams let alone OBEs have no metaphysical aspect to them and are only internal, I guess I can’t convince you otherwise. Maybe the only way the skeptics can experience any type of doubt inside of their bubble is to have a shared dream themselves. I had one with my great-grandmother when I was 7. Not gonna bother giving the details because skeptics tend to grasp for straws by screaming “SUBJECTIVE COINCIDENCE”.
Much of people’s dreams can be their subconscious, at the same time, much of people’s dreams can be metaphysical/spiritual/ what have you.
Could you please give details and not suppose a priori that all the people here are evil skeptics? 
No, not “evil”. But without meaning to offend anybody, I stand by saying many here are skeptics in their own little bubble as well as members at other LD/OBE forums.
When I was 7 years old I had my first and only shared dream. The dream itself wasn’t overly interesting. The little I remember of it, I was on a beach with a few houses and about 600 feet out give or take I saw a cruise ship. I ran into the ocean and tried to board the ship for some reason. As I neared it, I woke up. There was a lot more prior to it but this small part of my dream was the only part I had shared with my great grandmother. That morning as we always did, we discussed our dreams together from the night before. She told me that she had a dream she was on a boat with a bunch of strangers and had noticed a boy in the ocean trying to get aboard. Well, I was pretty shocked. Told her it was me and she absolutely believed me.
dreams show you how your life is unfolding
now, when you dream about someone you know, you interact with everything that this person means to you on a symbolic level, so in this sense the dreams are ab solutely true, sub-reality
now if the other person had the exact same dream or not depends, they would have to be very congruent with you on all spiritual levels, and plus, they might have the same dream t hat you had with them like 4 years after you did
a girl i know who has the capacity to do this came to my dreams a long time ago, she said “there’s no way we could share a dream, because to you it is insert date here and to me its insert date here”"
however, telepathy and these experiences being real, you have to have a crystal clear telepath you are friends with in order for them to work, and they generally don’t go to sleep, they just sit down and meditate and do what they will
here’s a case in point, if i dream i meet someone i really wanted to meet, and something is wrong about her in the dream world, and i am vividly aware of this, unfortunately, it will come to be so in waking reality in some way.
now these dreams are orchestrated by higher intelligence than the ego that WANTS to run around and travel
these are NDs with or without lucidity, where things are happening that you are NOT programming, and are INTAKING INFORMATION
Well, I’m not sure if I beleive in shared dreams or not. I’d like to beleive in them…
I think I’m at a point in my life where I don’t doubt anything anymore (which doesn’t mean I beleive anything either!)
Just because science can’t explain a thing (yet) doesn’t mean it can’t be real. I mean, people were once sure the Earth was flat and things like that. After I got into LD’s, heard about remote viewing and read a bit about NDE’s… Well, yeah, I don’t doubt anything anymore… 
Its one of those things you want to believe so much you are tricked into thinking it exists.
Yeah Epiphany, i was thinking that to myself, because the thought of any kind of telepathic ability’s/communication is just to good to be true.
And the argument of things like “Well 50 years ago people were scared to drive faster than 40 MPH” is complete BS, i believe that we are nearing the end of our technological advances in the sense that there is a difference between scientific theory’s and just plain fiction that people have got from TV shows or similar things, 50-100 years ago we were basically at the start of discovering certain things.
Although i don’t know much about any of this, so my opinions may be completely void.
Okay, as a skeptic (and one who is not ‘evil’), here’s my argument: Your dream as you just described it has a very low level of detail. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt in that you may not be describing it as fully as you really remember here, but it seems to me that the only things you and your grandmother dreamed in common were:
- A ship
- The ocean (which is kind of a given after #1, or at least the most likely)
- A boy trying to get on board.
That’s not much. And it’s very vague.
If that’s all you had in common, it’s clearly a coincidence. However, I’ll still give you the benefit of the doubt that you and your grandmother discussed it in further detail to make sure the details were the same. I’ll assume that you clarified the colour of the boat, the type of people on board, the fact that your grandmother was on a cruise ship and not a different kind of ship like a ferry, etc. Did your grandmother see the beach you were on? Did you see the other people on the ship your grandmother described?
If you couldn’t remember the details above well enough to clarify the details (or you didn’t even bother clarifying the details), then it’s pretty stupid to say it was a shared dream, because boats, boys and the ocean are all pretty common things to dream about and there’s no way you could possibly verify the experiences just through spoken accounts. But I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, remember?
