Dream Partners: An Ongoing Experiment in Lucid Dreaming Sharing

This is a guest post by Maria Isabel Pita & Dr. James M. Kroll.

Lucid dreaming—being aware of the fact that you are dreaming while your body is asleep—is a particularly interesting state of mind which allows for the exercising of intent, a heightened dream experience and vivid dream recall. Lucidity can also be training grounds for new and extraordinary experiences.

When we look at the fundamentals of remote viewing, telepathy and precognition—Non Local Awareness—it seems obvious that consciousness has the ability to split, effectively accessing more than one point in space-time at once. Dissociative and relaxed states such as dreaming facilitate a more complete “tuning” into such alternative points. With this thought in mind, we decided to personally test the limits of lucidity.

In September of 2012, we, the authors, both experienced lucid dreamers, met on the online lucid dreaming forum Mortal Mist.

Shortly afterward, we began attempting to experience a shared lucid dream, targeting specific nights when we would intend to become lucid and meet up in mind-space. We have never met physically in waking reality and live approximately seven-hundred miles apart.

Because dreams are personal and unpredictable, we agreed to be honest and non-judgmental of our dreams, to share them openly and not censure events and outcomes.

We discovered right away that it is indeed possible to intentionally create a “telepathic” link between two dreamers on a consistent basis:

Maria’s dream:

I’m sleeping in the backseat of a white luxury car, like a small limousine, when my mother wakes me and we go meet my deceased grandmother on the steps of a building. After a while, seeing the car still parked in the lot, I begin walking toward it hoping I might have time to go back to sleep just in case James has a lucid dream and tries to call me into it. I reach the car, enter through the driver’s door, and climb into the backseat, where I curl up comfortably…

James’s dream:

I’m outside inspecting an old mint condition luxury car. It probably dates back to the 1950’s and might be a Cadillac. The car is white with chrome bumpers…

The shared visual of the white limousine is striking, as is the action of each dreamer walking toward it for further inspection. One can speculate that Maria’s conscious desire to find James impacted his dream?

James:

I was in college and a female performer was putting on an interactive magic show. She needed volunteers from the audience and I was chosen. Her three provocatively dressed female assistants collected the various props. The lights went down and the show commenced. There was an odd sensuality about the dream; I was lead to believe that, as a part of the act, I would be losing some clothes. As it turns out, the act ended before ever achieving any real momentum. I then chatted with the three assistants, discussing where the act might have gone, but I was distracted by small pins embedded in my left index finger. I pulled them out one by one.

Maria:

I believe I wake in a strange living room. I feel I’ve been asleep for a long time. James must have found me in his dream. But Arthur needs to be walked, so I hurry upstairs to dress. A man’s shirt and pants are lying on the bed. I stand before the dresser mirror and clearly see my face but my hair is cut short like a boy’s. I look fondly around my old childhood bedroom and see what looks like the model of a stage on which stand three elfin barbie dolls with slanted eyes, and other details that indicate they represent magical beings or magicians. My presence activates some mysterious mechanism and they step forward to offer me their little magic wands.

Aside from the obvious visual bleed through of the magic show and magical dolls, there is also a synergy between the number of assistants and dolls (three), as well as between the small pins and the dolls’ little magic wands. The discarded male clothing is also interesting.

It was also possible for us to have mutual lucid dreams with shared dream images. For example:

Maria:

I’m flying, sensing the ocean to my left, but I’m farther from it than I had hoped. I cry, “James! and a man’s voice responds—Maria! I look down and see a dark-haired man sitting on a front lawn. “James, I’m up here!” He joins me in the blue sky, where we’re surrounded by pinkish white clouds… We land in a field where we’re confronted by two doors. James stands before the door on the left while I choose the door on the right… Feeling elated, I backstroke through the air. James still looks distracted as we take off into the sky again. I say, “Let’s go to the rock on the beach where we had planned to meet. Take me to the rock!” Holding hands, we begin flying toward the ocean.

James:

I decide to fly backstroke style to the rock wondering if I will find Maria there. I am almost there when the scene is suddenly superimposed onto another scene. In this secondary scene, I’m in a field looking up at a blue sky dotted with pink tinged clouds. The merged visuals slowly fracture, the pieces becoming smaller and smaller, until they collapse into a single point. Then the scene re-expands to its original size and once again I’m literally in two places at once, the beach/ocean and the field/blue sky.

To the best of our knowledge, we were lucid at approximately the same time here. There is an obvious synergy between the sky and pinkish white clouds in each dream.

Also relevant is James’ apparent split consciousness, literally experiencing two places at once, which seems to have been reflected by the two side-by-side doors Maria saw. We believe our simultaneous lucidity aided in the shared visuals, which seem to clearly demonstrate the notion of split consciousness.

We all dream with many people all the time, some who we know in waking reality, many who we don’t know. Some of these encounters may be mutual or shared dreams even if the participants don’t remember them.

Interconnections in the dream space are subtle and usually filtered through metaphors which, like the images of a poem, can be very personal. We feel that the more connected two people are, the more affinity they have with each other and their vision of the world, the better chance they have at intentionally realizing mutual dreams.

Beyond Inception: Real lucid dreaming encounters covers several years of our experiences, documenting our strategies and the dynamic approach we used to better negotiate the dream space individually and together, as well as work with a new group of dream partners.

About the Authors

Maria Isabel Pita was born in Havana, Cuba. Her family moved to the U.S. when she was four months old and she grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. Reading, writing and history, especially the ancient Egyptian civilization, have been her abiding passions ever since she can remember. In college she majored in World History and minored in English Literature and Cultural Anthropology. She has traveled extensively and authored a series of critically acclaimed paranormal and contemporary erotic romances. Maria’s most recent works are the historical epic Truth is the Soul of the Sun-A Biographical Novel of Hatshepsut-Maatkare, and A Concise Guide to Ancient Egypt’s Magic and Religion. Maria is a regular contributor to the Lucid Dreaming Experience, for which she was interviewed by Robert Waggoner in the September 2011 issue. For Maria, lucid dreaming is a spiritual practice intimately bound with her waking life, and what the ancient Egyptians called “the intelligence of the heart.” She invites comments and questions on her lucid dreaming Blog: Lucid Living Lucid Dreaming.

Dr. James M. Kroll is an engineer by profession, a life long dream enthusiast, and a charter member of the Mortal Mist and Deep Dreaming discussion forums. His personal interests in relation to the dreaming mind include exploring PSI phenomenon, reality modeling and the induction of lucid dreams. He holds a U.S. patent on the use of electrical and magnetic stimulation to induce lucid dreams. He participated in a study at a world famous PSI research center. A summary of his experiences may be found in his interview with Robert Waggoner in the December 2012 issue of the Lucid Dreaming Experience. James grew up near the ocean, which still remains a very special place for him. He currently resides in a suburb of Chicago with his beautiful wife and nine-year-old daughter.

First Image CC: Dream Canopy by Paul Anglada