Linda: Mutual dreaming occurs when two or more people share common
elements in their dreams or experience the same dream. There's a whole
range of interactive dreaming, from the most obtuse indication that we're
on the same wave length to the fantastic "I know you're in my dream
and you know I'm in yours," which is the shared dreaming experience.
When I first heard about and started reading about it, I had in mind that
mutual dreaming had to be of the fantastic variety. But as I've worked
with group and telepathic dreaming, I've discovered that is that there
is a wide spectrum of contact possibilities between being totally in your
own private dream space and this more public goal.
It is my belief, my experience and my belief, that I have had dreams
where I was lucid and in contact with other dreamers. I certainly was viewing
their images. We may have had conversations. We may have not. The conversations
may have been lucid and made sense or may have not. I can ask a person
a question in a lucid dream and they might say something completely off
the wall. It's as if they're dreaming - which they are! Or they can be
quite coherent.
R: I know a man who had a dream that he was sitting next to someone
he knew in high school. And when he said, "This is a dream, you know,"
the guy disappeared. He's convinced that the guy really was in the dream
and the information that this was a dream startled him so much that he
woke up. I love that.
L: I would agree. I've had situations where I'll be talking to
a dream person and say something to them or grab onto them and startle
them so much that they melt away. And the impression in the dream is that
this person has returned to waking life. It's a very strong impression.
There's no way I can verify it yet, but it's a very strong feeling. On
a couple of occasions I had lucid dreams in which I realized that the people
were awake and yet I was having a conversation with them. On one occasion
it was my husband. I had fallen back to sleep in the morning and I knew
he was downstairs starting breakfast. Yet I was holding a sensible conversation
with him.
One explanation is that the dream character was totally and completely
my hallucination, that I wasn't in contact with my husband at all. That's
one end of the spectrum: it's all my imagination. Dream characters are
all parts of me. Another explanation is that I was having a conversation
with him, but with another part, not his conscious self. If that's the
case, I could be having mutual dreams with people who are not necessarily
going to be awake and aware of me, or remember our meeting the next morning.
But on a couple of occasions, I have obtained information from a character
in a dream and had it verified. I called the person up the next day and
told them, "You said such-and-such." And they'd reply, "Oh,
well, such-and-such is happening to me."
So I theorize, "Well, I was in contact with something." At
the very least I was telepathically in contact with some information and
then hallucinated the whole scene, including the person I was talking to,
in order to understand and receive the information. When you think about
it, how may different ways are there in the waking state to be in communication
with another person? I can be thinking about someone else and project a
very strong hallucinatory image and indeed, that's something I'd like to
suggest we do right now. Let's see - let's pick somebody who we all like.
K: Bob Trowbridge.
L: Okay, Bob Trowbridge is right here. Can you see him? What's
he wearing?
K: A blue T-shirt.
L: What's he doing? Is he standing or sitting?
F: Standing.
L: On the table?
F: Sure. I hope he doesn't break it!
B: I had him sitting because that was just my image.
L: Standing, sitting. What kind of expression does he have on
his face?
J: Thoughtful.
R: Boyish.
J: Boyish and thoughtful.
B: He's very much into what he's expressing. He's very...
K: Sincere.
L: Okay, is he paying attention to any of us?
J: Uh-uh. (Laughter.)
K: The first image I had when you said Bob Trowbridge was of
him standing. I had him with a kind of crinkle, a smile in his eyes, but
you're right, not paying any attention to any one of us.
F: Actually I've got him over here, when he was trying to put
in the wiring and saying, "I can't do this, I can't do this,"
trying to figure it out.
L: Okay, do we have the same Bob Trowbridge? Well, obviously
we have overlapping variations of Bob Trowbridge. But there are some things
that are in common and other that are not. I had him with a yellow shirt
on, for instance.
R: I had a blue one too, but not a T-shirt, just a long-sleeve,
but cotton, too.
L: That's pretty apropos of Mr. Bob Trowbridge. Okay, now if
we wanted to contact this gentleman, and let's not get too psychic about
it right now, how would we go about doing that?
J: I'd call him on the phone.
L: I'd like to move back a step and say that one of the first
ways we could get into contact with him which wouldn't even involve his
voice presence would be to write him a letter. We could put information
down on a piece of paper and send it and he could send a letter back to
us. Next would be the phone with actual voice contact, but without visual
image.
R: We could send him flowers.
K: A singing telegram.