Anyway, here’s why I’m so skeptical: It’s because every single time (no exceptions whatsoever) I read a claim of a shared dream, the shared elements are as vague as the ones you’ve just given. Usually they’re even vaguer. That’s very easily a coincidence. Furthermore, often the person/people who think the dream is shared can’t remember the details of the dream very clearly. If you can’t remember it, how on earth can you verify it was shared?
It is very possible that you both had a very similar scene in your respective dreams that night. However, this is completely irrelevant to whether or not you had the same dream. I mean, if two different musicians write a song with the same title in the same genre on the same day of the year without knowing about each other, does that mean the lyrics and melody of the song are the same? No. It’s coincidence, and it happens all the time. And the amount of information you provided about that dream is probably about the same percentage of the dream as a song title is to the rest of the song.
Now, if someone shared one of my dreams, I’d believe it - the reason being that my dreams are highly complicated, and when I do dream of something like a boat, I can tell you exactly what it looks like, where it was, what the weather was like, who was on it and what was happening on board, etc etc etc. (Don’t believe me, read my dream journal.) If someone else could tell me the same thing in the same level of detail without hearing it from me first, I’d probably believe them. But just saying “there was a boy in the ocean trying to get on the boat” is not convincing in the slightest, sorry.
Before you start going around claiming to have shared dreams, you should be able to back it up properly with a lot more detail than you - or anyone, for that matter - is doing. On both sides of the “shared dream”. This means you need to give every scrap of detail you both recall.
[mod]last paragraph removed … please respect other’s views 
[/mod]
If you’ve met skeptics stuck in their “own little bubble”, then they were probably not very good skeptics
What I mean is, it’s not as if we’re, as you say, grasping for straws and trying to hold onto whatever bits and pieces of our worldview that we can in the face of supernaturalism, metaphysics, god, or whatever - we just want to be as certain as we can about things. That’s why skeptics demand evidence and try to rule out other things like coincidences first. We just want to be reasonably sure that what we decide to believe is actually true.
I would acknowledge that shared dreaming is possible (and so would a lot of other people) if there were some really good evidence for it, but there isn’t. That’s why I believe what I believe.
I fully believe in in shared dreaming. I’ve only ever experienced it once, but it was the exact same from me and my friends perspective. However, we couldn’t pshyically see each other, I knew the other person was there. I’ll have to find the dream, I’m sure I posted it around here before.
But the times we were asleep were exactly the same. The setting was the exact same. We came into contact, but I didn’t know it was him.
OMG EDIT. like the most major edit in the history of editing! this is karma coming back to bite me. i think i had a shared dream last night! no kidding. how much of a hypocrit does this make me? 
although it might have been me just thinking the girl i was with was real and not a dream character, she seemed pretty lfelike, and her behaviour was very close to how someone would react if the realized the world they were in was fake.
very interesting tho.
Honestly I don’t see why not. Isn’t it something similar when you are thinking of someone who happens to call you at that moment? Or perhaps when you just know something is going to happen to someone and it does?
Some people call that intuition-just knowing. What if it is because we are all connected instead? What if we can break into that connection to the rest of the world sometimes and see beyond?
I’ve had dreams where I’ve been asked for help when it really was needed in real life, I knew when my mother’s mega asthma attack (that made her get rid of my dog) was coming. Those are called Pre-cog, right? I was talking about them only last night to a large group; a good number of us had had them at one point or another. If this is so common, why is shared dreaming so “out there?”
I’m not a believer myself, but I have experienced dreaming and believeing it was a shared dream, several times, and in the dream I am convinced. So I am not unfamiliar with the EXPERIENCE of a potential shared dream. But I still don’t believe in them. Scepticism is not about DISbelieving things, it is about having an OPEN mind, it is about NOT ruling out things. That being said, a real sceptic can never trust anything anyone says, because we only have our own consciousness to rely on, and that in itself is not very reliable. We are all in our own bubble of experience, and that is where all our beliefs reside, even non-sceptics are in their own world.
If we listen to others. we always filter it though our own beliefs. How could we not do that? The sceptical point of view is only to not take things at face value, and trying to weed out information that does not make sense. And so we must try explain things from other points of view. What makes most sense to us, we will believe. Unfounded beliefs do not make sense. It is at least not rational to believe things without reason, and it makes sense to rationalise. It is not reaching for straws when we provide an alternative explanation that is rational, and does not conflict with rational beliefs. All the sceptic really says is, “don’t be so sure!”.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of shared dreaming alltogether, but since we can explain things with less strange assumptions, it makes sense to believe it too, until new information comes up.
