January 24, 2019 – Short dream due to a very short sleep duration.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t sleep much due to my back problem which developed last week. Managed to sleep for about four hours which is better than nothing. On top of that, I have to work early which means no time for a second sleep which is when I have the majority of my lucid dreams, although I do find I’m semi-lucid or faintly aware that I might be in a dream often.

It’s harder to remember these dreams as I wasn’t rested enough. The dream started out I was with a group of people. The people were a mixture of friends and work associates. We were in this city traveling on a bus. In the distance, what appeared to be many plumes of smoke were rising up from the mountains. It looked like multiple forest fires were taking place.

In waking life, we have had many forest fires and has been some of the worst years for it which may be the influence on this dream. I’m talking about the fires with some other men and we were trying to figure out what might have caused them. Then I wake up.

However, I wake-up into another dream. This time I am at the Monroe Institute and go down to the lower level of the Nancy Penn center. The dream characters from the previous dream are there sitting at the table where I sit down and I start talking about my dream.

Other dream characters start to say that they had a very similar dream and were shocked at the similarities. There were differences. The women saw the plumes of smokes as a result of bombs that had dropped and the fires were caused by explosions. The other men saw it as fires with plumes of smoke with no link to any kind of bombs being dropped.

We all notice that each of us were in that dream and start pointing out the similarities. We start discussing the idea that we all may have shared a dream. It’s very meta, because of the dream within a dream theme combining elements of shared dreaming. We start to talk about the idea that it was a shared dream which some people are really amazed at and others are frightened by the whole idea.

One of the stranges potentials I’ve encountered right from the start back in 1988 when I was just learning to lucid dream was how the potential for shared dreaming seemed to surface amongst friends that I had where we had uncanny similarities right down to the dream setting and conversations that we had. Long story short, over the last 31 years of lucid dreaming this anomaly has presented itself in very rare circumstances, enough that I am certain this potential exists but is neglected like many of the wonderful potentials that seem to reside in dreaming.

The majority of the dream after that point was talking with people about this whole concept of shared dreams. The dream characters start to get up and leave, some want to talk more about that experience and I cover some of my past experiences with it. We noted a few times that it was a total of six people who were involved in the shared experience and then I woke up.

I didn’t achieve lucidity in this dream, and with the lack of sleep and time constraint won’t be able to do a second sleep. But this also shows that with a very unstable sleep routing it’s very easy to maintain at least some level of dream awareness as my waking life is very demanding with career, family and balancing it all out so that when I sleep I can have some nice adventures in dreamland to write about.

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