Essay: Shared Dreams
May. 21st, 2023 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeShared Dreams
Series: Essays
Summary: When headmates share dreams via memory leakage, nightmares, and dream hook-ups, plus the skills and ontology thereof.
Word Count: 4400
Notes: This essay straightforwardly discusses nightmares, flashbacks, and sex. It was sponsored by the Patreon crew! It is also prep work for Multi, Moregasmic because that’s a sex-specific zine and we want a more general thing about shared dreams for plural use.
In December 2020, Rogan, Mac, Miranda, Sneak, Bob, and Grace found themselves all together sharing a dream taking place at a water park that defied physics. They piled into a giant water raft roller coaster, got soaked, and had a blast. (And afterward, Sneak magically dried Grace’s clothes to put the creases back in her suit.)
At their best, shared dreams are probably one of the most spectacular, nifty, gee-whiz things we can do. At their worst, they can be devastating, uncontrollable nightmares. Not all plurals have them, but plenty do, and yet I haven’t been able to find anyone going more in-depth than, “we can do that!” or “I cannot.” So let’s talk about it!
Headmates Mentioned in this Essay (skip this if you don't need/want the intro)
Rogan: he/him. Workaholic stress cadet. Mac's hubby, Biff's boyfriend.
Mac: he/him. Disney princess in man form. Rogan's husband.
Miranda: she/her. Just wants everyone to love to-do lists.
Sneak: ze/zer. Bubbly ray of sunshine. Not sneaky at all.
Bob: he/him. All smarts, no sense. Grey's hubs.
Grace/Grey: she/her. Silent and sensible. Bob's wife.
Biff: he/him. The only one who can sew. Rogan's boyfriend, Mori's best bro.
Mori/M.D.: she/her. Punk zinester who does our taxes. Biff's best bro.
Rawlin: he/him. That one freakin' guy.
Types of Shared Dreams
For at least a couple multiples we’ve met, Dreamland plays the role that our own waking imaginary landscape (AKA headspace) does: giving a place for headmates to communicate, make agreements, pool knowledge, and access information that’s usually blocked. This sounds very cool, but if anyone’s made a proper essay or how-to about it, I haven’t found it, and ours mostly don’t work this way, so I can’t speak to it. For ourself, our shared (or shared-ish) dreams come in the following flavors:
• Zany adventures: fun, silly escapades, like the one at the water park. Hands-down the most enjoyable and easy to explain. Brain vacations or bonding experiences.
• Fly-on-the-wall: watching someone else’s dream as though it were a movie without being a part of it. (Example: the time Mori dreamed about Biff getting a job as a teenager.) Sometimes, these dreams are so straightforward that they’re more memory than dream. Often mundanely educational.
• Flashbacks: trauma irrupting into a nightmare so it becomes a coded or straightforward memory of something horrible from the past.
• Nightmares: if you find yourself in someone else’s nightmare, you can gatecrash it so your friend doesn’t get hurt! Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t work and the nightmare just gets a higher body count.
• Dates/hookups: run the gamut from romantic wine-and-dining to filthy id-fests. Like shared nightmares, they can cause a lot of emotional fallout, but they can also really strengthen a relationship.
• Dream hacking: Breaking into someone’s dream for your own purposes. This is extremely rare for us; only Rawlin seems able to do it, and he’s only done it for unpleasant purposes, so we know jack all about it. We sure ain’t going to ask him!
Bodies
Sometimes singlets ask us what our bodies are like in Dreamland, whether we have a shared one like in the “real” world or have our own separate bodies like in headspace. The answer is “yes and more,” so here are some terms we’ll be using to describe those experiences:
• Shared Body: We all have a communal body in the dream, just like in “real” life. The shared body may resemble our “real” one at various ages, a headmate, be a mix of the two, or even a total stranger (though that’s rare nowadays). This shared body may morph to show the appearance of the headmate in front.
• Separate Bodies: We each have our own individual body, like we do in headspace. The water park dream was this type.
• Partial Shared/Separate: Some of us share a body, and some of us do not.
Keep in mind that dreams are weird and fluid, so it’s not uncommon for our bodies to change in biologically improbable ways, or for us to get separated out or melded in at various times. It’s also pretty common for us to simultaneously dream separate- and shared-body things on separate reality layers, because that’s how we experience waking life. (If you have a hard time envisioning this, think of it as a split-screen video game, or the way you might switch your attention between different conversations or pods of people while at a large party.)
Unlike some people, we can be injured, feel pain, and die in our dreams without waking up. Certain sensations may be unusually intense, while others seem oddly dulled. We also seem incapable of shedding tears in our sleep—though we will wake up with swollen eyes if we were crying.
(Not) Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming is being aware that you are dreaming, often used as a stepping stone to dream manipulation and control. For a long time, we felt inadequate to write this essay because we mistakenly equated shared dreams to lucid ones, and we are lousy lucid dreamers (with the possible exception of Rawlin). However, while lucid dreaming and shared dreaming can overlap (and certainly skills at one can translate well to the other), they are not the same. In fact, lucid dreaming can be risky for people like us, who aren’t well-seated on the reality horse!
Certain methods encouraged for lucid dreaming (like sleep interruption and getting into the habit of “reality-testing”) play havoc with our sanity. Rogan recently had a false awakening dream where he kept dreaming he was waking up into sleep paralysis, only to keep “falling asleep” and getting sucked back down into the “dream-dream” world, over and over. The paralyzed waking-dream was way less obviously surreal than the mobile “dream-dream,” and his sanity started decaying as he started frantically asking himself, “Am I dreaming? Is this a dream too? Is anything real at all?” This is not far from our mind frame when we go catastrophically bats, and it never leads us to good places. Fortunately, a dream stranger intervened to keep Rogan from totally freaking out, and the effects passed once he woke up, but it’s not something we want in our waking life.