Arguments of the skeptics are just not scientific. If they want to prove me I never saw my friend O. yesterday night, they could say that I a my friend O. may be liars, that I could have dream it, that by the way nobody saw me with my friend O. etc. The assumption that everything has already been observed and explained thus everything strange that can be observed is either wrong or can get a known explanation, the way to explain it by searching in a set of possible known causes, are an aberration. To caricature them, I would say skepticism is a belief or a pseudoscience.
I’ve had two impressive experiences of remote viewing and knowing that some people exist who strongly deny such things makes me think they are just believers of an useless way of seeing the world, which cannot bring anything interesting to us. Now on the other hand, people who emphasize very rare experiences and transform them into a sort of global system, “explaining” them by spirituality, divine will, quantic holes in the DNA or other stuff that has been even more rarely observed, make me sometimes think that skepticism is not such useless, anyhow. 
Concerning SD, for four years I’m on LD forums, I’ve just read two convincing reports. If Rod Serling say that people who are on LD/OBE forums (thus are very interested in dreams and possibly paranomal stuff and are likely to have read many dreams accounts, I suppose) don’t believe in shared dreaming, I think it’s not a “coincidence”: it clearly means that reports are so rare that most of the people don’t have read anything like that on dream forums.
Moreover, the two reports I’ve read were not exactly shared dreams: they are rather dreams with shared content. In the first one, the dreamer was in a cemetery with a very particular architectural feature and her husband woke her up cause he made a nightmare. It turned out that they had dreamed of the same environment. In the second one, two members of a LD forum who don’t known each other personnaly reported the same night a curious dream: each of them was trying to repair a doll and they didn’t manage because they put the head in place of the arm. Those dreams have been published by serious people and it obviously wasn’t in order to prove something or to gain popularity.
As for me, I had a dream in which information was sort of shared. I was dreaming that I was with my friend S. in the garden of his parents’ house and we were trying to see through the windows what was happening inside. Then the phone rang IRL and I woke up from this dream. I immediatly thought it was my friend S., though it was quite unlikely cause I was sleeping at my parents at this epoch and friends of mine didn’t phone in the morning. It was my friend S. indeed. He was phoning to ask me to verify what happened at this parents’, cause he hasn’t be able to join them by phone for 3 days and he was worrying. At this time, he was (and he’s still) living 200 kilometers away from the place I’m living and I had no news from him for many weeks. By the way, this event had absolutely no importance cause nothing special was happening at his parents (they just weren’t here the times he tried to phone, or something like that). I think this should be noted for people who think there may have been a divine message of special importance, etc.
In this case, my friend was of course not sleeping while I was sleeping. There is of course no scientific explanation. In the three cases I’ve told, the phenomenon was completely unvolontary.
Right, before I write anything else, I’ll say this: Think critically about something you don’t understand.
Haha, there are too many responses to make to this. Usually when people call, we’re in a position to be expecting that call. For example, if we make an appointment at the dentist, and the dentist calls back a couple of days later to confirm the appointment. Or, a relative might call because they haven’t heard from you in a while. Or a friend who you often see calls you up to make a time to meet or just to talk. These aren’t exactly rare occurrences. It’s natural that you’d think about the kind of people who are likely to call you up - you’ve had some kind of interaction with them, after all. What would be far more impressive is if you had suddenly thought of someone you’d never met, like an employee at a call centre trying to sell you insurance. Now, picking up the phone and saying “hi, Marie”, to an insurance girl named Marie - that would be something.
What is worse, in my opinion, is to treat each case of “thinking of someone when the phone rings” as some sort of indication that you have psychic tendencies. This is just silly, because these coincidences happen to everyone at some point (assuming they have a phone, anyway). Chances are, unless you only think about yourself constantly or people who don’t possess your contact details, you will be thinking about someone else when they ring. Is everything in life unpredictable? Of course not. Otherwise nobody would ever win at games of chance or gambling. Eventually, when you call a six, the dice is going to come up with a six. Eventually.
“Psychic” incidents are the same. You can make a great many guesses, and sometimes you are going to hit on the right answer. It’s simply that a lot of people ‘forget’ or ignore all the times they got it wrong. What about all the times the phone rang and you didn’t know who was on the other end - or perhaps had a fleeting feeling you ‘knew’, but it turned out to be someone different? But people choose to forget the times they had it wrong, because it disrupts their illusion that they might have some mysterious ability.
Come to think of it, I was being a little unfair above. You know, some of what you say is absolutely true. Shared dreams are similar to predicting phone calls or other events. They’re all coincidences, and they’re all sometimes misinterpreted by gullible people. See above comments again - they pretty much all apply to this as well.
