Preliminary Notes on Shared Dream Research
I've been hesitant to write about this publicly. What I'm going to describe sounds impossible, and I'm acutely aware that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I don't have extraordinary evidence yet. What I have is a series of carefully controlled experiments with results that I cannot explain through conventional frameworks.
I'm posting this as a record—a timestamp of where my thinking stands as of December 2005—so that if this goes somewhere, there will be documentation. And if it turns out to be nothing, well, at least I'll have been honest about the process.
Background
Six weeks ago, I responded to a forum post about a statue. The poster, H., claimed to have been drawing this statue from dreams for months before encountering it in physical reality. The statue is real—I've seen it, photographed it. His dated sketchbooks are real. Whether his dream memories predate his encounter with the physical statue is something I cannot verify, but I can say his account is internally consistent and he has no obvious motivation to deceive.
More interesting than the statue itself was what H. described: a persistent dream location. A city by the sea. White buildings. A sense of returning to the same place night after night.
I've been collecting similar accounts for my research. Most turn out to be nothing—pattern-matching, confabulation, the brain's remarkable ability to manufacture false memories. But some accounts share specific details that are hard to explain through individual psychology.
The Experiments
H. and I began meeting regularly in October. We developed a protocol:
Before sleeping, one of us (the "sender") focuses on a specific, novel piece of information—a word, an image, a short phrase. Something we've never discussed.
We sleep during overlapping time windows.
Upon waking, the other (the "receiver") records any dreams immediately, without communication.
We compare notes.
The first two weeks produced nothing unusual. Standard dream content with no apparent correlation to the sender's focused information.
Then we added a component: instead of just focusing on the information, the sender attempts to "place" it somewhere in the persistent dream location—if they reach it that night. The receiver, independently, attempts to reach the same location.
Results
I want to be careful here. I'm not claiming we've achieved telepathic communication. The results are noisy, ambiguous, and could have mundane explanations.
But.
In trials where both of us report reaching "the city" (we've started calling it that), there is a statistically significant correlation between placed and received information. Not perfect transmission—more like a faint signal emerging from noise. A word placed at "the fountain plaza" might be received as a rhyming word, or an associated image. The emotional tone transfers more reliably than specific content.
In trials where one or both of us doesn't reach the city, there is no correlation. It's as if the location matters—as if something about that specific dream-space enables a channel that doesn't exist in ordinary dreams.
A Framework (Tentative)
I've been reading everything I can find on dream research. Most of it is either dismissive materialist skepticism or credulous mysticism. Neither helps.
But I found something interesting in the Brown library: the work of a Soviet researcher named Tumanov, from the 1960s and 70s. Most of his publications are in Russian (which I'm slowly teaching myself), but I found one translated paper in an obscure consciousness studies journal.
Tumanov proposed that certain dream states allow access to what he called "shared persistent realms"—stable structures that multiple consciousness can access simultaneously. He was rigorous, systematic, and eventually discredited for reasons I haven't been able to determine.
His framework, if I'm understanding it correctly, suggests that ordinary dreams are private—they happen within individual minds. But under certain conditions, consciousness can extend beyond individual boundaries into shared spaces that have their own stability and persistence.
If this is true, it would explain our results. The "city" wouldn't be a hallucination or a shared archetype—it would be an actual place, in some sense, that we're both accessing.
I'm aware of how that sounds.
Next Steps
H. and I are expanding the protocol. We've found one other person online who claims to visit the same city, and we're designing experiments to test whether all three of us can coordinate within the shared space.
I'm also continuing to translate Tumanov. There are hints in his published work that he conducted much more extensive experiments than he ever published—experiments that might have established, definitively, whether shared realms are real.
If any of this pans out, I'll write more. For now, I'm trying to stay humble about my uncertainty while remaining open to what the data might be showing us.
A Note to Skeptics
I welcome rigorous criticism. Point out flaws in my methodology. Suggest alternative explanations. I genuinely want to know if I'm fooling myself.
What I don't want is dismissal without engagement. "Dreams are just random neural firing" is not an argument; it's an assertion. If you want to convince me I'm wrong, show me where my reasoning fails. Show me why the correlations we're seeing are spurious.
The universe is under no obligation to conform to our expectations. I'm trying to figure out what's actually true, not defend a position.
3 Comments
This is really interesting work. I've been studying lucid dreaming for years and your methodology sounds much more rigorous than most accounts I've seen. The correlation results in "city" vs non-city trials is compelling. Have you considered running a blinded version where a third party knows the placed information and evaluates matches?
That's an excellent suggestion, and it's something we're working toward. The challenge is finding someone trustworthy who takes this seriously enough to participate but skeptical enough to be a fair evaluator. We're also limited by sample size—these experiments are time-intensive and we can only run a few per week.
The collective unconscious! Jung wrote about shared archetypal spaces that transcend individual psychology. Your "city" sounds like an archetypal landscape—the celestial city, the eternal city. Of course multiple people would dream of similar places; we share the same psychic inheritance.
I appreciate Jung, but I think there's an important distinction. Jung's archetypes are shared patterns that manifest individually—we all dream OF similar things because we have similar psychological structures. What I'm suggesting is different: that we might be dreaming IN the same place, simultaneously, with the ability to exchange information. That's not archetype; that's something closer to shared reality.
Thank you for taking this seriously. When I first posted about the statue, I thought I was losing my mind. Working with you has been... clarifying. Whatever we're finding, at least I know I'm not finding it alone.