This isn’t a problem just for us. 879CoDe et al.’s Lucid Dreaming on WikiBooks (which has different web versus PDF versions) lists “dissociation” as a “possible danger of lucid dreaming,” because it “may weaken the borders between waking and dreaming, the conscious and subconscious mind, reality and fantasy” (PDF, pg. 8). They advise, “You may consider avoiding experimentation with lucid dreaming if you have a mental condition that will alter your perception of reality, eg. Schizophrenia, Hallucinations, Dementia,” (web version) and we second that advice. (That said, a lot of what is in that book has been helpful in other ways, and we’ll get into that later.)
Luckily, we have come to realize that control or manipulation of our dreams is not our goal, and neither is being aware that we’re dreaming. Instead, our goal is to just dance with a shared dream, experience it wholeheartedly on its own terms. (Though calling it a “goal” overstates it; really, we just want to take the ball and run with it.)
What Is Real?
Mainstream local society treats one world as “the real world” and all others (dreams, headspace, spirit realms, cyberspace, whatever) as irrelevant nonsense. It’s why you see so many people dismiss even the most heinous online behavior: “it’s not in the real world, so it doesn’t matter!” It’s also why becoming selves-aware is so ontologically upsetting for a lot of plurals: the supposedly solid foundations of “who/what am I” and “what is real” crack up, often simultaneously.
For ourself, life is not a binary of “waking/real” and “dreaming/fake.” We have at least five different layers of reality we exist on—the corporeal (“real”) world, cyberspace, headspace, Dreamland, a story world—and we have to pay attention to all of them to thrive. These layers aren’t cleanly delineated either! Just as cyberspace bleeds into corporeal, Dreamland and headspace and story world overlap.
To keep our sanity (such as it is) over the years, we’ve come to define “real” as “whatever requires our input or attention,” and that means that yes, a lot of what happens in our dreams is real. Our actions there hold real moral weight, even if there are no consequences anywhere else. Part of why Rawlin has such a bad reputation here is he has taken advantage of Dreamland to assault other headmates. Sure, the injuries he bestowed would vanish upon waking, but it was a warning of how he’d behave while awake. Brushing off his actions as “just a dream” only taught him what he could get away with. So yes, his Dreamland actions had consequences, required our response, and thus were “real” by our standards!
Similarly, dream hookups cause way more problems when the partner joins (or rejoins) our group and realizes what (and who) they’ve done. Biff and Rogan’s first interaction was a dream hookup. Neither of them realized the other existed, but when Biff joined up a year later, he had to deal with being outed as trans—something he’d gone to great lengths to avoid—and Rogan had to deal with the fear that he’d cheated on his husband, Mac. About that situation, Mac says, “because Rogan was honest with me from day one, and I was always kept in the loop, I could keep my cool about it. If he’d hid it from me, or tried to brush it off with ‘it was just a dream,’ I would’ve been way more upset!” When there are real social and relationship repercussions, the simple binary of waking/real and dreaming/fake falls apart.
We avoided dealing with this for a long time. We have a lot of gruesome nightmares, and it’s unsettling to think that we can’t just wake up and go, “oh, thank goodness, it was just a dream!” But over time, we have come to realize that our nightmares have a lot of useful things to say to us, even if we don’t understand them. We used to take nightmare meds (clonidine), but we’ve chosen to go off them, because they never made the nightmares go away, or even less disturbing in content. All they did was make us care less about them, and we need to care. After all, which would we rather: to practice psychological self-defense so Rawlin’s less able to attack us from within, or to numb ourselves so we don’t give a shit if he does?
What I’m saying is, you can avoid a lot of heartache further down the line if you take the reality bull by the horns. Have the hard conversations together about what is “real” to you, and where dreams fall on that scale. Don’t just dismiss it. Many people, singlets included, can name a dream that changed their lives, and plenty of religious traditions put great stock in dreams. It’s worth thinking about.
Shared-ish
Sometimes, we dream about each other more than we dream with each other. Fly-on-the-wall dreams often leave us passive, invisible, intangible floating eyeballs watching the unfolding of someone else’s experience. The information we learn is often prosaic: Grace’s tiny artist grandparents, Bob’s first boyfriend in high school, Biff’s teenage job. These memories also tend to be less emotionally-loaded, prompting easy conversations: “who was that boy in the letter jacket?” “who were those old people in wheelchairs?” They’re a pleasant, everyday kind of intimacy, and they rarely cause trouble.
Sometimes, even if a dream isn’t entirely shared, there’s still psychological leakage. For instance, Biff’s teenage job dream was fairly straightforward, until he suddenly saw our (not his, our) childhood house. He recognized it, since he’d been there, but only as an adult, and it was jarring enough that other people in the dream remarked on his reaction: “Oh, have you been there before?”
We often have “shared-ish” dreams presaging the return of a headmate we lost contact with. This can range from a headspace ghost first surfacing in a nightmare (such as Escape Object in All In the Family), to the intense fusillade of fly-on-the-wall dreams about Bob and Grace in the months preceding their return, culminating in a shared one. It’s like Dreamland’s door is easier to open than headspace’s, paving the way for more contact.
A couple headmates seem to be dream-only: Dion and Miranda were dream-hookups for over a year, but as far as we know, he’s never appeared in our headspace! Almost everything we know about him—his hobby for photography, his coming out as non-binary—we know from dreams. Dion doesn’t appear much these days, but Mir’s always happy to see him, and they usually manage to at least smile and wave at each other before the dream whisks them off on their separate ways. (Our dreams, alas, rarely allow for long, in-depth conversations.)
