In a shared dreaming project, a group of dreamers will attempt to meet one another while they sleep. It's not surprising that they would assume that this "meeting" will ook and behave just like its counterpart in the waking world. But, wait a minute, they're not in the waking world.

Because the land of dreams is a virtual reality, it can simulate stable physical existence. Sometimes. Given the chance, though, it'll begin to revert to its native mutable behavior. In shared dreaming, this metamorphosis becomes quite pronounced.

Many shared dreamers engage in lucid dreaming. As they begin to question what they experience, they introduce fluidity to their mind set, which is reflected in the less stable scenery, props, events and activities. As their minds become more active, the imagery that their minds produce becomes more animated. Rather than plod through the dreamscape, using the old mundane method of motation, they can take advantage of dream flexibility and fly.

However, even if lucidity isn't part of the package, true dream connection requires ESP. Extrasensory perception has its own quirks. Time slip (precognition and retrocognition) and subtle sensing (tele-empathy) are two examples of its unconventional conduct. By its very nature, ESP is not beholden to the rigor and restraint of the time-space continuum.

Actually, if you want a perfect clone dream, it'll probably have to be either spontaneous or occur when you first engage in deliberate dreaming. That is, before you mind has had a chance to flex its wings. It's fortunate that we have those initial experiences. Without clones we probably wouldn't even know that ESP exists.

But once your sleeping consciousness realizes that you truly desire a dreampsi experience, it'll stop treating you like a casual tourist and begin to take you deeper into uncharted territory. Some dreamers already journey several levels beyond the expected. The further away you travel from home base, the less likely you are to be chained to waking state assumptions, like this one: "In a shared dream, you and I will look just like our waking selves."

Want to make a bet?

One shared dreaming night, after I became lucid, I went searching for my fellow dreamers. There were plenty of dream characters about, but no one I could identify. However, I seemed to be vaguely familiar to them.

One man looks at me hard, as if trying to remember me. Suddenly I suspect that my appearance might be the problem. "Can I see a mirror?" I ask. Mirrors appear on the cupboard behind him and he moves aside so I may get a clear view of my reflection. "Oh, my god!" I gasp. The image is me, all right, but my curly permanent waves are frazzling out in all directions. I look just like I do when I get up in the morning: bloodshot eyes, puffy features, face lined with wrinkles. No wonder everybody has trouble recognizing me. I look like the Bride of Frankenstein after 12 Miles of Bad Road!

Literal Physical Appearance

Can you imagine if my literal appearance were displayed in your nighttime dream? If you could actually view my material body as it looks to the naked eye, I would be under a pile of blankets in bed, with my hair askew and my face distorted from being pressed against a pillow. With bedroom lights unlit, I'd probably be hard to see. Since I'd be unconscious, communication would be as difficult as if you had paid a waking visit to my bedside. A perfect conception of my physical condition in the early morning hours wouldn't be very practical for shared dreaming. In fact, it might be downright scary.

Would you rather see my body as it is clothed and coifed during the day? If we live in the same time zone, direct clairvoyance would work only if you are day sleeping. Yesterday, depending on the hour, I was wearing dirty garden clothes, wrapped in a towel as I stepped out of the shower or struggling into flannel pajamas. Not exactly the attire for a formal portrait. Besides, when I'm awake, I'm unlikely to be aware of you. Although you might make an accurate dreampsi observation, we couldn't consciously "meet" under those circumstances.

In the middle of the night, to truly "see" a daytime version of my physical body can require precognition or retrocognition on your part. You would have to factor in time slip. If so, there's no way to constrain time slip to recent history or the close future. You might perceive me as a child or a cantankerous old lady. Even if you restrict my appearance to an external body image, the possibilities beyond a real-time rendition are endless.

To avoid multiple choices, I might take a photo of myself and put it into a sealed envelope. If I gave it to you, you could place it under your pillow as you sleep. After you record your dream the next morning, you would open the envelope so the revealed picture could be compared with my image as it appeared in your dream. An alternate approach involves posting the photo on the Internet after the dream date. But even though the photo is real-time when it was taken, it's not real-time during slumber. To be clairvoyant of the picture, you'd have to ignore my dreaming consciousness, which may be "wearing" some other costume as I sleep. Keep in mind that a dream image is a product of the mind. It's actually my self-image that serves as the real-time target for your dreampsi perception, not my physical body or a photograph.

Habitual Self-Image

The self-image is usually a habit, not a conscious choice. We often create a self-image simply by looking at ourselves each day in a mirror. Please note this is a reverse image. You can be correct if you ID me with my hair parted on the "wrong" side.

Here are some mirror features that bear noticing on your dream characters: hair color (tinted or bleached), hairstyle (ponytail or spiked), facial hair (heavy beard or mustache), headgear (curlers or earphones), height and weight (6' tall or portly) and clothing of unusual shape (aviator suit) or shade (phosphorescent blue-green). The common structures underlying these cues are color and form. Visual clues can also show up in attitude, mood or behavior (stubbornness, sadness or smoking a cigarette).

