This is going to be a long post. Bear with me.
We've been documenting our dreams of the city for a few weeks now. We're accumulating data. But we need to address a fundamental question: what exactly are we documenting?
There are several possibilities, and I want to lay them out clearly.
Possibility 1: Pure Coincidence
Multiple people having similar dreams of a white city by the sea. This is the skeptical baseline. We're pattern-matching on common archetypes. The "Mediterranean dream city" is a widespread motif. Our similarities are less remarkable than our minds make them seem.
Problem: This doesn't explain the highly specific shared details - the statue, the spiral fountain, the library-cathedral. Archetypes are usually vaguer than this.
Possibility 2: Shared Archetype
A step beyond pure coincidence. Maybe there's a specific archetypal city that multiple people can access through dreams - not "the same place" in any objective sense, but a shared pattern in human consciousness. Like Jung's collective unconscious made geographical.
Problem: This doesn't explain why some of us have dreams that feel different in quality - more consistent, more stable, more "real" - than our ordinary dreams of archetypal content.
Possibility 3: Collective Construction
We are building this city together. Our discussions, our shared expectations, our documentation - all of this is creating and reinforcing a shared dream space. The more we talk about it, the more real it becomes. We're not discovering the city; we're making it.
Problem: This is actually what I suspect is partly true. But it raises questions: how would collective construction even work? And it doesn't explain the experiences many of us had before we ever communicated with each other.
Possibility 4: Genuine Shared Location
The city exists, in some sense, independently of any individual dreamer. It's a "place" we can all visit, like a website anyone can access. Its geography and history are (mostly) fixed, and our job is to explore and document, not to create.
Problem: This requires a radical expansion of our metaphysics. What kind of "place" can exist in dream-space? What is it made of? How does it persist?
My Working Hypothesis
I think the truth is probably some combination of 3 and 4. The city may have some independent existence - or at least, some aspects of it are more stable and persistent than others. But our collective engagement also shapes it, reinforces it, perhaps even expands it.
If this is right, then what we're doing here matters. Our documentation isn't just recording a pre-existing reality - it may be helping to create and stabilize that reality.
This is why methodology is so important. If we're partly creating what we observe, we need to be careful about what we create.
Thoughts?