Science has discovered that thousands of people have 'shared dreams'! What happened?

There are dreams that are just the same, similar to each other, but there are also dreams in common - dreams that are strangely similar.

In 2017, "On Body and Soul" - a film that resonated at the Berlin film festival opened with a scene of a pair of deer entwined together, leisurely foraging in a dreamy snow-covered forest.

Immediately after that, the film changes to a harsh and shabby slaughterhouse, where the two main characters meet: Mária - a newly arrived female product expert, with a stiff and shy personality, and Endre – the financial manager of the slaughterhouse with a paralyzed arm, austere face and a hardened soul after an unhappy marriage.

There wouldn't be anything special about the deer in the snowy forest, if it weren't for the story of the nightly dream that Mária and Endre shared. Not the same type of dream, similar to each other, but similar to every little detail and even have a reciprocal interaction.

Two main characters in the movie "On Body and Soul"

In Endre's dream, he was a stag groping a thick leaf, giving some of that rare food to the female deer, and together they went down to the stream to drink water. On the other side, the dream Mária is a female deer who was given a leaf, touching her nose with her friend while drinking water by the stream.

Every little detail coincided in the dream, making the character of the ideal doctor think it was a joke arranged in advance by Mária and Endre. "What a strange coincidence," the doctor commented when temporarily believing that the two were not joking.

Thousands of "shared dreams" have been recorded!

The concept of "shared dream" (shared dream) as in the case of Mária and Endre was not simply woven by Ildikó Enyedi, a veteran Hungarian screenwriter and director. It is a strange, rare but real coincidence in life.

According to Dr. Patrick McNamara, professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine (USA) with many years of research on human dreams, there are thousands of documents recording common dream cases.

He also classified common dreams into three groups: those between therapist-client, cases between people with close relationships such as parent-child, spouse-partner, twins, and school between strangers.

Although the phenomenon of general dreaming is well documented, most of it is in the form of "anecdotal reports", which are recorded reports, not scientifically controlled data, he argues. Especially in the case of people who know each other, when one person is talking about a recent dream, the other tends to jump in to "finish" the story, and "believe" they have the same dream. However, when examining each detail carefully, there are still differences.

For the first two groups, it is relatively easy to explain why people who are related to each other have similar dreams. According to the general view of sleep science, dreams are stories created by the brain during the REM (rapid eye movement) phase of sleep.

Materials to create stories are from each individual's emotions and life experiences. People who have a relationship with each other often share the same environment and circumstances, so it is easy to have the same raw materials to "process" similar dreams.

Materials to create stories are from each individual's emotions and life experiences

Meanwhile, the third group - complete strangers (such as between Mária and Endre) is rarely recorded, because it is less likely that they met, shared and discovered this coincidence.

The source recorded in this case, trusted by Dr. McNamara, is in Frank Seafield's book "The Literature and Curiosities of Dreams". Dr. McNamara objectively admits that shared dreams between strangers "can happen", but he himself cannot find the reason why.

According to Mr. McNamara, between complete strangers, the only thing that can explain common dreaming is that they must be in exactly the same brain condition to produce the same cognitive content.

However, this seems unlikely, even in identical twins. He proposes another explanation, which he admits is still unconvincing: that dreams are not simply the product of the brain that records and processes information while we sleep.

Dreams are probably the product of the interactive cultural world of people, they float in that "cultural morphological space", and are waiting to manifest on individual consciousness.

Dr. McNamara's second interpretation seems to have similarities with a theory of a psychologist nearly two centuries ago: Carl Jung's "collective unconscious" theory.

Decoding the "common dream" through the "collective unconscious"

Carl Jung (1875-1961).

Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, was a student of the father of psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud and was also one of the pioneers who laid the foundation for this field of research.

He suggested that dreams are the mind's attempt to communicate with individuals, and that when two different people dream the same dream, they are drawing data from a common source, called the "collective unconscious".

The "collective unconscious" is a concept that makes Carl Jung go against the views of Sigmund Freud, when he thinks that the "unconscious" is not made up of individual experiences.

According to Jung, the "collective unconscious", sometimes called the "objective subconscious", is the deepest part of the human subconscious, built up from collective experiences: Ancestral experience. passed on to offspring through genetic material (genes).

As described by Carl Jung, the "collective unconscious" is made up of instincts and archetypes – these in the form of stub images or symbols, which can overlap and combine with each other, and are suppressed by perception. Some of the archetypes that Jung proposed include the mother, birth, death, rebirth, etc.

Among them, the "mother" archetype is the most important, which can be in the form of the Virgin Mary, the motherland, the forest, the sea.

Thanks to the concept of the "collective unconscious", the similarity and universality of human behaviors or behavioral orientations, such as innate fears, fairness or rationality, are easily resolved. Preferably inherited traits. People who share the same dream, perhaps because they share these primitive, most basic archetypes.

Carl Jung believes that dreams are places that give us insight into the "collective unconscious". He suggested that symbolic objects and symbols have a universal meaning in dreams, since they represent archetypes.

In other words, the same symbols in a dream have the same meaning, even though they are different people.

He also believes that dreams are a way to compensate for the suppressed parts of the mind in everyday life. This lays the scientific foundation for the study of dreams, as a tool for research, analysis and treatment of psychological conditions or phobias.

Even so, the "collective unconscious" theory has also faced controversy and criticism as a "pseudoscientific" theory, because it is difficult to prove with data or pictures that archetypal symbols inherited and available when a person is born.

Thousands of people are reported to have had the same dream as the other: Maybe you are 'participating' too

Going back to the case of Mária and Endre, if Carl Jung's reasoning is correct, then Mária and Endre's dream about a pair of deer in a snow-capped forest is a beautiful symbol for two lonely and one-to-one souls, longing for Thirsty for love, accidentally and fortunately found each other in real life.

At least, moviegoers in many countries around the world can use the metaphorical symbols of their dreams to decipher the poetic film, despite the lack of scientific evidence.

And who knows, each of us has or will "dream together" with someone – if Carl Jung's theory is universal?