The idea of shared dreaming is popular among lucid dreamers. A group of authors led by Denis Banchenko hypothesized that there is a biological environment, a certain field inside which people mentally transmit information to each other, that forms a collective consciousness. Mutual adjustment and synchronization are possible during joint or synchronous activities (such as reading texts, watching movies, or chatting). As a result, people may experience similar dreams or dreams with common elements.
An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis. The authors started with the idea that the group of participants should consist of at least seven people; according to one of the hypotheses, six should be in a state of normal sleep, and one should be in a lucid dream. The researchers wanted to find out whether common themes discussed during the day would appear in the participants’ dreams and whether the number of lucid dreams would increase.
According to the authors, synchronization is real: the topics discussed during the day appeared in the participants’ dreams, and the number of dreams involving members of the group increased by 2.5 times. However, the number of lucid dreams did not increase – it may be necessary to add other practices for this to happen. The authors suggest that the coordination of biological brain rhythms is possible, which affects the synchronization of dreams.
At the same time, neither previous research on this topic nor this article (which was not even formatted according to the rules of the scientific community) have been reviewed in scientific journals. The author named a method after himself, but so far, it has not been confirmed.
Have you ever had a shared dream (ordinary or lucid)?
The preprint of the article was published in January 2024 on the OSF.
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