Have you found yourself encountering a phenomenon that means you and someone else have shared the same dream? Or are you just wondering if it is indeed possible?
There do not seem to have been many scientific studies or psychological investigations into this, but all you need to do is search the internet enough and you will be inundated with accounts of this occurring.
The most well-accounted cases of this type of dreaming happening are between people who have similar experiences, lifestyles or know each other very well.
This can be in cases such as therapist-client relationships, in which the therapist has noted that they have a matching dream around the same time their client had theirs.
Other instances of this happening are often with people of emotional closeness, families, such as parents and children, romantic partners, lovers, and many cases of twins as well. The least well-documented cases are in strangers experiencing the same dream.
What exactly is shared dreaming? Can you make it happen? Is it possible? And what does it mean?
Let’s find out.
Table of Contents
Shared Dreaming
Shared dreaming is entirely possible, and is somewhat groundbreaking in its discovery. Around 1 in 1,000 people acknowledge having had a shared dream. It is usually discovered by one person telling the story of what happened in the dream and the other excitedly interrupting and finishing it, only for the two to realize they shared the same dream.
While this occurrence is most common in people who are close, families, friends, and so on, shared dreams also often happen the same night as well. A shared dream is most often had when two people have spent a great deal of time together and their shared day-to-day experiences overlap into their dreams.
Often they might have spent the day out together and that night they may both dream of the place that they had spent the day. In shared dreaming, both parties will be there in the dream as well. It is this reason that shared dreams are often had by people who are close and why it is rare that strangers ever share their dreams.
Shared dreams can also be had as a result of emotional heaviness. This is a reason why therapists and clients may share dreams, with the emotional weight of what is talked about, this can overflow into the dream state. So, after a particularly heavy session, it is no real surprise that both parties may share a dream about the topic discussed in the session.
And while these two parties are not necessarily close, there is a lot of emotional weight and personal feelings involved in the relationship between these people, which declines the need for shared experiences that would otherwise end up in a shared dream occurring.
That being said, it cannot go unthought that there is a possibility for shared dreaming with a stranger. There is every possibility that it could happen, especially if two parties are experiencing the same situations at that point in their life.
There is another type of shared dreaming though called mutual dreaming or ‘meshing’. This is a topic that you can see touched on in the movie ‘Inception’. Although the premise is far from reality it doesn’t hurt to experiment and see what the human psyche is capable of. Let’s consider what this means and if you cab run your own experiments.
Shared and ‘Meshing’ Dream Experiments
We want to take a moment here to talk about something that you are probably wondering about. Is it possible to meet someone in a dream? Perhaps you walked down the street and saw a stranger, but you recognized them, did you meet them in a dream?
This is an area not looked into very much and the idea of mutual dreaming in this sense would imply paranormal explanations; either that humanity has an unrecognized capability for telepathy or that the dream world is an external construct in itself.
If you wanted to try sharing a dream with someone you know, or ‘dream meshing’. Then you need to set things up, chose a person you are close with, and do an activity during the day, something memorable would work best. Before you sleep discuss the experience with your dream partner.
Hopefully, this will result in you both dreaming about your waking experience, or something related to it. There is a chance you could lucid dream this if you do seek out your ‘meshing’ partner and speak with them in your dream. Then after comparing notes with your partner and see how much of it matches up.
Remember there is nothing paranormal about this, it is simply an example of how our living experiences affect our subconscious and our dream state.
Inception
You might think we are drifting into the topic of the infamous ‘inception’ film here and it all sounds a bit crazy. Inception was about espionage, non-consentual dream sharing.
Inception is far from dream-sharing, ‘inception’ is about infiltrating another’s dreams and dreaming within dreams, within dreams. Dream sharing, however, is about shared experiences with another person becoming a shared dreaming experience with another person.
You can plan shared dreams with a person, or you can find it to be a happy accident. However, unlike in inception, you will not be aware that you shared a dream with someone unless you both discuss it and discover you had the same dream.
You may be aware of this, if you can lucid dream, this is something that not everyone can do, and is not always quite as fun as just letting the dream take hold.
Unintentional Shared Dream Meanings
The root of most dreams is experiences and emotions that are functional in your subconscious mind. If you share a dream with another person then it is likely that you have gone through something, bore witness to something, or even just spent a lot of time together, with that other person.
There is no supernatural meaning behind it, it is simply a wonderful phenomenon that occurs when two or more people have a similar experience.
Me and my two brothers all had the same dream on the same night. In the dream, we took my parent’s blue truck and my oldest brother drove us to Walmart and we hurried up and came back home before our parents knew the truck was gone. But I thought this was crazy when we all woke up and remembered the dream and we all said that we dreamed about that. We would never do that outside of our dream even though it seemed really real because we would be too scared to get in trouble. At the time my oldest brother was like 14 so he couldn’t even drive.