Mashable.com, November 8th, 2007 (http://mashable.com/2007/11/06/peer-into-the-dreams-of-others/)
Since the inception of lucid dreaming into the media by movies such as Vanilla Sky and Paprika, it has become a popular blogging genre, as has similar topics of out of body experiences (OBE) and astral projection. In case you’re not up on your West Coast spiritual terminology, a lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is said that it is possible to exert conscious control over the course of the dream.
I have an IM buddy I met many years ago, back when I primarily engaged in web design and programming for my dollars, named Justin Crawford. He and I would chat about life in general and attempt to solve design issues together. He would from time to time bring up the topic of lucid dreaming; learning about it was always one of his hobbies, and it was his interest in it that induced him to purchase the domain “luciddreaming.com” several years ago.
He didn’t actually tell me till he accrued over 1000 active users, but he’s built a niche social network built around the exploration and documentation of lucid dreaming. He sent me an invite to the community earlier today. Having checked it out, I see that there’s quite a bit of interesting stuff going on there.
The most attractive feature about the social network, as with any niche social network, is the community there, and there seems to be a fairly active community growing. It also comes stock with most of the generally available social networking features you’d find elsewhere, like messaging, profile pages, and group forums.
The blogging feature is most interesting, though. Dream interpretation isn’t an exact science, but there are general themes in dreams that can be interpreted to mean certain things that are generally agreed upon by folks who do this sort of stuff. When a dream blog is posted, a general interpretation based on tags and keywords from the post is generated by the system and appended to the end of the post to provide a starting point for the community to discuss and help derive meaning from the dream.
Justin Crawford says of his site, “It’s exciting to finally see lucid dreaming getting recognized on the web and we hope our online community will bring forth a much larger awareness. My ultimate goal is to educate everyone so that they’re familiar with what lucid dreaming is. We want to give the dreaming community tools to help promote their ideas and thoughts to others.”
It is definitely worth checking out, either if you’re curious as to what that dream involving your mother and the navy submarine actually means, or if you’re just wanting to engage voyeuristically into other people’s minds.