L: All right. So there are very symbolic ways of communicating
with Mr. Trowbridge. Then we could move to a step where he was within yelling
distance. Even before then perhaps we could have visual and audio, maybe
a television rig. Of course if we saw him that doesn't necessarily mean
that he's there at the moment. It could be a video tape.
F: You could send him a modem message.
L: You could. Superman, The Movie really intrigues me
when Superman talks to a holographic image which acts as though it were
a real person. But you know from the script that it is not; his father
has been dead for many years. And yet Superman is able to have this interdynamic
conversation with his father's image. If we can imagine such technology,
consider that our dreaming minds are much more free in terms of how we
can communicate with one another or be with other people. Then when we
start asking, "Can I mutual dream with another person?" what
do we really mean? What level of contact are we talking about? Are we talking
about eyeball to eyeball contact? Are we talking about a replay of an old
tape that happened several months ago in time? How valid are our dream
contacts? In a certain sense, it may not matter, because we consider that
TV's and radios and phones and letters are all legitimate forms of contact
with other people, although they may not be there physically.
After looking at my own dreams and reading the reports of other dreamers,
I started considering this model. I said to myself, "Okay, maybe we're
coming in at quite oblique angles, but there can still be a very valid
contact even though we're not having exactly the same dream." What
are we having instead? The same symbols are showing up; the same feeling
tone. The phrases being spoken by our dream characters are very similar.
So I took those elements back to the dreamers...
R: What do you mean, you took them back?
L: ...to the dreamers and asked, "Hey, does this sound right
to you?"
R: And they would basically tell you whether or not they thought
the correlation was valid or whether you were stretching it.
L: Right. On the frontiers of this kind of dream research, it's
not just the dreamers who are exploring, it's us facilitators, too. Because
there are very few rules, we are making them up as we go along. That's
why I encourage as much feedback as I can get because it helps me to help
everybody else.
I think we need to begin to get a sense of the subtleties, to ask, "Where
was I sharing symbols or actually getting in touch with another person
as opposed to another part of my dream where there was absolutely no correlation?
Was there a feeling level difference in this part of the dream as contrasted
with that part? Was there a scene shift in between? What was going on so
I would relate to another dreamer here and not over there?" These
are some of the questions I and other dreamers began to ask ourselves.
What goes on seems to be like switching from daydreaming at the ceiling
to suddenly coming back to the group and realizing, "Oh, yes, there's
a conversation going on here."
B: That's an interesting analogy.
L: That seems to happen all the time in our dreams because we
wander about, maybe focusing on other people and then we're off again.
Remember, we come together in physical life, not always looking one another
straight in the eye. Even though we may be physically in the same room,
in our minds we can be in Tahiti or on the moon or in the midst of a game
of Dungeons and Dragons. It's become very clear to me how many different
layers of consciousness and ways of connection there are in the waking
state. So it's not surprising, when we move to the dream state, which is
much freer place to experience our own consciousness, that we get into
spaces where other people might appear as symbol only and not as their
physical image. Speaking of which, K, you wouldn't have happened to have
any cats in your dreams would you?
K: When?
L: Just recently.
K: I just turned to this page in my journal. This was real close
to lucid. The name of this dream is "Two Simons." Simon is one
of my three cats.
"I'm in a new apartment. Peter, the landlord, is in my apartment
fixing things. He is slightly drunk and slightly belligerent. There is
a concrete tunnel to the outside and the cats keep going in and out. Then
at one point Simon is in and another Simon comes in from the tunnel and
sits next to him. Peter, the landlord, looks up and says, 'So now you have
four cats!' He doesn't seem too upset. I say something about 'The third
cat is only temporary. I'm watching him for a friend.' Meanwhile my mind
is busily running through explanations about probabilities and simultaneous
time. I quickly decide that it's better not to try to explain these things
to Peter. I come very close to knowing that I'm dreaming. This is why I
can see two Simons at once. The two Simons are snuggling up to each other
and giving me this peculiar knowing look as though underscoring the fact
that they're a dual presence."
This was a very interesting little segment. The second Simon comes in
and I'm like, "Now wait a minute. I know I've only got one of those."
And they sort of curl up to each other and look at me like, "Pay attention."
L: Did they rub against or roll or...
K: They rubbed against each other. And then Nanu, which is my
smallest, most wild-like cat, who hides from everyone...almost jumps out
the window. I grab her and she grips my hand like a little monkey. She
holds onto it. But the two Simons were rubbing against each other.
L: Reason I asked is that there are a lot of cats in the air.