A man's self-image tends to be more fixed and literal than a woman's. A woman's mirror image changes with each shift in clothing, hairstyle and make-up or, more profoundly, as a result of pregnancy. So, if you want to see a self-image that's frozen like a snapshot, I wouldn't make a very good target. My self-image is too mutable, due to ongoing physical changes as well as a very active imagination.

Imaginary Personification

Your self-image might not resemble an inverted physical clone if you have a well-developed fantasy life or maintain an ideal picture of yourself, in the prime of health. Or, perhaps, a less-than-ideal inner picture reflecting a low opinion of yourself. The habitual self-image can shift when there is an essential alternation in life style (like a career or name change). Or it may be temporarily exchanged by strong visualization, when you deliberately picture yourself as someone else. Identifying with a book, video game or TV character (putting on their "skin") can result in being seen as that avatar. The visual intensity may not have dissipated by the time you dream. Imagination is also involved when you plan shifting your physical appearance: to change hair length, to purchase clothing or to create a costume (like a lion mane's for a dream ball). Even if you never get around to completing the plan in the waking state, this temporary self-image shift can be literal wish fulfillment as you sleep. You must be very self-aware to confirm your partner's psychic view of your self-image, especially if it's not a near-physical version. This can be difficult to do. However, either the habitual or newly created self-image may be revealed if you pay attention to the media you see, the books you read, your reveries or your dreams.

Dream Depiction

If it's dream appearance that you're looking for, and the most obvious place to look for correlations is in another a dream. First, consider your former dreams. I wasn't surprised when a dream partner dreamt me as Lily Thomlin, because I've dreamt myself as her, too. Then, look at the dreams of other dream partners. I've appeared in the dreams of a dozen or so dreamers as a dark-haired young man. Finally, look in your dream of the night. When you're lucid, do you pay attention to how you appear? Sometimes it's possible to "see" yourself autoscopically, as if you are situated at a distance looking back at your dream body, rather than from within the confines of that body. Ask your dream characters how they see you. And check out those mirrors. While I was still a brunette, Jill Gregory had a lucid dream of me as a blonde. That same night I had a nonlucid dream in which I looked into a mirror and discovered that my hair was blonde. On another occasion, I went looking for Ed Kellogg while I was lucid and came upon a short man seated in a Buddha position. The same night Ed was having a lucid dream in which he looked into a mirror and saw himself as a "short jolly fat man" (in waking life, Ed was tall and had plenty of dark hair). It's convenient when an alternate appearance is confirmed dream-to-dream, but it's a rarity. More likely, you'll either be oblivious to how you look or perceive yourself as a physical clone, out of habit. However, if a perceptive partner is utilizing "x-ray vision," she can psychically "see" any of the selves you wear. Larger/smaller, younger/older, with different hair or skin, ethnicity or gender. Wearing clothes or none at all. Wearing a body or none at all. The alternatives can be analogous to a literal feature or event from waking life. You might see a partner as a dwarf, when she's actually confined to a wheelchair and, thus, is not the expected height. You could see me as a Latina, because that's the ethnicity I "wear" when I use my married name. You might be seen with hair braided atop your head, if you have a Swiss heritage. Or as a soap opera star or one of your partner's relatives because you share some "family" resemblance to that person. You might also be a science fiction, fantasy or comic character like a diminutive pixie, robotic superhero or two-dimensional cartoon. Your dream appearance isn't restricted to humanoid form.

Animal Form

I have dreamt my husband as an elephant and gorilla, a close relative as a dragon and a fellow dreamworker as an anteater - all analogous descriptions of the emotions, attitudes and activities that I had observed in the waking state. These are all my projections - the people involved don't confirm my characterizations. But what if another person dreams up the same representation? When I dreamt Fred Olsen as a little bald dog, I simply thought it was my humorous description of his growing pattern baldness. Then Jill Gregory informed me she had also dreamt of Fred as a little bald dog. I call this social agreement: we'd both seen Fred first-hand and used the same analogy to typify a feature obvious to waking eyes. But later on another lucid dreamer, who didn't know what Fred looked like and had never observed his behavior, dreamt that "a little dog with a bald spot on its head comes to be petted." Sounds like Fred to me.

The two most common characterizations that people have of me are: as a cat and as a bird (parrot, goose and peacock). The bird analogy is no reach of the imagination if you know that I have a website featuring flying dreams. In a non-lucid dream, I've dreamt myself as a butterfly, while in a lucid dream, my arms turned into wings. To dream of me as a cat isn't a great stretch, either. In one nonlucid dream, I declared, "I am a feline!" There's an interesting variance between physical life and dream however. Here, I like black panthers and all our family cats were black and white. In dreams, I'm more likely to be perceived as some shade of orange: lion, tiger or domestic shorthair. Well, at one time I did tint my hair with a reddish tone.

I've never deliberately dreamt myself as an animal in a lucid dream, but another dream partner did. First is Nora's lucid dream, then the dream of the partner she was targeting (Jill) and, finally, another member of the group who seemed to participate in the same event, but in her own way (Barbara).

