T. W. Stoneham is Professor of Philosophy at the University

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Robert Stickgold is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School whose research focuses on dreams.

“‘Someday’ is certainly a long time, but I think the answer for a middle-aged person would be, ‘No, not a chance!’ Think about it—it’s almost impossible to share your thoughts with someone, even verbally. Once you start, twenty new topics open up, and you only have to choose one. The best that scientists could do with perfectly healthy people is to put them in an MRI scanner and see if they were looking at a face or an instrument.

On a more philosophical level, your thoughts and dreams are always embedded in shared networks of memory and life experience. You can't just walk into someone else's shoes."

Adam Hara Horowitz (RA Davies) is a research intern at the MIT Media Lab whose work focuses on neurobiology.

“As in many other sciences, questions are doors to more doors. To share dreams, we must first define them, draw some kind of boundary around the dream. If dreams are visual effects and we only want to portugal number data share the possibility of seeing them, then will the image of my mother correspond to the representations of another person in a shared dream? I don’t think so. Dreams are a fusion of memory, an internal exploration of a person’s semantic relationships, concepts always embedded in a personal context. Thus, the same sensory stimulus can appear completely differently in two minds. One can even go so far as to ask whether we are watching the same movie, sitting together on the couch… from a philosophical point of view, this is a confusing question.

From a practical point of view, it is less messy. Today, there is some progress in deciphering the visual images of dreams using brain scans. Other studies have shown that we can communicate during lucid dreams, using eye movements to communicate different states of consciousness. On a superficial level, we are bridging the gap between the personal space of dreams and the external observer. But I think this gap remains a kind of paradox, because the “experience” will always be there and will interfere with scientists, even when objective tools for recording, observing and reproducing dreams appear. We cannot divide the dream completely without dividing ourselves completely.

of York, whose research focuses on dreams. R. A. Davies is Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of York.

“Beyond the idea that we simply share our dreams, there are at least two interesting concepts of dream sharing: having the same dream (shared dreaming); and seeing someone else’s dream, perhaps with the help of advanced technology (dream scanning). Examples of dream sharing can be found in some modern African cultures, where it is possible to “dream” for another person or even “triangulate”—that is, transmit messages from one side through dreams to another. Similar practices are mentioned in ancient civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece), including cases where the same important dreams occurred in both the patient and the priest on the same night.