You’re separated from your sweetheart and you’d like to have some good private time together. Can you do that? Absolutely. As in the old song, “you can reach [him or her] with your mind.” The next question is: Your place or mine, or somewhere else altogether? How about meeting up at an elegant restaurant in Paris, or on a lava beach in Hawaii, or at the Moon Cafe (in the astral realm of Luna, don’t you know?) where the bubbly is better than any earthly brand of champagne. You can do this.

If you are embarking on shared dreaming as home entertainment, you get to choose your category. Maybe it’s not romance you’re looking for tonight with that special person, but something more like an Indiana Jones movie, or the History channel, or a scifi adventure with better special effects than even James Cameron has so far contrived. You can have that too, and the best thing is you don’t have to remain a spectator; you and your friend get starring roles.

I know what I am talking about. I have walked on the back of a golden cobra the size of a skyscraper with a special friend to gain access to a very special library, dedicated to a goddess of ancient Egypt. I have shared excellent adventures in conscious shared dreaming with other friends and partners in which we have crossed time to visit the Viscontis in Renaissance Italy when they were using the earliest hand-painted Tarot cards to work magic, and into a world of Forest People – animate, talking trees – and into a possible future in which an order of priestess-scientists are seeking to repair our world.

Want to try this? Do you have a partner or friend who is willing to play? If that person lives with you or near you, you can make a date to start out next to each other, in the bed or anyway close by. If you are intimate partners, you may find that tender lovemaking gives you the juice for a shared journey to the moon and stars – if both of you can stay awake or at least remember what happens in your dreams if you fall asleep.

But shared dreaming doesn’t require you to start out from the same place, or even on the same continent. And unless it’s part of your agenda, sex is not required.

To keep this simple, let’s assume you have a friend who is not physically present, with whom you’d like to share a dream adventure. You can set up your date like this:

1. Make the date. 

You might simply agree to try to meet in your dreams on (say) Wednesday night. Or you might be more time-specific, saying to each other “Midnight Pacific Time” or “between one o’clock and 5:00 AM.”

2. Agree on a rendezvous

If you’re new to this kind of thing, it’s probably best to start out with a place in the physical world that one or both of you know. That cafe in Soho, that beach in Hawaii, that stand of poplars in the Smoky Mountains. When you’ve acquired some practice, you can set your sights on locations in this world that neither of you have visited, and locations beyond this world.

3. Make sure you agree on a juicy intention

The idea of simply hanging out with your partner in a delightful locale – and not having to pay for the plane ticket or the five-star hotel suite – may be juicy enough. But there may be something even more compelling the two of you would like to do, from figuring out how to get the house loan to swimming with mermaids or spending the night locked in tantric embrace. Whatever your agenda, make sure it is exciting. The energy of a juicy intention will help you to get there.

4. Make your intention firm

This means that before going to bed, you’ll write down and mentally affirm your intention to keep your rendezvous, and pursue any further agenda you have agreed on with your partner.

5. Record your experiences

Write down whatever your remember from the night of your assignation, whether or not it seems remotely relevant to your intention

6. Share

Give your partner your raw report, unedited and uncensored.

When you share, be alert to the time-slip phenomenon. When we go dreaming, we step outside linear time – unless we are versed in the art of traveling close to “real time” in order to track physical situations very closely. We are capable of having shared experiences that are simultaneous in dreamtime, but are recollected at widely differing times (hours, days or even weeks or longer apart) in serial time. So if your reports from the night of your rendezvous do not match up as closely as you would like, be open to the possibility that one of you may have recalled your shared experience earlier or later than the other – perhaps even before the experiment was begun.

~

For more on the many modes of shared and social dreaming, please read Active Dreaming: Journeying Beyond Self-Limitation to a Life of Wild Freedom, published by New World Library.