Nora: I have awakened but struggle back to the dream. I can sense Jill. She is trying to "catch me". But I feel her strangling me in the dream. I make a decision and change myself to a cute brown teddy bear. Immediately there is a visual scene of a street. It is a small town. I am on the edge of the vision. Across the street is a cluster of non-descript buildings. I realize that Jill has recognized that she has hold of a bear and holds it tenderly. I have seen a car going each way on the street. I ask her, "Which way are the cars going?" Jill: I am standing in a circular meadow with buildings along the perimeter. A tiny kitten whose eyes have just opened is clinging to the top of my head with its tiny claws. Its eyes are squinting and its face is scrunched up. I take the kitten off from my head and hold it in front of my face, looking at it. It seems insecure. Then I watch in fascination and admiration as a half-grown cat does super-hero tricks: jumping to the top of buildings, hanging by one foot from a high railing, stopping instantly on the edge of roofing after running swiftly, etc. Barbara: I slip into dream and find myself, to my surprise, on top of the Eiffel Tower. I seem to be hanging on quite securely to the outer struts and looking at Paris below me. I see low buildings (and) a circular plaza with cars going round the Tower as part of a traffic pattern.

Nora willfully created her alternate persona as a teddy bear, but Jill did not quite perceive her that way. For Jill, a kitten was a more comfortable image to hold than a bear, although it was still small and furry. Influenced by Nora to see humans as animals, Jill used the same analogy to perceive Barbara as "a half-grown cat." Notice that both the teddy bear and the kitten are the same, very unusual, size. Yes, it's possible to perceive another human at great disparity with her waking physique and height, especially if that's how she projects herself to you.

Every image that Jill saw was created by her own body/brain and the same was true for Nora. The final cut of Nora's dream movie did not get through to Jill, but some of the raw footage of her appearance did: size, shape, texture and tactile pressure on Jill's dream body. It was if Nora handed herself to Jill as a blob of clay with these structures intact, but said, okay, Jill, the finishing details are up to you.

When you think of it, these are truly shared dreams because both dreamers are providing parts of the final productions. By giving herself over to Jill, Nora perceives bits and pieces of Jill's dream. Not the whole scene, since she's only on the "edge" of it. Her own dream is as unique a mix of contributions as is Jill's.

Underneath the Mask

Given that a partner may be appearing in another guise, how can you know who she is? The answer is, you probably can't, either because that possibility has never occurred to you or because you haven't trained yourself to sense beneath the surface of the dream. There are, however, some things you can do if you are a lucid dreamer that will increase you chances of meeting and recognition.

1. Expect your partner to be there when you begin your dream. Initially, you may expect to meet your dreaming partner at a particular place, and concentrate on that location. But if you get to the place, there may not be anyone there. The natural tendency is to go looking for your partner, like opening a door and expecting to see him behind it. I've had poor luck with that tactic, although my chances become slightly better if I spin with the intent to go where he is. In either case, it's all too easy to get distracted by whatever else is in the scene. Another commonly used technique is to stand your ground and call for your partner. Several times I heard my partner's voice reply, "I'm coming" but he never showed up! The main problem with this method is that you spend your precious lucid dream time in the search, leaving little time to interact. Avoid this delay by incubating to be where your partner is, however the scenery may look. 2. Assume that you connect, no matter what you see. When you are concentrating on finding a literal image of your partner, it's all too easy to ignore the characters who do appear, and thus miss clues to connection. I find a more productive approach is to act-as-if. Talk to whomever you meet as if he were your dream partner. He might be, in costume. But even if he is not, you are intending to communicate and he may become alert to that intent in his own dream. Although you may not achieve a mutual dream, you can still try for a telepathic one. Treat the character in front of you as a messenger. 3. Note details of the dream for later comparison. Whether your partner assumes a recognizable form or not, you will still have to confirm the dream connection when you wake. This is the time to put your observation skills to the test. Once you memorize a dream character's appearance, take a look at the surrounding scenery. Your partner may have brought some of his dream with him. Props can appear in both your dreams (goldfish, picnic table, bicycle). Or they may reflect ongoing interests and events of the previous day (playing piano or preparing a meal). Perhaps the most intriguing supporting element is your dream partner's companions. Who does he hang around with or who has had a major impact on his life: grandmother, friend or spouse? Once, my partner and his former guru showed up in my lucid dream. 4. Become conscious of dream imagery sub-features. When your dream partner presents himself in a less-than-conventional appearance, there still may be some structural details that remain the same. A vaguely seen character may still retain the same size and shape as his waking counterpart. An animal persona may have the same color and length of hair. A monster may still move and gesture like someone you know. 5. Notice is how the character feels to you. Give yourself the opportunity to develop the accuracy of your subtle senses as an adjunct to identification by visual image.

Are there any constraints on how you can appear? Probably just the limits of imagination. You can train yourself to stretch it, literally. Next lucid dream, experiment with your own dream body. Pull on your hair or fingers. Stick your hand into your arm or torso. Change your expectations by first hand experience. Your lucid dream body is far more mutable than you might expect.