How Can You Tell A Dream is Shared?
We have found no way to know for sure besides asking the other person involved about it while awake. Rogan’s been positive he shared a dream with his husband, only for Mac to say, “Sorry, hon, that wasn’t shared! Too bad, that sounds fun.” Other times, we thought that something couldn’t have been shared, only to discover years later that it was.
Though it’s not a guarantee, when the other person acts very much “in-character,” it’s more likely that the dream is shared. Dreams may lower our inhibitions, but they don’t change our core personality or ethics. If Rogan has a nightmare where Mac hurts him, it’s a safe presumption that the dream isn’t shared: he’s just having a nightmare about someone he loves. Rawlin, however, is perfectly okay with hurting people, so such a dream starring him very well could be shared.
Note, however, that “in-character” is relative. You may not know someone’s core personality, in which case a shared dream can bring an, ahem, rude awakening.
Uncomfortable Fears
Dreams are among the most personal experiences someone can have, and they often involve emotionally-loaded things that the person would’ve preferred to hide, or at least tone down. This is especially true for nightmares and erotic dreams.
In shared dreams, we are ourselves, but we lack the inhibition and filters we have while awake. It is a raw experience, having that unmitigated id shoved in your face, or to see it in yourself, and it can lead to feelings of intense guilt or shame. We might have to deal with some part of ourselves that we never wanted anyone to know about, and because we can’t dismiss dreams as “not real,” we have to talk about them.
Nobody is strong in their nightmares, and it can be painful to be viewed at one’s most abject and fearful. Having been our abuse sponge for years, Rogan still regularly has dreams about being compelled to mindlessly adore someone who brutalizes him, and that made it easy for Rawlin to hurt him. In that dream, Rawlin had his own body, while Mori and Rogan shared one; Rawlin wanted to sexually assault Mori, only for Rogan to intervene, though he was too impaired to do anything but smile and laugh as he soaked up the ensuing violence. Rawlin was especially nasty because he’d been thwarted. Afterward, Rogan felt deep guilt and shame, like he’d “made” Rawlin hurt him, while Rawlin never seems to have thought about it: after all, it wasn’t “real!”
Gatecrashing someone’s nightmare is especially intimate, because it is breaking into someone’s private hell. That Rawlin chose to take advantage of that intimacy for his own benefit makes the violation especially upsetting, but he is an exception. Most of us, given the opportunity, will happily try and bust our loved one out, and that can be a powerful experience. The first record we have of Biff as more than a fictional character is of him coming to break what was probably a nightmare in progress for Mori. She was hiding in our closet, which we also did in waking life, and Biff came in and comforted her. This was so contrary to his tough-guy persona, and thus so memorable, that the scene ended up in All in the Family, twenty years later.
Even long after we lost access to Biff, he would sporadically show up in dreams, always in a positive role. We considered him a good omen, but we were also puzzled as to why such a brusque bruiser acted so differently in Dreamland. Now we know: we were seeing his true character, rather than his self-defensive, lone-wolf facade. It’s not a coincidence that his first dream-meeting with Rogan involved a romantic date at a nice restaurant and being openly gay and trans: in his heart of hearts, he wanted to be himself, to be treated well. Awake, he could keep everyone at a distance, but asleep, his guard came down.
Uncomfortable Desires
Shared erotic dreams might be superficially more pleasurable, but when it comes to emotional fallout, they aren’t far from nightmares. Biff didn’t just get evicted from his closet because of his and Rogan’s initial dream hookup; there was a cascade of additional consequences, ending with them becoming boyfriends and Mac and Rogan’s marriage opening. This was a lot of work and involved a lot of high emotions—Rogan’s fears of cheating, Biff’s fears of being trapped, Mac’s desire to be a good, giving partner despite his own insecurities and jealousy—and all of them had to be dealt with. That work wasn’t easy, but it ended up strengthening all the involved relationships! Biff discovered he could be loved safely, Rogan’s respect and love for both his partners increased, and Mac learned a lot about himself and had a new boyfriend-in-law. Even Mori, who feared Biff would abandon her for a romantic partner, discovered that she wasn’t losing her best bro.
It was a bumpy ride, but it can be even bumpier. Bob would’ve way preferred to never acknowledge that he found adult Rogan attractive, and he never would’ve had to, if Dreamland hadn’t forced the issue with a dream hookup. Bob had acted in loco parentis for Rogan fifteen years prior, when Rogan still a minor, so when Bob realized what had happened, he felt intense self-loathing and self-recrimination. Rogan trying to reassure him only made it worse. On top of it, while neither of them felt victimized, both felt a bit grossed out.
Why Do Unpleasant Shared Dreams Happen?
Unpleasant shared dreams are like triggers: they’re the mind’s scream for attention, a demand to deal with your shit. Bob and Biff’s hookups with Rogan are easy, obvious examples. In both cases, everyone involved had to deal with things they wanted to avoid: feelings they wanted to disavow, parts of themselves they’d tried to bury. But often, those things seem worse to the owner than the witnesses. Biff’s gender, Bob’s attraction, and Rogan’s sexuality didn’t trouble the others, but it did trouble them. Maybe these dreams, be they fantasies or nightmares, are ways to force us to confront and embrace those parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of, to have these hard conversations we’d otherwise avoid.
Obviously, things turned out pretty ideally for Biff and Rogan, but it doesn’t always go that way. Bob and Rogan had to have hard, painful conversations about their attraction to each other, what that said about them, and what they wanted (didn’t want) to do with it. They had to, if they wanted to make sure it never happened again.
How Do You Prevent Unpleasant Shared Dreams?
