Can Two Sleeping People Talk to Each Other? The Shared Dreaming Question
DISPUTED CLAIM
The neuroscience module covered something real and verified: a waking experimenter communicating with one sleeping, dreaming person. This is a different, much bigger claim — two sleeping people, each dreaming, somehow reaching each other. We want to lay out exactly what's been claimed and what's actually been tested, without pretending either direction is settled.
"Mutual Dreaming" — Two People, Similar Dreams
The mildest version of this claim is people reporting the same or strikingly similar dream on the same night, usually within couples or close relationships. A 2017 analysis of 102 such narratives found most occur in close relationships, and raised a real alternative explanation: shared routines, shared conversations, and a motivated desire for closeness can make two ordinary, unrelated dreams feel like a match after the fact, without anything having passed between the two dreams themselves. That's a legitimate psychological account — it doesn't prove nothing happened, but it means a felt "match" isn't itself evidence of anything beyond normal memory and bias.
Dream Telepathy — The Maimonides Experiments
This is older and more rigorous than it sounds. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner ran a formal research program at the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Laboratory in Brooklyn: a sleeping subject was monitored by EEG for REM onset; a "sender" in a separate room concentrated on a randomly chosen art print; on REM onset, the subject was woken and asked to describe their dream; independent judges, blind to the actual target, then tried to match dream transcripts to prints from a pool. Across roughly 14 years and 450+ formal sessions, the lab's combined results came out to roughly a 63% hit rate against a 50% chance baseline, reported as statistically significant.
WHERE THIS ACTUALLY STANDS
This is genuinely disputed, not quietly settled either way. The psychologist James Alcock has written that the Maimonides results don't hold up and that "lack of replication is rampant" in follow-up attempts. Against that, a 2003 meta-analysis by Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe pooled Maimonides with 27 later dream-ESP studies and found a combined effect better than chance. Both of those are real, published positions, and they disagree. We're not picking a side here — this is the same kind of open dispute as the Castaneda material earlier in this course, and it deserves the same honesty: a real research program, real critics, and no consensus verdict.
REMspace — A Current, Unverified Claim
OPEN QUESTION
Most recently, a California-based startup called REMspace announced what they describe as the first dreamer-to-dreamer communication: two participants, induced into lucid dreams and monitored with brainwave sensors, exchanging a message in a constructed signal system the company calls "Remmyo." In their account, one dreamer received and repeated a word, which was stored, and a second dreamer later received and repeated it back after independently entering a lucid dream.
We want to be precise about what this is: a company's own announcement of its own technology, not a peer-reviewed study, and as of this course, not independently replicated or published in a scientific journal. That doesn't make it false — plenty of real findings get announced before formal publication. It means this sits in a very different evidentiary category from the Konkoly et al. 2021 study in the neuroscience module, which was peer-reviewed, multi-lab, and polysomnographically verified. Treat this the same way this course treats every other claim without a controlled study behind it yet: a real claim worth tracking, not a result you can rely on.
References
Sherwood, S.J., & Roe, C.A. (2003). A review of dream ESP studies conducted since the Maimonides dream ESP programme. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(6–7), 85–109.
Alcock, J.E. (1981). Parapsychology: Science or Magic? Pergamon Press.