The validation criteria for mutual dreams looks similar: find a dream that corresponds to another dream. But because mutuality is dream-to-dream, that correspondence need bear no relation to the waking world. When the necessity to link with physical reality is broken, the dreaming selves are released to act beyond the constraints of space, time and stability. Freed from domesticated behavioral patterns, they can go native.

The question is-can we follow our dreaming selves back to the wild to observe and appreciate them in their native habitat?

In terms of mutual dreaming, the dreaming selves can and do play the extremes. They can empathize. They can walk in one another's moccasins, peering out through each other's eyes, seeing things more or less from the other guy's point of view. Voila, the meshing dream. Or they can individuate and separate to such a great extent that my dream has no relation to yours at all. No mutual dream. One both/and version is the meeting dream: agreement to mesh the landscape and events, but retain individual body sense. That's the trick we perform out here in physical reality, with little appreciation of just how complex the procedure is. It's the one we learn through acculturation: the illusion of a common landscape, a common waking reality, hidden behind a common language.

You and I agree that there is a "chair" sitting in the middle of the room. But your association with the word chair and your inner picture of a chair is a conference room chair and my inner picture is of a Queen Anne highback. This is despite the fact that the physical chair is actually a rocking chair. In waking life, we ignore our inner pictures in favor of the same word. When we compare dream reports, we can't ignore the fact that I dream of Queen Anne while you're dreaming of a conference room chair, as a result of a common stimulus of rocking day residue.

If our dreaming selves decide to meet in the dreamscape, do they drag along the rocker, the Queen Anne or the conference chair? How about "none of the above"? Remember, in dream space, our dreaming selves sit on symbols-illusions, when they bother to sit at all. And when they fly beyond the constraints of physical time, space and solidity, they fly into a world that more closely resembles the morph of virtual reality, the wave of quantum physics than the particulate form of physical matter.

Unless we become aware of the rules of dream reality, finding evidence of a mutual dream may elude us. When we insist that the dream act exactly like the waking state, we become the dreamland equivalent of the "Ugly Americans." You know, the tourist who demands in a loud voice, "How come these foreigners don't speak English!?!" A courteous visitor might be wiser to follow the advice, "When in dreamland, do as the dreaming selves do."

Can you "go native," just for a little while? Here's a quick exercise to help you see things from the dreaming selves point of view. Remember your last dream. Become the self of that dream. Now think for a moment: you are a native of dream reality. You can fly, walk through walls and suddenly transport into an entirely new scene. What do you think of waking reality? Can you prove that waking reality even exists?