I Spent a Month Trying to Share Dreams With Strangers on the Internet

It's 3 AM and I'm lying in a stranger's apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, trying not to fall asleep. Which is ironic, because falling asleep is exactly what I came here to do.

Around me, four other people are settling into sleeping bags arranged in a careful circle. Someone has drawn symbols on the floor in chalk—they look vaguely Celtic, though when I asked about them earlier, a guy named Marcus just shrugged and said "It helps some people focus." Soft ambient music plays from a speaker. The air smells faintly of lavender.

"Remember," says a woman named Elena, who organized tonight's session, "we're meeting at the fountain. Stone fountain, three tiers, in a plaza with red brick. Focus on it as you fall asleep. Picture yourself already there."

This is a "sync session"—an attempt by a group of strangers to share a dream. And according to a growing online community, it actually works.

Down the Rabbit Hole

I first encountered the shared dreaming community the way most people do: through a late-night Reddit rabbit hole. The subreddit r/SharedDreaming has about 15,000 subscribers, which makes it small by Reddit standards but massive for what it claims to be: a community of people who believe they can—and regularly do—share dreams with each other.

Not just similar dreams. The same dream. At the same time. With verifiable details.

I expected the subreddit to be full of obvious cranks—the kind of people who also believe in chemtrails and lizard people. Instead, I found something weirder: a community with its own terminology, research protocols, and bitter internal debates. There were posts about "resonance theory" and "dream bandwidth." Detailed guides on synchronization techniques. Arguments about whether "persistent realms" were stable or collapsing.

And there were the experience reports. Hundreds of them. People describing shared dreams with partners, friends, strangers met through forums. Some were vague enough to dismiss as coincidence. Others contained the kind of specific, mutually-verified details that made my skeptical brain itch.

"I dreamed we were in a library with green marble floors," one user wrote. "I told her about the books on the third shelf—there was one with a blue spine that said 'Architectures of Sleep.' She messaged me the next morning asking how I knew about the blue book, because she'd been planning to look for it."

The blue book. The green marble. Details that shouldn't transfer if dreams are just random neural firing.

I needed to know more.

The Believer

Marcus Williams has been practicing shared dreaming for six years. When I meet him at a coffee shop in downtown Providence, he doesn't look like someone who spends his nights exploring collective unconsciousness. He's 34, works in IT, wears a fleece vest over a button-down shirt.

"People expect me to be more... woo-woo, I guess," he says, smirking. "I'm not. I'm an engineer. I like things I can test and verify."

He explains that he got into shared dreaming through lucid dreaming—the well-documented practice of becoming aware that you're dreaming while you're dreaming. Lucid dreaming has actual scientific literature behind it: sleep lab studies, verified REM patterns, the works.

"Once you can control your dreams, you start experimenting," Marcus says. "And at some point, you try to meet someone else in there. Most people fail. But some of us..." He trails off, shrugging.

"It works?"

"It works. Not always. Not reliably. But often enough that I stopped being able to dismiss it."

I ask him about the mechanism—how could two separate brains, in separate locations, share an experience?

"Nobody knows," he admits. "There are theories. Quantum entanglement, collective unconscious, some kind of information field we can tap into during REM sleep. Most of us don't care about the mechanism anymore. We're more interested in exploring what's possible."

He tells me about Ethel.

The Dream City

Ethel—sometimes spelled "Aethel" by certain community members, though Marcus rolls his eyes at this—is a persistent dream realm. Unlike ordinary shared dreams, which happen in random, unstable environments, Ethel is described as a fully-realized city that maintains its geography across visits.

"Same streets every time," Marcus says. "Same buildings. You can draw a map. Other people can use your map and navigate. It's like a real place."

The idea of a shared, persistent dream world sounds like something out of a fantasy novel. But the shared dreaming community takes it very seriously. Online forums contain detailed maps of Ethel, descriptions of its neighborhoods, accounts of its history stretching back decades.

According to community lore, Ethel was "discovered"—or "created," depending on who you ask—in the mid-2000s by a small group of dream researchers who were trying to prove shared dreaming was possible. They succeeded beyond their expectations. Not only could they share dreams, they found themselves repeatedly arriving in the same stable environment.

"Nobody knows if they found it or made it," Marcus says. "Maybe there's no difference."

The original group has largely dispersed. Some died, according to vague community references that no one wants to elaborate on. The original forum where they gathered—Somniaforum—went offline years ago. But Ethel endures.