Some people seem to think that if you really don’t want something to happen in Dreamland, it won’t. These people are wrong. In fact, this myth can make things worse, leading you to blame yourself when such things happen, or leave you with no recourse in situations like the one with Rawlin.
In our experience, to make sure an unwanted shared dream doesn’t occur, you have to deal with the thing the dream’s trying to draw your attention to. That’s why Rawlin’s such a pain in the ass: it is work he refuses to do, and we cannot do it for him. All we can do is work around him—in this case, we had to realize that this was the kind of person Rawlin was, take safeguards to protect ourselves from him while awake, and also work to learn his personality and behavior so as to better understand him. He might be a dream hacker, but his powers are limited when we flee him on sight in Dreamland.
He’s an extreme case, though. Most situations don’t involve personal malice. For instance, Biff and Mori had a shared nightmare where they were forced to rape each other, which horrified them both. Obviously, that was something neither of them wanted. The nightmare was a grim manifestation of their own shared abuse history, plus their resulting fears: Biff that he was doomed to hurt the people he cared about, Mori that an asexual friendship like theirs couldn’t exist. By acknowledging and dealing with those respective fears (and keep in mind, this took months, even years of work), they were able to prevent such a dream from happening again.
Side Note: Nightmare Aftercare
In our experience, the best nightmare-helper ever, far beyond any therapy or medication, is just to have someone nearby who listens and comforts us upon awakening. Mac discovered this by accident; just listening to Rogan’s rambling gibberish, patting him, and mumbling, “it’s okay, baby, there are no snakes,” helped a lot. (This applies even to the really bad dreams that leave gruesome waking hallucinations behind. Rogan has found that even if he can’t stop seeing Mac as a rotting corpse, voice or touch may remain unaffected.) If someone is okay doing this duty, by all means, recruit them! (And also, make sure they truly are okay with being woken up at weird hours of the night, sometimes multiple times a night.)
Other helpful tricks have included sleeping on the floor (so nothing can hide under the bed) and placing our bedrool so all doors and parts of the room are easily visible. Being able to see there’s nothing there reduces the compulsion to get up, search, and check, which makes going back to sleep easier. Having a lock on our door also helps.
How Do You Make Shared Dreams Happen?
We don’t know! Sorry! But there are some ways to improve your odds.
First of all, work on enhancing dream recall. It would be a shame to have a shared dream, only to then forget it! Every lucid dream guide worth its salt will discuss this, from basic dream journaling to elaborate routines of chemicals, meditation, and gizmos. Go hog wild if you want (and if you’re well-saddled on the reality horse) but if you’re like us and too batty to tamper with your brain chemistry, the safest methods we’ve found are keeping a dream journal and napping.
Everyone recommends a dream journal because it works. The process is simple: keep your journal in arm’s reach, and if you wake up during the night with a dream on your mind, write it down, immediately. (Trust us, you will forget otherwise.) Use a pencil for a bookmark on the next blank page so you don’t have to get up, fish for a page, or even necessarily turn on a light. Do not use a digital device if you don’t have to; the bright screen will keep you up!
We are sporadic and lackadaisical about this. We won’t write anything for a while, then suddenly get passionate about it. Nevertheless, we’ve gotten results, and so can you!
If you’re like us and get grumpy at all the experts telling you to only nap for a few minutes, prepare to be vindicated: a 90-120 minute nap, or a full REM cycle, tends to give better dream recall. This is because you usually only manage to get one REM (dream) session before immediately waking up, which makes you more likely to remember. (A normal night’s sleep involves multiple REM sessions, but you either don’t wake up afterward or go right back to sleep, thereby losing the memory of what you dreamed. This is why many lucid dream methods involve sleep interruption.) For added bonus, napping with a headmate seems to make a shared dream between you more likely. So flop on a couch together and enjoy the snuggles!
Shared dreams seem more likely with people you spend a lot of time with. Most of our shared dreams occur between headmates who usually share a headspace bed together: Mac and Rogan, Biff and Mori, and Bob and Grace. It’s unclear if physical proximity or emotional closeness is more at work there. Certainly thinking about each other a lot helps, and so might the fact that people sharing a bed are likely to chat themselves to sleep.
Shared dreams are also more likely to happen when our brain is jumping for our attention, so an easy way to encourage shared erotic dreams is to abstain for a bit. Rogan and Biff had far more erotic shared dreams while recovering from their hysterectomies, because not only were they medically forbidden to have sex for a while, but they were also tired and napping a lot. Similarly, our nightmares ebb and flow according to our memory work cycle, dragging traumas into awareness, then calming down as those traumas are dealt with. You could also hypothetically refuse to deal with your shit until Dreamland spanks you, but this is not recommended.
Though we are crummy at lucid dreaming, we’ve had some success with the techniques the Wikibook calls Eyelid Patterns and Hypnagogic Imagery, just through trial and error, with few negative side effects. These techniques mostly work by paying attention to hypnagogic hallucinations (the sparkles behind your eyelids as you’re falling asleep) and trying to manipulate and guide them so as to fall asleep physically while remaining alert mentally, thus creating a lucid dream. While we sometimes get that result, we mostly use these tricks to be aware of ourself falling asleep, rather than dreaming. It has also proved somewhat useful for insomnia: watching the little eyeball sparkles soothes our mind and keeps it from rattling on about all its worries and frustrations. It’s like Brain TV!
We are only one multi and rely on our own personal experience. Is yours totally different? Write about it and link it in the comments, so folks can learn!
