Natalia Snider is a certified dream practitioner living in Carbondale. She works with people’s dreams and imaginations to facilitate self-healing. Every month,
she will analyze someone’s dream in The Sopris Sun. Anyone can submit a dream for personal analysis or inclusion in this column by visiting dreamhealings.com
I want to take a slight variation from the normal format this month to share my own dream practices in hopes it will inspire dreamers out there to go farther, experience more, heal or grow if they so wish. There’s a conference each year that I am part of called the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), where I am working with other dreamers to experience and study shared dreams. First, let me review where science is currently in the field of dream studies.
Lucid dreaming (meaning one is conscious inside the dream state) is at the forefront with labs successfully communicating with a sleeping lucid dreamer through electroencephalograms and biofeedback signals from inside the dream to the outside waking world. This proved that lucid dreaming is indeed a real phenomenon taking place, which on its own is a success and has created multiple stems of study along with devices to hack yourself into lucid dreaming. But it doesn’t stop there. At a research facility in California called REMspace, two lucid dreamers successfully communicated with each other from inside the dream. When one sleeping subject entered lucidity they were given a randomized word through earbuds, which they repeated into the dream space. A second sleeper then became lucid and correctly picked up the word from the dream space and reported it back to the waking world. Although, like all scientific studies, more studies are needed here to convince the masses. Yet, for us in the dream field, this is extremely exciting because it not only is proof of lucidity but validation of this realm, in which people can meet and communicate, that is outside of the physical one — something many lucid dreamers, shamans and spiritualists have known for eons.
So with this in mind, let me tell you what I am doing with shared dreams and the steps of how to experience shared dreams with your own family and friends if you so choose. After spending so much time with other dreamers focusing and talking about dreams for a week at the conference, we began to all dream of each other, sometimes through shared dreams. This is when two dreamers have individual dreams of the other person but the storyline and details of the dream are the same. This indicates that the two dreamers met in the dream realm and experienced the same dream together. Shared dreams happen naturally, spontaneously, and so much more often than most realize because of the lack of recording or sharing of dreams with each other.
So, step two is to bring about awareness and importance to dreams in your own group by recording and sharing them continuously. You may be surprised how quickly you might dream sync with someone.
After so many spontaneous shared dreams my group and I decided to try and procure this type of experience. We created what we are calling an incantation that we repeat like a mantra while falling asleep to connect with the other dreamer. Once this began to work, we realized we needed more to prove that we were indeed meeting in the same space, so we decided to try and share a code word. A word that is secret to only yourself until the other dreamer successfully shares a dream with you where you shared that word with them. Step three, then, is to create a phrase with a code word for yourself to share.
One night practicing this, something extraordinary happened, not at all what I had hoped for but what now has my full attention. I became lucid inside my dream and went searching for the dreamer I was supposed to be meeting. When I found her she was sleepwalking in a forest. I tried to wake her but couldn’t fully bring her out of her stupor. Instead she started talking in her sleep, slurring and mushing her words. She said, “I love you,” and I knew she was dreaming of someone she loved. I could almost visualize her dream but stopped myself, not wanting to pry. Then I asked her for her code word and she mumbled out the word “salad.” I thought this odd but went about telling her my word, repeating it over and over. When I woke, she texted telling me of a really weird dream where she was trying to repeat a word but couldn’t remember it upon waking. Then she went on to say the rest of her dream didn’t mean anything and was a dream of preparing a salad with her new partner.
I found myself astonished at what I was realizing happened in my own dream. I was trying to wake someone from a real normal dream state into lucidity from inside the dream realm, the implications of which are exponentially exciting.
So lastly for step one, which is absolutely the most important and therefore best kept ‘til the end, is to first allow anything to become possible. Nothing happens in the dream realm, this place of pure consciousness and creation, without your belief that it can.