By Patrick McNamara Ph.D.
Published June 19, 2016
Can two or more people share the same dream? As far as I know, there have been no scientific investigations of this question. But there are literally thousands of well-documented accounts.
The best-documented cases involve therapist-client shared dreams. In these, there is a professionally trained therapist who verifies the claim that the dream happened to both the therapist and the client around the same time. The next-best documented cases involve people in close relationships like parent/children, spouses, or lovers. Consistent with the effect of emotional closeness on shared dreams, we also have plenty of well-documented cases of twins sharing the same dream. The least well-documented cases involve complete strangers sharing the same dream. (We only have anecdotal reports of strangers experiencing the same dream because the strangers happened to run into one another and recognize each another from the dream!)
I have written about the shared dreams of twins in this blog and cited sources on twins in that post. For sources on shared dreams between therapists and clients, see Anthony Shafton’s 1995 book Dream Reader. For sources on complete strangers sharing dreams, see Frank Seafield’s Dream Curiosities. You can also find forums on shared dreams all over the web. We have to conclude that people everywhere do occasionally experience the same dream as another individual.
What are we to make of this fact? First, all we have are anecdotal reports. People believe they experienced the same dream, but we have to remain skeptical until controlled scientific investigations are conducted. In addition, the two people involved never agree about every detail about the shared dream. Nevertheless, I have learned to respect anecdotal reports in the world of dream research because these reports are usually reliable. There is no incentive for people to lie about the experience.
There are some commonalities among the reports that increase confidence in their reliability. For example, most often the two people involved know each other and are emotionally close. Obviously, you are more likely to hear about unusual experiences involving two people if they see each other on a regular basis. In addition, the way in which the two people typically discover that they shared a dream is that one person begins sharing the dream without knowing that the other person had the same one until the other person jumps in and finishes it.
Read more: PsychologyToday.com
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