do dreams transfer and morph from person to person like a virus?

or the ideas that evolve in our subconscious to create them?

completely random idea. I just read a dream thread, OP mentions that he has a dream like no other.
I can relate, as I too have had dreams like no other, but not recently. perhaps OP came down with the dream virus?
he tells his dream, and it spreads. now one of you could have a dream like no other, or could it take a much less direct approach and infiltrate through simple linguistic algorithms. tell me i'm making this bs up lol..

reply to post by yourmaker


You may be onto something here, but don't have a clue what. A year or so ago, I had this dream of an earth depopulated and one scene was of this small town with some folks sitting around a table in the street, a shop right next to it where they made clothing, and inside was this happy woman with a fancy hat and trying on a dress like the 1800's. I wrote this down in my journal, but did not tell anyone.

Three months later, my wife tells me of this odd dream of the past, yet it was of the future. As she went through the dream, I remained silent, but chills went up my spine as she was telling the same dream with more details that I had had. Then she ended it inside the shop with the woman in a fancy hat. Yup, we share on some level.

reply to post by yourmaker


Sailormoon gets a star because I am pretty much in solid agreement with everything in that post, but I think the key words in the op are "dream like no other". We've all had them, which is probably why we tend to dismiss them as "just another dream" - even when everything about them makes us (want to?) believe they're something more.

Why are some so much more vivid than others? Why do we seem to have varying levels of 'connectedness' to our dreams?

Is it just a matter of the pineal gizmo being more generous with "the good stuff" at some times rather than others?

I have experienced what Sailormoon is referring to, and think yourmaker is talking about the same thing, in a sense. That when you get close to someone, spend a lot of time with them, discussing the same subjects, you cultivate conditions conducive to "shared dreaming". How "inner" or "outer" you believe that is has to do with what you believe dreams are.

Personally, I think they are channels that our consciousnesses "tune" into when we sleep. I *suspect* that some of them can be shared - by any number of dreamers. I think this network exists on other levels of our consciousnesses too, so the idea of a "viral dream" - being perpetrated by those who might know how to manipulate this network - seems ABSOLUTELY plausible.

Good thread.

The best theory that I can come up with is that we ALL are connected, or at least, could be.

The mechanism by which that occurs is still under study, but it has to do with quantum mechanics and the very nature of "reality" itself.

I don't think dreams are like a virus, but I could believe that there is an underlying theme as to why people dream similar dreams. If my proposition is correct, then the phenomena could be explained by a "bleed through" of thoughts throughout the "network", and it would point to an evolutionary process where we hone the skills innate within ourselves.

The theory I'm working on would explain astral travel, telepathy, and intuition.

I am led to believe that our physical bodies are just a "shell", and that the mind itself is separate entity, but knowledge of how the "interface" works is long lost.

If you can imagine all the people around the world, sleeping in thier beds and dreaming, the collective "dream world" or collective imagination, can be seen as the "realm" of our dreams. All our ideas, images, experiences and thoughts are combined in the collective subconsciousness, and when the lights are turned off, we experience dreams as a kind of "program" that pulls specific data into a pattern.

When we learn to override the program, we experience a lucid dream, and if we can tap into the mechanisms of how a dream is formed, we could even learn to program our dream experiences. I would imagine that one would need to document their dreams and then map them together, familiarising themselves with the memory area that is used to produce a dream, and introduce programming of their own.

Very interesting thread, i have always found dreams very fascinating. When i was a freshman in college i wrote a research paper about lucid dreaming. Its a very interesting subject on its own. While researching it though, i remember coming across a few sites that speculated one could travel to another persons dream. I remember them saying that both people would have to be in a lucid dream state. I think that their could be a connection between people when they are dreaming if they are both in control (lucid) of their dream. I personally don't know if this is true or not but i wouldn't rule it out. I mean, they say we only use a small percentage of our brain, who knows if we can tap into some distant part when we are asleep. All in all a very interesting subject.