I've been having cat dreams. I was just talking to Blanche. She had a cat
dream at the science lab last night. Her dream was about a gray and white
tabby that came and rubbed against her leg. The same night, Eliot, who
was also sleeping in the lab, incubated a dream asking for the "god
of lucidity" and got this huge cat!
My corresponding dream wasn't the same night, but two nights previous.
It was about my cat rolling over. Later on in the dream I was massaging
somebody. Rubbing and rolling - the gestures and the tactile sense - are
quite similar in these dreams, in addition to the image of the cat.
K: Actually, I have been writing about the cat in my journal
as being a kind of a...magic symbol. It's got within it potential for magic.
But also fear of the unknown is part of that symbol. So in dreams I'm getting
close and then coming back and putting up my mask. I'm going to hide behind
my cat self. I'm not quite going to look at you eyeball to eyeball, but
keep the symbol between us. I just think it's real interesting that the
same symbols keep coming up in our dreams.
L: If we expand our data base to include dreams from the previous
month we can find even more. Lately, I've been symbol swiping, either from
previous dreams of my own or from the dreams of another person.
J: And how do you swipe these symbols?
L: Well, for instance, I had dream, woke up and said to myself,
"Those symbols were in Jim's dream." Both our dreams had...coming
to a T in the road, a barn by the side of the road, a sexual metaphor -
kissing in the original one and actual explicit sex in mine - nudity and
chocolate or a discussion of the merits of chocolate. All these elements
came from the first dream that Jim ever had of me. And I just played them
back in my recent dream. But it wasn't a dream of Jim, specifically. It
was a dream of a woman. Symbolically, who can say? That's what I call symbol
swiping. Some part of my subconscious will hear about a symbol in dream
and think, "Oh, I like that. I'm going to incorporate it into my dream
the next time I have the opportunity."
F: Wait 'til we get copyright laws in the dream state!
L: And thank goodness we can do this because I think that a goodly
portion of group incubation, whether it's incubation for a particular kind
of a dream, a symbol, or lucidity, is successful because your subconscious
self gets really excited about somebody else's dream report. It gets stimulated
by reading other people's dreams and decides, "I'm going to have one
of those!"
F: R. stole my rattlesnake the other day.
L: Bob had snakes in his dreams, too. They're there, yes they
are. Bob and F. and R. are having snaky dreams. But Eliot and the women
are dreaming about cats.
K: My cats are very aware of any stuff that's going on with me
mentally or psychically. I can wake up with a dream in the middle of the
night, an important dream in the sense of carrying a lot of emotional weight
or being full of symbols that I find powerful. Often it will be a cat that
has awakened me at just the right moment. And it doesn't seem that this
is random. It seems really pretty distinct. It will be a couple of meows
or somebody will lick my face. I appreciate that.
L: So you don't need any light masks in your face. You've got
all these licky tongues. That's great. It seems much more organic then
red lights flashing in your eyes. Blanche also said she had trouble going
to sleep because of the pressure of the goggles.
F: I wore the goggles here in my own bed and had trouble going
to sleep.
You know how Tore Neilsen's doing it in his lab, what he's using for
kinesthetic triggering of lucidity, or "reality dreams," he calls
them? He puts a blood pressure cuff around the thigh. When somebody has
REM he pumps up the cuff which creates/triggers dreams that appear to have
incredible vividness of reality. It could be lucid or also waking dreams.
L: He increases blood pressure?
F: Well, he puts pressure on the thigh which creates a physical
intensity of the kinesthetic which apparently activates or intensifies
the dream content.
L: Does it lead to lucidity, necessarily?
F: Not necessarily, but the general term he calls reality dreams,
which are dreams that appear to be real and intense and vivid. It creates
vividness. Sometimes they're lucid, sometimes they're not.
L: That makes sense.
F: I think your red sock technique is another way of increasing
the pressure or the heat or whatever the kinesthetic trigger is.
L: I agree.
B: Lately, a trick I've been trying on myself to stimulate dream
recall is to set the alarm for three in the morning or 4 or 4:30 or 5.
Usually what happens, if it works, is I will have a dream and wake up just
before the alarm goes off. It seems like setting the alarm is the trigger
itself.
I do know I have some of the most vivid dreams I have ever had have
been after a day of nice vivid activity where there's a lot of neat stimulation:
music and color and sound. So if you wanted to capture that, from that
situation you would be emotionally up, be kind of energized. Your adrenaline
would be higher, probably.
F: Could be more blood flow to the brain.
L: We've been talking about lucid dreams and vivid dreams, but
mutual dreaming is also associated with the out-of-body experience. You
don't necessarily have to get to shared space by going through all the
layers that you do when you have an out-of-body experience. You can certainly
get there using that route, but you don't have to.
