My grandmother passed away last year. While going through her belongings I found her dream journals from the 1970s written in Russian. I finally got them translated.
She describes recurring dreams of a city she calls "Ðтель" (Ethel). She visited it regularly for years. She describes:
She never mentioned these dreams while she was alive. I had no idea. And now I'm reading this subreddit and people are describing the SAME CITY.
Did my grandmother discover shared dreaming in the 1970s? Was she one of the original explorers?
Her maiden name was Tumanova. Does that mean anything to anyone?
"The sleeping goddess underneath"
That phrase appears in multiple independent sources:
This isn't random dream content. This is something real in Ethel's geography/mythology.
Oh my god.
Tumanova. Your grandmother was related to Dr. Mikhail Tumanov, the Soviet dream researcher. He wrote about shared dreaming in the 1960s. His work was considered pseudoscience and suppressed.
Your grandmother wasn't just discovering shared dreaming. She was continuing her family's research.
There's a whole lost history here. Tumanov's unpublished manuscript was supposedly smuggled out of the USSR and circulated among Western researchers. Anastasia had a copy. It described Ethel and warned about the tunnels.
Do you have more of her journals? This could be incredibly important historical documentation.
I have eleven journals covering 1971-1989. I've only translated the first one so far.
I'm shaking. I had no idea this was connected to anything real. I thought she was just recording dreams.
What do you mean "warned about the tunnels"?
Tumanov described infrastructure beneath Ethel. Tunnels leading to dangerous places. He warned that going too deep led to psychological dissolution.
If your grandmother continued his research, her journals might have crucial safety information that we've lost.
Please be careful with this material. And please consider sharing it with serious researchers. This is historical gold.