OVER THE YEARS I HAVE HAD A NUMBER OF DREAMS of being with friends and acquaintances to whom I related the events afterwards in the waking state only to find they had experienced the same thing. This means they found themselves in the same dream environment I had, in which the circumstances were the same and in which events were commonly observed or experienced. I discovered we also often reported to each other the same buildings climate or objects. And they took place during the same night.

This of course raises many questions and potentially has many implications. How is such a shared experience possible? Is this just a variation of some anomalous shared awareness that occurs like a sort of empathy at a distance (telepathy -- or should we term it “telempathy”)? Is there an undiscovered aspect of our environment to which consciousnesses in the dream state have easy access and by which transmission and reception of impressions and mental constructs and meaning readily occur? In that case a mutually shared construct would constitute a sort of mutually generated and reinforced idea which we in dream state take for real even though it doesn’t reflect some physical reality. But this still relies on some means of exchange whose mechanism is thus far undetected in laboratory investigations. This is no simple question.

However a further step could suggest that environments may exist and events take place in them that are thus far inaccessible to the waking consciousness nor detectable through none but the crudest of measurements by detectors and instrumentation. In this case the human consciousness and nervous system may be the only instrumentation currently available to us. When I say the crudest of measurements by instrumentation I am suggesting that from the plethora of particles discovered throughout the development of modern physics there may be various combinations capable of binding together in coherent and stable ways which would in no way be detectable to either the waking senses of the person on the street nor to any of the arrays of detectors used in particle physics experimental beamlines.  Such condensed or concatenated matter is not what these systems have been designed to detect. Objects consisting of “clumps” of such matter may simply be undetectable at least at this time. We certainly have a strong argument for this emerging in modern physics in the concepts and theories about dark matter.

This suggests the possibility that mutually observed objects in shared dreams may have an existence independent of the dreamers. They may have existed before a shared dream occurred, and could therefore continue to exist after the experiences of the dreams. The condensation of non-concatenated particles such as in the formation of ice crystals from gaseous water to create snow or in the condensation and crystallization of chemicals of minerals in a hot gaseous state into solids such as rock crystals are two familiar examples. Currently there is no theory to suggest this may not also occur in dark matter.

Other questions arise. How stable are those objects? How durable or resistant to change under the influence of external forces and effects would such objects be? And in a realm where altered consciousness (e.g. the dream state) functions how susceptible might such substance be to the influence of human thought and consciousness itself? Would human consciousness be capable of affecting such matter in a free or gaseous state so as to gather and fix it into stable objects observable in dreams?

It may be possible to extend experiments in lucid dreaming to include an investigation into the properties of matter. What might we discover?