Citations
879CoDe et al. (n.d.) Lucid Dreaming (PDF version). Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Lucid_Dreaming.pdf
879CoDe et al. (n.d.) Lucid Dreaming (web version). Retrieved from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming
Series: Essays
Summary: When headmates share dreams via memory leakage, nightmares, and dream hook-ups, plus the skills and ontology thereof.
Word Count: 4400
Notes: This essay straightforwardly discusses nightmares, flashbacks, and sex. It was sponsored by the Patreon crew! It is also prep work for Multi, Moregasmic because that’s a sex-specific zine and we want a more general thing about shared dreams for plural use.
In December 2020, Rogan, Mac, Miranda, Sneak, Bob, and Grace found themselves all together sharing a dream taking place at a water park that defied physics. They piled into a giant water raft roller coaster, got soaked, and had a blast. (And afterward, Sneak magically dried Grace’s clothes to put the creases back in her suit.)
At their best, shared dreams are probably one of the most spectacular, nifty, gee-whiz things we can do. At their worst, they can be devastating, uncontrollable nightmares. Not all plurals have them, but plenty do, and yet I haven’t been able to find anyone going more in-depth than, “we can do that!” or “I cannot.” So let’s talk about it!
Headmates Mentioned in this Essay (skip this if you don't need/want the intro)
Rogan: he/him. Workaholic stress cadet. Mac's hubby, Biff's boyfriend.Mac: he/him. Disney princess in man form. Rogan's husband.Miranda: she/her. Just wants everyone to love to-do lists.Sneak: ze/zer. Bubbly ray of sunshine. Not sneaky at all.Bob: he/him. All smarts, no sense. Grey's hubs.Grace/Grey: she/her. Silent and sensible. Bob's wife.Biff: he/him. The only one who can sew. Rogan's boyfriend, Mori's best bro.Rawlin: he/him. That one freakin' guy.Types of Shared Dreams
For at least a couple multiples we’ve met, Dreamland plays the role that our own waking imaginary landscape (AKA headspace) does: giving a place for headmates to communicate, make agreements, pool knowledge, and access information that’s usually blocked. This sounds very cool, but if anyone’s made a proper essay or how-to about it, I haven’t found it, and ours mostly don’t work this way, so I can’t speak to it. For ourself, our shared (or shared-ish) dreams come in the following flavors:
• Zany adventures: fun, silly escapades, like the one at the water park. Hands-down the most enjoyable and easy to explain. Brain vacations or bonding experiences.
• Fly-on-the-wall: watching someone else’s dream as though it were a movie without being a part of it. (Example: the time Mori dreamed about Biff getting a job as a teenager.) Sometimes, these dreams are so straightforward that they’re more memory than dream. Often mundanely educational.
• Flashbacks: trauma irrupting into a nightmare so it becomes a coded or straightforward memory of something horrible from the past.
• Nightmares: if you find yourself in someone else’s nightmare, you can gatecrash it so your friend doesn’t get hurt! Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t work and the nightmare just gets a higher body count.
• Dates/hookups: run the gamut from romantic wine-and-dining to filthy id-fests. Like shared nightmares, they can cause a lot of emotional fallout, but they can also really strengthen a relationship.
• Dream hacking: Breaking into someone’s dream for your own purposes. This is extremely rare for us; only Rawlin seems able to do it, and he’s only done it for unpleasant purposes, so we know jack all about it. We sure ain’t going to ask him!
Bodies
Sometimes singlets ask us what our bodies are like in Dreamland, whether we have a shared one like in the “real” world or have our own separate bodies like in headspace. The answer is “yes and more,” so here are some terms we’ll be using to describe those experiences:
• Shared Body: We all have a communal body in the dream, just like in “real” life. The shared body may resemble our “real” one at various ages, a headmate, be a mix of the two, or even a total stranger (though that’s rare nowadays). This shared body may morph to show the appearance of the headmate in front.
• Separate Bodies: We each have our own individual body, like we do in headspace. The water park dream was this type.
• Partial Shared/Separate: Some of us share a body, and some of us do not.
Keep in mind that dreams are weird and fluid, so it’s not uncommon for our bodies to change in biologically improbable ways, or for us to get separated out or melded in at various times. It’s also pretty common for us to simultaneously dream separate- and shared-body things on separate reality layers, because that’s how we experience waking life. (If you have a hard time envisioning this, think of it as a split-screen video game, or the way you might switch your attention between different conversations or pods of people while at a large party.)
Unlike some people, we can be injured, feel pain, and die in our dreams without waking up. Certain sensations may be unusually intense, while others seem oddly dulled. We also seem incapable of shedding tears in our sleep—though we will wake up with swollen eyes if we were crying.
(Not) Lucid Dreaming
Lucid dreaming is being aware that you are dreaming, often used as a stepping stone to dream manipulation and control. For a long time, we felt inadequate to write this essay because we mistakenly equated shared dreams to lucid ones, and we are lousy lucid dreamers (with the possible exception of Rawlin). However, while lucid dreaming and shared dreaming can overlap (and certainly skills at one can translate well to the other), they are not the same. In fact, lucid dreaming can be risky for people like us, who aren’t well-seated on the reality horse!
Certain methods encouraged for lucid dreaming (like sleep interruption and getting into the habit of “reality-testing”) play havoc with our sanity. Rogan recently had a false awakening dream where he kept dreaming he was waking up into sleep paralysis, only to keep “falling asleep” and getting sucked back down into the “dream-dream” world, over and over. The paralyzed waking-dream was way less obviously surreal than the mobile “dream-dream,” and his sanity started decaying as he started frantically asking himself, “Am I dreaming? Is this a dream too? Is anything real at all?” This is not far from our mind frame when we go catastrophically bats, and it never leads us to good places. Fortunately, a dream stranger intervened to keep Rogan from totally freaking out, and the effects passed once he woke up, but it’s not something we want in our waking life.
