I just thought of a way technology could be used so that people could communicate with each other in lucid dreams! If there was a sensor that recorded eye movements during sleep, and converted them to sounds or flashes of light that someone else dreaming could see or hear. You would just need to get proficient in morse code
Then you could communicate with fellow dreamers over the internet while dreaming
I read recently (and this is as reliable as anything read over the internet, keep in mind!) that lucid dreams were first considered seriously by the academic community when a researcher and a subject agreed on a gesture moving eyes from side to side, because the researcher suspecter SP didn’t apply to the eye muscles (and that REM was actually the same movement your dream self was making in the dream world) and, voilá! when the subject was got lucid during his dream, he remembered to make that gesture, and the researcher recorded it on his physical eyes.
Stephen LaBerge did the experiment on himself with the help of Dr. Lynn Nagel at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory. Actually it was to prove the existence of lucid dreaming because at the time scientists didn’t even believe in it. It’s in his book Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming.
They’re allowed to say such things because it is a valid belief. I personally don’t believe in shared dreaming because I’ve seen nothing but claimed personal experiences exists as proof. However, it would be irresponsible for me to rule out the possibility entirely. How can I discount something that can be neither proved nor disproved?
what would be an invalid belief? don’t you need at least a little evidence to believe something? i think that some things are not allowed to be said here right? but if you say something that’s impossible and that you have no evidence for can be done in lucid dreaming, why is that valid?
I liked the part of ETWOLD where the man’s eyes keep going back and forth. When asked to describe his dream, the man says, “I was watching a tennis match.”
SPOILER - Click to view
I won’t respond to the post above, because I don’t want to bring God out.
What they are describing isn’t telepathy, its just communication with eye movements. I don’t entirely know why you would want to do that though, considering you couldn’t communicate with any speed and it would have to be in morse code or something similar. It’s a far cry from shared dreaming, but it isn’t bs.
One use I can see for this would be to test how time appears to flow, within the dream and outside it. A dreaming person could make an indication that they had started to count, count to ten, then indicate they had finished. This would grant a measure of comparison with reality. Perhaps not an absolute measure, but certainly something to evaluate and look at.
Without getting into a debate of what constitutes a valid belief. I’d like to point out that the assumption that you need empirical evidence to believe something is a stance which itself is not proven to be true, by its own standards. Since you have no evidence to make such an assertion. You can justify thinking this way, but you can’t prove it as true. You assume things about the universe, that you can’t prove. So why would we enforce a view such as this across the whole forum? Doing so would be closed-minded and no better than enforcing that all discussions must comply with Christian mythology, or Hindu, or any other religion. The forum is for discussion and the rules are designed to aid that. Not to support any specific world-view. If you want to discuss this further I would suggest creating a new topic, this topic isn’t even related to Shared Dreams of the manor you are debating against, and therefore this discussion is off-topic.
In Hindu mythology, we’re all just sharing a huge dream, by the way
Besides, I agree with what was said: even if you don’t think it is a “valid belief” (does that even make sense?), the original question was about using technology to communicate across dreams. Someone from early last century would probably think the idea of bouncing gigabytes of torrents over the world ridiculous, but…