Furthermore, I would like to comment that it strikes me as being awfully egotistical of someone when the first explanation for something which comes to mind is that they possess some uncanny psychic ability or intuition. But that’s human nature, I guess - to believe we’re better than we are, or special in some way when we aren’t. We have to consider that perhaps we’re not special, that there really is nothing that sets us apart from the rest of the human race. I suspect that many self-styled psychics (even allowing for the possibility that some may be genuine) are just inflating their own abilities past what they really have. This is part of what bugs me so much - that some people are more willing to trust their own egos over any kind of sensible evidence whatsoever. It’s just not smart, and although I do try to be as open-minded as possible, I’m the first to admit I have a very low tolerance threshold for irrationality and stupidity. Particularly when other people try and perpetuate the same ignorance forward onto others who are gullible enough to accept it without question (I can think of several people on this site who I have to force myself not to say nasty things to for this reason). Believe what you want to believe, but don’t start indoctrinating the masses. (End rant here.)
Intuition is fair enough - you can read a lot from people by their body language, for instance - but to attribute this to something psychic is taking it too far, unless you can back it up with evidence.
We are all connected, through our humanity; through interaction; through communications and communities and networks. We all (excepting those few with emotional disorders or brain damage, perhaps) feel love, sadness, anger, joy, and so on. We break into this connection every day! Every time we interact with someone else, we touch it. Even indirectly, our actions affect others. Our decisions, our morals, the way we choose to live our lives. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t life wonderful and complex enough as it is? The way I see it, all we have to do to see “beyond” is try to understand the people with whom we share the world around us. We don’t need psychic ability or shared dreams or any of that. All is takes is a caring heart, compassion, and a willingness to interact with others.
Huh, I get asked for help in dreams all the time. It probably says more about you than anyone else, I think. It’s your dream, after all. I think almost everyone needs help in some way (even if they won’t admit it) - otherwise we’d all be happy and satisified, which we all know is not true. You know, when I was little I would sometimes wonder if the universe was looking out for me in particular, because every time something bad happened to me, something good came out of it in the end. Then I realised I just happened to be looking at things optimistically instead of dwelling on the bad. The universe wasn’t ‘looking out’ for me at all.
Pre-cog isn’t common, though. While I can’t disprove that it exists and therefore am willing to believe that perhaps a very few instances are real, the rest are similar to what I’ve trying to point out this whole time. People think things are mystical and psychic when they are not! These people are often very gullible and not too bright. Sorry for being politically incorrect there, but it’s true and I’m not going to be dishonest to you. Others, like Basilus West, can come up with better arguments to support themselves (which I suggest that everyone does), but an awful lot of people are simply taken in because they heard it from someone else and just took it as being the truth.
Just like shared dreams, all the examples of precog I’ve read of have been extremely vague. To avoid a rehash of my previous post, I’ll just say: How can you know something is precog if it is based on only a hazy feeling or a few sparse details? You think/dream of a lot of things that aren’t precog, don’t you? But, yet again, people like to ‘forget’ all the hundreds of times that their dreams did not come true, or they thought about something vague which wasn’t related to reality.
Even I’ve once had a dream in which my mother was sick and I woke up to find her sick in real life. Precog? No. The sickness was different, my mother was in a completely different situation, and she was terminal in the dream but only had a 24 hour bug in reality. My mother has been sick in other dreams since, but wow - she’s perfectly fine when I wake up. But I’ve read near-identical stories from people that because they dreamed of sickness, it was precog! Uh, no.
Essentially, believing you’re psychic is almost akin to the faith of religions. However, I have a lot more tolerance for religion, because faiths usually come with a set of rules and you generally either believe in it or not. Whereas “psychics” (or the gullible) just take a random personal experience and inflate it, with absolutely no evidence, checks or balances whatsoever, and can make any assumptions they like about it without stopping to question its accuracy. Worse, the same people can then repeat their personal assessment to others, and a lot of people will just believe it without questioning it. Which is very stupid of them. Which is why I refute claims based on little evidence, because people should be properly informed before making decisions about what to believe.
Until I see a detailed report of an incident with every fact reoccuring in real life, I am going to remain skeptical. I’m willing to believe that it’s perhaps possible, but it’s certain that every example I’ve ever read is far too vague to be taken as anything other than a coincidence. If you have evidence to back it up, I’m willing to listen, but not until then.
I’m not sure i beliebe in shared dreams either, i think it’s too good to be true… But i do think there is such a thing as “psychic powers”. Or something simular to that anyway. I mean come one, how about those strange monks that can levitate or those guys who can manage impossible tasks or people who can move objects with their mind?
I suppose SDs are possible if two people’s minds are connected. Maybe in the future, with some sort of machine…