This isn’t a problem just for us. 879CoDe et al.’s Lucid Dreaming on WikiBooks (which has different web versus PDF versions) lists “dissociation” as a “possible danger of lucid dreaming,” because it “may weaken the borders between waking and dreaming, the conscious and subconscious mind, reality and fantasy” (PDF, pg. 8). They advise, “You may consider avoiding experimentation with lucid dreaming if you have a mental condition that will alter your perception of reality, eg. Schizophrenia, Hallucinations, Dementia,” (web version) and we second that advice. (That said, a lot of what is in that book has been helpful in other ways, and we’ll get into that later.)
Luckily, we have come to realize that control or manipulation of our dreams is not our goal, and neither is being aware that we’re dreaming. Instead, our goal is to just dance with a shared dream, experience it wholeheartedly on its own terms. (Though calling it a “goal” overstates it; really, we just want to take the ball and run with it.)
What Is Real?
Mainstream local society treats one world as “the real world” and all others (dreams, headspace, spirit realms, cyberspace, whatever) as irrelevant nonsense. It’s why you see so many people dismiss even the most heinous online behavior: “it’s not in the real world, so it doesn’t matter!” It’s also why becoming selves-aware is so ontologically upsetting for a lot of plurals: the supposedly solid foundations of “who/what am I” and “what is real” crack up, often simultaneously.
For ourself, life is not a binary of “waking/real” and “dreaming/fake.” We have at least five different layers of reality we exist on—the corporeal (“real”) world, cyberspace, headspace, Dreamland, a story world—and we have to pay attention to all of them to thrive. These layers aren’t cleanly delineated either! Just as cyberspace bleeds into corporeal, Dreamland and headspace and story world overlap.
To keep our sanity (such as it is) over the years, we’ve come to define “real” as “whatever requires our input or attention,” and that means that yes, a lot of what happens in our dreams is real. Our actions there hold real moral weight, even if there are no consequences anywhere else. Part of why Rawlin has such a bad reputation here is he has taken advantage of Dreamland to assault other headmates. Sure, the injuries he bestowed would vanish upon waking, but it was a warning of how he’d behave while awake. Brushing off his actions as “just a dream” only taught him what he could get away with. So yes, his Dreamland actions had consequences, required our response, and thus were “real” by our standards!
Similarly, dream hookups cause way more problems when the partner joins (or rejoins) our group and realizes what (and who) they’ve done. Biff and Rogan’s first interaction was a dream hookup. Neither of them realized the other existed, but when Biff joined up a year later, he had to deal with being outed as trans—something he’d gone to great lengths to avoid—and Rogan had to deal with the fear that he’d cheated on his husband, Mac. About that situation, Mac says, “because Rogan was honest with me from day one, and I was always kept in the loop, I could keep my cool about it. If he’d hid it from me, or tried to brush it off with ‘it was just a dream,’ I would’ve been way more upset!” When there are real social and relationship repercussions, the simple binary of waking/real and dreaming/fake falls apart.
We avoided dealing with this for a long time. We have a lot of gruesome nightmares, and it’s unsettling to think that we can’t just wake up and go, “oh, thank goodness, it was just a dream!” But over time, we have come to realize that our nightmares have a lot of useful things to say to us, even if we don’t understand them. We used to take nightmare meds (clonidine), but we’ve chosen to go off them, because they never made the nightmares go away, or even less disturbing in content. All they did was make us care less about them, and we need to care. After all, which would we rather: to practice psychological self-defense so Rawlin’s less able to attack us from within, or to numb ourselves so we don’t give a shit if he does?
What I’m saying is, you can avoid a lot of heartache further down the line if you take the reality bull by the horns. Have the hard conversations together about what is “real” to you, and where dreams fall on that scale. Don’t just dismiss it. Many people, singlets included, can name a dream that changed their lives, and plenty of religious traditions put great stock in dreams. It’s worth thinking about.
Shared-ish
Sometimes, we dream about each other more than we dream with each other. Fly-on-the-wall dreams often leave us passive, invisible, intangible floating eyeballs watching the unfolding of someone else’s experience. The information we learn is often prosaic: Grace’s tiny artist grandparents, Bob’s first boyfriend in high school, Biff’s teenage job. These memories also tend to be less emotionally-loaded, prompting easy conversations: “who was that boy in the letter jacket?” “who were those old people in wheelchairs?” They’re a pleasant, everyday kind of intimacy, and they rarely cause trouble.
Sometimes, even if a dream isn’t entirely shared, there’s still psychological leakage. For instance, Biff’s teenage job dream was fairly straightforward, until he suddenly saw our (not his, our) childhood house. He recognized it, since he’d been there, but only as an adult, and it was jarring enough that other people in the dream remarked on his reaction: “Oh, have you been there before?”
We often have “shared-ish” dreams presaging the return of a headmate we lost contact with. This can range from a headspace ghost first surfacing in a nightmare (such as Escape Object in All In the Family), to the intense fusillade of fly-on-the-wall dreams about Bob and Grace in the months preceding their return, culminating in a shared one. It’s like Dreamland’s door is easier to open than headspace’s, paving the way for more contact.
A couple headmates seem to be dream-only: Dion and Miranda were dream-hookups for over a year, but as far as we know, he’s never appeared in our headspace! Almost everything we know about him—his hobby for photography, his coming out as non-binary—we know from dreams. Dion doesn’t appear much these days, but Mir’s always happy to see him, and they usually manage to at least smile and wave at each other before the dream whisks them off on their separate ways. (Our dreams, alas, rarely allow for long, in-depth conversations.)
How Can You Tell A Dream is Shared?