"I've been there maybe a hundred times," Marcus tells me. "It's more real than real. The textures, the smells, the way light hits the cobblestones at sunset. When I wake up, my bedroom feels like the dream."

The Skeptic's Dilemma

I want to believe this is all elaborate roleplay—an alternate reality game, or a shared fiction that participants have convinced themselves is real. The internet is full of communities that blur the line between imagination and belief. Maybe this is just another one.

But I can't shake some details.

I spend a week reading experience reports on r/SharedDreaming and the larger Ammonite forums. I look for patterns that might indicate coordination—a game master feeding participants details, or a shared document people are consulting. I find nothing. The reports are too inconsistent to be scripted, too specific to be pure imagination.

One user describes accidentally kicking over a merchant's cart in Ethel's market district and feeling embarrassed. Three days later, another user—different country, no apparent connection—mentions seeing an "overturned cart, vegetables everywhere" in the same location.

Could be coincidence. Could be confirmation bias. Could be that I'm falling for a very elaborate hoax.

Or it could be real.

The Sync Session

Which brings me back to Elena's apartment at 3 AM, trying to share a dream with strangers.

I've been preparing for this for two weeks. Following the community's recommended protocols: keeping a dream journal, practicing lucid dreaming triggers, doing "reality checks" throughout the day. I've mostly failed—I'm not a natural lucid dreamer. But Elena assures me the group setting helps.

"Sync sessions are easier," she says. "More minds focusing on the same target. The resonance is stronger."

The target tonight isn't Ethel—Elena says that requires months of preparation and specific attunement techniques. Instead, we're aiming for a simpler shared space: a fountain in a plaza. We've all studied the same description, visualized the same details.

I fall asleep around 4 AM. I don't remember my dreams.

In the morning, everyone compares notes. Two of the five report reaching the fountain. Elena draws what she saw; Marcus nods and adds details. They agree on the color of the stone (gray-white), the sound of the water (gentle, not rushing), the presence of pigeons.

I feel like the kid who didn't make the basketball team. But I also feel something else: a creeping suspicion that I'm witnessing something real. The way they compare details isn't performative. It's casual, matter-of-fact—the way you'd compare notes after visiting the same restaurant.

"It takes practice," Elena tells me sympathetically. "Most people get there eventually. You just have to want it."

The Dark Side

Not everything in the shared dreaming community is gentle fountains and cosmic wonder.

There are warnings in the forums. Posts about "bad visits"—dreams where Ethel felt wrong, where the usually-stable geography shifted ominously. Reports of entities that shouldn't be there. Experienced dreamers advising newcomers to stay away from certain areas.

"The tunnels," Marcus says when I ask about this. "There are tunnels under the city. Nobody knows where they lead. Some people have explored them and come back... different."

Different how?

He won't say. But I notice he touches his forearm unconsciously as he answers, and I wonder if there's something there he's not showing me.

More troubling are the references—always oblique, always quickly shut down—to the deaths connected to the original Somniaforum group. I count at least three people who have died young, though no one will give me details or even confirm that dreams were involved.

And there's the migration ideology.

"Migration" is a term used by a subset of the community—mostly followers of an alternative Ethel tradition—to describe the belief that one can permanently move to the dream world. The method is left unspoken, but the implication is clear: if you die while dreaming of Ethel, you don't die. You just stay there.

This is fringe even within a fringe community. Most shared dreamers I talk to are horrified by it.

"Those people are dangerous," Elena says flatly. "They've taken something beautiful and turned it into a suicide cult. We don't talk to them. We don't engage with them. They're not part of our community."

But they exist. And they're recruiting.

What I Believe Now

I went into this story expecting to write about a harmless delusion—a community of people playing pretend on the internet. I'm leaving with something more unsettling: the suspicion that I don't know what's real.

I never successfully shared a dream. I can't personally verify that any of this works. And yet.

The people I met weren't delusional. They weren't playing a game. They spoke about shared dreaming the way I'd speak about my commute to work—as routine fact, not exotic belief. The internal consistency of their reports, the specific details that matched across independent observers, the casual certainty with which they described impossible things...

Either this is the most elaborate hoax in internet history, or something very strange is happening in the dreaming minds of a few thousand people scattered across the world.

I don't know which possibility frightens me more.

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Maya Chen is a features writer for Uncharted Magazine. Her previous work includes investigations into urban exploration communities, competitive eating circuits, and the underground world of AI-generated art. She still can't lucid dream.