By Rory Mac Sweeney © 2013

“My new project, The Mutual Dream Experiment, seeks to encourage people to explore the nature of reality by allowing a means in which to investigate the process of shared dreaming. There is a consensus among people who really tune into their dream life that the possibility of exchanging information (for example passwords) with other people in the dream world may certainly be a possibility, one that, although perhaps counterintuitive to our physical model of the world, may be something that seriously needs to be revised in the wake of lucid dreaming.

 

Lucid dreaming has far wider reaching philosophical concerns than most materialists are willing to consider as it unravels the very fabric of our reality. If it wasn’t for the incredible demonstration of Keith Hearne and later, Stephen LaBerge, the scientific community would likely still be holding in contempt the very notion of a self aware dreamer, so how should we feel about mutual dreaming?

 

I think the answer is that we should proceed as explorers, pioneers of the vastness of inner space, ready to accept any findings we encounter.

 

My experiment was inspired by the work of Robert Waggoner and Ed Kellogg and their efforts to share dreams in the pre-internet era. Robert and I have spoken extensively on this subject and we both agree that an independent adjudicator of some description really lends a level of credibility to the exercise. We have created an intuitive software system specifically designed to allow people to anonymously interact, should anyone actually receive a password. Robert and I both agree that this is generation 1 of what we hope will become a rather elaborate exercise and hope to fine tune the system as we progress.

 

It is for this latter reason that I want to avoid the treatment of this exercise as a binary process. Receiving or not receiving a password should not be your only goal as the language of the dream is often very semiotic in its process, so what we really hope to see is people sharing out their dreams and comparing their experiences so as to uncover any potential synchronicities that might emerge and otherwise go unnoticed.

 

We will be making our outing into the dream world for 24 hrs on the last Saturday of every month and each active member will have 15 days prior to the experiment to enter a password of their own unique choice into our secure online system. This would preferably be a word not normally associated with their person nor should it be documented anywhere else apart from their own imagination.

 

During the 24 hour period of the experiment, people from all over the globe will be encouraged to attempt to communicate with other dreamers and attempt to give out their password. Being lucid in the dream will help, needless to say, but it is not essential. Strong intention to share might yield a similar outcome.

 

One must be open to what can be contrived to be the password. Although we ideally want the exact word to be spoken person to person, I am aware of several types of results that may occur here, due to the semiotic nature of the dream and I encourage people to communicate their findings regardless of how trivial it might seem. Robert and I discussed the nature of potential encounters in a recent YouTube video. The video makes a very insightful reference to a passage from Robert’s book “Lucid Dreaming – Gateway to The Inner Self” referencing Dr Kellogg’s terrifically insightful views on how we might approach mutual encounters in the dreamscape.