Those who believe that shared dreams are genuine say it can happen spontaneously, or be planned. They're most common between people who are emotionally close such as couples, siblings, parent-child, or best friends. It's also said that twins may be especially prone to shared dreams.
Between 60% and 75% of American adults experience recurring dreams , with more women experiencing them than men. Although recurring dreams are a normal part of sleep for most people, they can be distressing due to their content.
But why do some people have these recurring dreams and what do they mean? Most recurring dreams are assumed to reveal the presence of unresolved conflict or stress in the dreamer's life. Recurrent dreams are often accompanied by negative dream content, that is associated with lower psychological well-being.
A recurring dream is a dream which is experienced repeatedly over a long period. They can be pleasant or nightmarish and unique to the person and their experiences.
You are reminiscing about each other in your dreams. Built upon what may be a deeply felt emotional or possibly a spiritual connection. There are some who accept and believe that certain spirits have a way of connecting to each other in the dream world.
Types of Group Dreaming
In reality, mutual dreaming is very unlikely to exist - although we may, one day, develop technology to allow us to share "dreams". This doesn't mean people can't share what seem like mutual dreams. The most commonly reported type is known as a meshing dream.
Mutual dreaming is the concept of experiencing the same dream with somebody else at the same time, and although there's no scientific evidence to back this up, countless personal anecdotes suggest its possible existence.
Lucid Dreams
These are the rarest type of dreams where the person is aware that they're dreaming, while dreaming. Not just that, people actually feel like they're in complete control of their dream. Because of the awareness that you have, you can easily interpret your own lucid dreams.
These persistent dreams often occur during our REM sleep cycle, which has long been linked to our body and brain's emotional processing and memory production — unresolved issues and emotional distress are thus usually processed during this time in the form of a recurrent dream.
False awakenings, mainly those in which one dreams that they have awoken from a sleep that featured dreams, take on aspects of a double dream or a dream within a dream.
Vallat and a research team found that people who frequently remember dreams have more white matter in a region of the brain known as the medial prefrontal cortex, which is linked with processing information about ourselves.
Dreams can be so realistic that it can be hard to tell if we're awake or asleep. And sometimes, we wake up in the middle of a dream and wonder if it's possible to go back to sleep and pick up where we left off. It is possible to resume a dream, but it requires a certain focus and concentration.
One of the most common reasons people dream about someone is because they miss that person. It's human nature to feel a sense of well-being when we're with someone we care about. In other words, if you dream about someone often, and think it means they miss you, it may be because you're the one missing them.
At times, dreams may occur during other stages of sleep. However, these dreams tend to be much less vivid or memorable. The length of a dream can vary; they may last for a few seconds, or approximately 20–30 minutes. People are more likely to remember the dream if they are awakened during the REM phase.
Some of the reasons we dream about the same people may be: We see them a lot during the day (such as a family member or colleague) Their bond is particularly strong with us, such as a parent. Your dream may be a way of dealing with loss and grief, especially if someone close has passed away.
Alan Eiser, a psychologist and a clinical lecturer at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, says dreams can be “highly meaningful,” because they “deal with the sort of personal conflicts and emotional struggles that people are experiencing in their daily lives.”
Such feats of dream manipulation may not seem possible to the same extent in our real lives, but they are not altogether absent. In fact, a number of people are able to experience something called lucid dreaming, and some of them are even able to control certain elements of their nightly dreams.
According to clinician Jacky Casumbal, “Dreams are our brain's way of organizing events of the day, memories, and images into vivid, symbolic, and nonsensical storylines.” Nightmares in particular are “dreams that are often connected to unresolved anxiety and trauma that our brain has not fully worked through.”
At this time there is little scientific evidence suggesting that dreams can predict the future. Some research suggests that certain types of dreams may help predict the onset of illness or mental decline in the dream, however.
1. Falling. The most frequent in the common dream family, researchers say that the average human will dream about falling to his or her death more than five times in their lives (yikes).
One of the earliest and most influential studies of color in dreams was performed by W.C. Middleton in 1943 — of the 277 college students tested, 70.7% reported “rarely” or “never” seeing colors in their dreams, whereas only 10% reported “frequently” or “very frequently”.
People have several dreams each night, but probably forget about 95 percent of them.
Typically, we forget these dreams and spend our daily life with no memory of what went on during our nighttime REM cycles. Some people, though, experience dream content that feels surprisingly realistic, and they remember it the next day. Such dreams are known as vivid dreams.
A dream within a dream is a very rare phenomenon experienced by very few people.