We have found no way to know for sure besides asking the other person involved about it while awake. Rogan’s been positive he shared a dream with his husband, only for Mac to say, “Sorry, hon, that wasn’t shared! Too bad, that sounds fun.” Other times, we thought that something couldn’t have been shared, only to discover years later that it was.
Though it’s not a guarantee, when the other person acts very much “in-character,” it’s more likely that the dream is shared. Dreams may lower our inhibitions, but they don’t change our core personality or ethics. If Rogan has a nightmare where Mac hurts him, it’s a safe presumption that the dream isn’t shared: he’s just having a nightmare about someone he loves. Rawlin, however, is perfectly okay with hurting people, so such a dream starring him very well could be shared.
Note, however, that “in-character” is relative. You may not know someone’s core personality, in which case a shared dream can bring an, ahem, rude awakening.
Uncomfortable Fears
Dreams are among the most personal experiences someone can have, and they often involve emotionally-loaded things that the person would’ve preferred to hide, or at least tone down. This is especially true for nightmares and erotic dreams.
In shared dreams, we are ourselves, but we lack the inhibition and filters we have while awake. It is a raw experience, having that unmitigated id shoved in your face, or to see it in yourself, and it can lead to feelings of intense guilt or shame. We might have to deal with some part of ourselves that we never wanted anyone to know about, and because we can’t dismiss dreams as “not real,” we have to talk about them.
Nobody is strong in their nightmares, and it can be painful to be viewed at one’s most abject and fearful. Having been our abuse sponge for years, Rogan still regularly has dreams about being compelled to mindlessly adore someone who brutalizes him, and that made it easy for Rawlin to hurt him. In that dream, Rawlin had his own body, while Mori and Rogan shared one; Rawlin wanted to sexually assault Mori, only for Rogan to intervene, though he was too impaired to do anything but smile and laugh as he soaked up the ensuing violence. Rawlin was especially nasty because he’d been thwarted. Afterward, Rogan felt deep guilt and shame, like he’d “made” Rawlin hurt him, while Rawlin never seems to have thought about it: after all, it wasn’t “real!”
Gatecrashing someone’s nightmare is especially intimate, because it is breaking into someone’s private hell. That Rawlin chose to take advantage of that intimacy for his own benefit makes the violation especially upsetting, but he is an exception. Most of us, given the opportunity, will happily try and bust our loved one out, and that can be a powerful experience. The first record we have of Biff as more than a fictional character is of him coming to break what was probably a nightmare in progress for Mori. She was hiding in our closet, which we also did in waking life, and Biff came in and comforted her. This was so contrary to his tough-guy persona, and thus so memorable, that the scene ended up in All in the Family, twenty years later.
Even long after we lost access to Biff, he would sporadically show up in dreams, always in a positive role. We considered him a good omen, but we were also puzzled as to why such a brusque bruiser acted so differently in Dreamland. Now we know: we were seeing his true character, rather than his self-defensive, lone-wolf facade. It’s not a coincidence that his first dream-meeting with Rogan involved a romantic date at a nice restaurant and being openly gay and trans: in his heart of hearts, he wanted to be himself, to be treated well. Awake, he could keep everyone at a distance, but asleep, his guard came down.
Uncomfortable Desires
Shared erotic dreams might be superficially more pleasurable, but when it comes to emotional fallout, they aren’t far from nightmares. Biff didn’t just get evicted from his closet because of his and Rogan’s initial dream hookup; there was a cascade of additional consequences, ending with them becoming boyfriends and Mac and Rogan’s marriage opening. This was a lot of work and involved a lot of high emotions—Rogan’s fears of cheating, Biff’s fears of being trapped, Mac’s desire to be a good, giving partner despite his own insecurities and jealousy—and all of them had to be dealt with. That work wasn’t easy, but it ended up strengthening all the involved relationships! Biff discovered he could be loved safely, Rogan’s respect and love for both his partners increased, and Mac learned a lot about himself and had a new boyfriend-in-law. Even Mori, who feared Biff would abandon her for a romantic partner, discovered that she wasn’t losing her best bro.
It was a bumpy ride, but it can be even bumpier. Bob would’ve way preferred to never acknowledge that he found adult Rogan attractive, and he never would’ve had to, if Dreamland hadn’t forced the issue with a dream hookup. Bob had acted in loco parentis for Rogan fifteen years prior, when Rogan still a minor, so when Bob realized what had happened, he felt intense self-loathing and self-recrimination. Rogan trying to reassure him only made it worse. On top of it, while neither of them felt victimized, both felt a bit grossed out.
Why Do Unpleasant Shared Dreams Happen?
Unpleasant shared dreams are like triggers: they’re the mind’s scream for attention, a demand to deal with your shit. Bob and Biff’s hookups with Rogan are easy, obvious examples. In both cases, everyone involved had to deal with things they wanted to avoid: feelings they wanted to disavow, parts of themselves they’d tried to bury. But often, those things seem worse to the owner than the witnesses. Biff’s gender, Bob’s attraction, and Rogan’s sexuality didn’t trouble the others, but it did trouble them. Maybe these dreams, be they fantasies or nightmares, are ways to force us to confront and embrace those parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of, to have these hard conversations we’d otherwise avoid.
Obviously, things turned out pretty ideally for Biff and Rogan, but it doesn’t always go that way. Bob and Rogan had to have hard, painful conversations about their attraction to each other, what that said about them, and what they wanted (didn’t want) to do with it. They had to, if they wanted to make sure it never happened again.
How Do You Prevent Unpleasant Shared Dreams?
