This article was originally published on The Lucid Hive

Hello Dreamers!

I believe that clues to the origin and purpose of shared dreams may be found not only in how they are similar, but importantly, in how such shared dreams are dissimilar.

Being fortunate enough to be part of a community of Dreamers whose membership often intersects with many other related groups, it may be little surprise how information from conversations about dreaming and our waking lives can flow between individuals without them having had direct contact at all. This information can subsequently filter its way into our dreams to produce shared dream elements that may come as a surprise to some.

Occasionally though, we may find that when people we know have dreams with shared details, there is simply no obvious explanation for where the information came from in our waking world(s).

I recently shared a dream with a friend in the Dreamer community. The matching details in the dreams that occurred within a few days of one another were unusual – we had both dreamt of a brown file that had been torn along the top. In the same dream there were also two men outside on a bar/pub porch discussing something. We also saw an umbrella in our related dreams from the same week. One of the most interesting aspects about this experience for me was that in her dream somebody had also tried to staple the torn file back together again. Neither of us recall that any of these details matched waking world interactions between us or anybody else.

Take another dream I had this year that I recently shared with a sceptic neighbour who believes dreams are meaningless. I dreamt about two teenagers with a shotgun who were walking towards me up Street X. Strangely, I had just left a park and was running towards the teenagers in the direction which I live, rather than away from the teens as you’d expect. I ran past them and jumped over a fence with a steep bank on the other side; something few people would think to do in the waking world. I then ran into the stairwell where a violent altercation ensued, and somebody came along and gave me a new phone.

Upon telling my neighbour that I had a dream about two teenagers with a shotgun, their jaw dropped – they had had a dream about two teenagers with a shotgun that same night. At this point I did not want to influence their dream description so did not divulge all of my dream details to them. They told me that in their dream they ran towards two teenagers with a shotgun who walked up Street X in the same direction as appeared in my own dream. In their dream they ran towards the shooter and jumped over the same fence, entering the same stairwell (out of four possible stairwells in the area). In the stairwell, some kind of violent act occurred – it was at this point in our waking world conversation that my jaw also dropped.

I hardly talk with this person and was amazed at the number of dream detail matches. Yet, what I found most intriguing were the differences between our dreams. In his dream the teenagers exited a car. In my own dream, I don’t recall a car. In his dream the weather was clear and in mine it was raining. In his dream it was night and in mine it was day. More grimly, in his dream description, a car then came to pick up a body from the stairwell and took it away in the boot (trunk) of the vehicle.

I know many of you have had shared dreams before and I would really love to hear about some of your experiences, and especially some of the little oddities you may have found within, or indeed outside of your dream.

Thanks for reading. God(s) bless!

Dan, aka Dream Prophecies – If you want to wake up, go to sleep

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