K: I've had at least one dream where there were too many layers
for me to be able to follow. I could follow a thread, but just barely.
And I knew that what I wrote down was only hinting at everything that was
happening. But there was a lot happening simultaneously and people operating
on different levels at once and knowing it and talking to each other about
it. But not in terms of visual images mixing.
It's very upsetting because I realize I'm getting into chaos. I'm getting
into that portion of dreams before it's had a chance to congeal. It's still
very amorphous and instead of getting to the point where my dream mind
or my logical mind is picking one symbol to mean what it is, it's just
pulling everything. And because my waking self is not used to functioning
at that level I come away feeling confused. But I'm glad when I have them
because I think it's practice in loosening up, reaching further or reaching
the boundaries. And bringing in as many different levels as possible, stretching
myself.
F: Is that called simultaneous dreaming?
K: Yeah, it's a kind of simultaneous dream.
F: Because G's talked about having multiple dreams woven together.
I've had that happen a time or two. Not often. Yeah, that's confusing too,
or can be.
K: It can also be great.
L: Yes. In one case I actually incubated it. My goal was one
of the Seth exercises: when you become lucid, ask what happened before
the dream began. After I formed that intent, it became like two dreams
at once. I went forward and I went backward at the same time. One part
of me had this dream where I was walking backwards into the dark, into
a dark room.
F: Like pushing the rewind button.
L: Yeah, it was funny when I woke up. The other part of me went
forward into the next scene. I didn't actually move forward but suddenly
a woman appeared in front of me with a smile and a great sense of recognition.
It was like, "I know who you are and you know who I am and we're old
friends." We both hugged each other and it was wonderful.
When I woke up I wondered, "I know they happened at the same time,
but which dream am I going to write down first?"
F: That's a waking reentry exercise too.
L: To do two things at once?
F: No, but to do the fast forward and the replay. Go backwards
and forwards in your imagination.
K: It seems like the more you exercise, the more you've built
up some skills...you know, if you can do one thing then that will allow
you to do the other.
L: That's very true. And except when I'm into a particular experiment,
I don't try to limit myself by saying, "Well, you just have to have
one goal." I usually have several things going on at the same time.
K: That's my problem. When I try to focus on...if I decide I
want to do a project in my dreams, choosing what to focus on... As soon
as I think of something, I instantly think of five or ten other things
I want to do equally as much. I want to do this and I want to do that.
L: To tell you the truth, getting involved in these group experiments
is really good for me because I have the same problem. When I have a commitment
to a particular target with a group of people who I know are going to be
watching me, both in the dream state and in terms of looking at my dream
report, then I get focused real fast. It's a real incentive, also, to make
an additional effort to try to lucid dream or try to have a particular
kind of a dream.
Now, before we end, I'd like to share a commentary from a mutual dream
experiment. Actually it's a shared dreaming experiment.
J: What's the difference?
L: At one end of the spectrum we try to find common elements,
get psychic "hits." I dream about a dog; you dream about a dog.
I'm crying in my dreams; you're in bad spirits in yours. There are bits
and pieces that are similar. But, as you move up the scale these incidents
grow.
So, in the midst of these massive dream reports, there's this one little
scene. I have a flash of people walking on a beach and all I can see is
from the knees down. The same night another member, Barbara Shor, has that
image in her dream. They were up on a cliff above the sea, though.
J: But she saw them from the knees down.
L: Right, she had a flash. I just looked at Jill Gregory's report
and she comes at it from a more oblique angle, but that little scene is
in her dream too.
J: So that's a shared dream.
L: No, we're not there yet. We're really not aware of the fact
that I'm seeing you and you're seeing me. But we're dreaming a mutual dreamscape.
B: Mutual dreaming but not shared dreaming.
L: Then up the scale, shared dreaming is, I see you in my dream,
you see me. We have a dialogue or some event is happening so that when
we compare dream reports there is the "ah-hah!" of recognition.
We are both there.
K: I would think that the ultimate would be to become skilled
enough in doing it so you make plans to meet in order to engage in a project.
L: Right. And we'd go off and have our adventures or do something
together. We'd create our own dream reality and hopefully bring back some
of it to the waking state.
B: The ultimate for me would be being able to do it consciously
where the other person could be 10 miles away and both of you just go into
meditation and you're instantly together.
R: What might be fun would be material intended to stimulate
this kind of dreaming, to add the element of play to it, as another avenue
of shared experience.
L: I'll second that.