Some people seem to think that if you really don’t want something to happen in Dreamland, it won’t. These people are wrong. In fact, this myth can make things worse, leading you to blame yourself when such things happen, or leave you with no recourse in situations like the one with Rawlin.
In our experience, to make sure an unwanted shared dream doesn’t occur, you have to deal with the thing the dream’s trying to draw your attention to. That’s why Rawlin’s such a pain in the ass: it is work he refuses to do, and we cannot do it for him. All we can do is work around him—in this case, we had to realize that this was the kind of person Rawlin was, take safeguards to protect ourselves from him while awake, and also work to learn his personality and behavior so as to better understand him. He might be a dream hacker, but his powers are limited when we flee him on sight in Dreamland.
He’s an extreme case, though. Most situations don’t involve personal malice. For instance, Biff and Mori had a shared nightmare where they were forced to rape each other, which horrified them both. Obviously, that was something neither of them wanted. The nightmare was a grim manifestation of their own shared abuse history, plus their resulting fears: Biff that he was doomed to hurt the people he cared about, Mori that an asexual friendship like theirs couldn’t exist. By acknowledging and dealing with those respective fears (and keep in mind, this took months, even years of work), they were able to prevent such a dream from happening again.
Side Note: Nightmare Aftercare
In our experience, the best nightmare-helper ever, far beyond any therapy or medication, is just to have someone nearby who listens and comforts us upon awakening. Mac discovered this by accident; just listening to Rogan’s rambling gibberish, patting him, and mumbling, “it’s okay, baby, there are no snakes,” helped a lot. (This applies even to the really bad dreams that leave gruesome waking hallucinations behind. Rogan has found that even if he can’t stop seeing Mac as a rotting corpse, voice or touch may remain unaffected.) If someone is okay doing this duty, by all means, recruit them! (And also, make sure they truly are okay with being woken up at weird hours of the night, sometimes multiple times a night.)
Other helpful tricks have included sleeping on the floor (so nothing can hide under the bed) and placing our bedrool so all doors and parts of the room are easily visible. Being able to see there’s nothing there reduces the compulsion to get up, search, and check, which makes going back to sleep easier. Having a lock on our door also helps.
How Do You Make Shared Dreams Happen?
We don’t know! Sorry! But there are some ways to improve your odds.
First of all, work on enhancing dream recall. It would be a shame to have a shared dream, only to then forget it! Every lucid dream guide worth its salt will discuss this, from basic dream journaling to elaborate routines of chemicals, meditation, and gizmos. Go hog wild if you want (and if you’re well-saddled on the reality horse) but if you’re like us and too batty to tamper with your brain chemistry, the safest methods we’ve found are keeping a dream journal and napping.
Everyone recommends a dream journal because it works. The process is simple: keep your journal in arm’s reach, and if you wake up during the night with a dream on your mind, write it down, immediately. (Trust us, you will forget otherwise.) Use a pencil for a bookmark on the next blank page so you don’t have to get up, fish for a page, or even necessarily turn on a light. Do not use a digital device if you don’t have to; the bright screen will keep you up!
We are sporadic and lackadaisical about this. We won’t write anything for a while, then suddenly get passionate about it. Nevertheless, we’ve gotten results, and so can you!
If you’re like us and get grumpy at all the experts telling you to only nap for a few minutes, prepare to be vindicated: a 90-120 minute nap, or a full REM cycle, tends to give better dream recall. This is because you usually only manage to get one REM (dream) session before immediately waking up, which makes you more likely to remember. (A normal night’s sleep involves multiple REM sessions, but you either don’t wake up afterward or go right back to sleep, thereby losing the memory of what you dreamed. This is why many lucid dream methods involve sleep interruption.) For added bonus, napping with a headmate seems to make a shared dream between you more likely. So flop on a couch together and enjoy the snuggles!
Shared dreams seem more likely with people you spend a lot of time with. Most of our shared dreams occur between headmates who usually share a headspace bed together: Mac and Rogan, Biff and Mori, and Bob and Grace. It’s unclear if physical proximity or emotional closeness is more at work there. Certainly thinking about each other a lot helps, and so might the fact that people sharing a bed are likely to chat themselves to sleep.
Shared dreams are also more likely to happen when our brain is jumping for our attention, so an easy way to encourage shared erotic dreams is to abstain for a bit. Rogan and Biff had far more erotic shared dreams while recovering from their hysterectomies, because not only were they medically forbidden to have sex for a while, but they were also tired and napping a lot. Similarly, our nightmares ebb and flow according to our memory work cycle, dragging traumas into awareness, then calming down as those traumas are dealt with. You could also hypothetically refuse to deal with your shit until Dreamland spanks you, but this is not recommended.
Though we are crummy at lucid dreaming, we’ve had some success with the techniques the Wikibook calls Eyelid Patterns and Hypnagogic Imagery, just through trial and error, with few negative side effects. These techniques mostly work by paying attention to hypnagogic hallucinations (the sparkles behind your eyelids as you’re falling asleep) and trying to manipulate and guide them so as to fall asleep physically while remaining alert mentally, thus creating a lucid dream. While we sometimes get that result, we mostly use these tricks to be aware of ourself falling asleep, rather than dreaming. It has also proved somewhat useful for insomnia: watching the little eyeball sparkles soothes our mind and keeps it from rattling on about all its worries and frustrations. It’s like Brain TV!
We are only one multi and rely on our own personal experience. Is yours totally different? Write about it and link it in the comments, so folks can learn!
Citations
879CoDe et al. (n.d.) Lucid Dreaming (PDF version). Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Lucid_Dreaming.pdf
879CoDe et al. (n.d.) Lucid Dreaming (web version). Retrieved from https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming
no subject
Date: 2023-05-31 04:18 am (UTC)