NORD (Non-Ordinary Reality Database)

NORD stands for the Non-Ordinary Reality Database.  Non-ordinary reality (NOR) is a transpersonal psychology term that refers to any conscious experience that isn’t ordinary, that you might not talk about with co-workers or within public.  It might be a dream, premonition, spiritual experience, or anything that has meaning for you but isn’t part of your public persona. They’re fascinating experiences because they can change the course of your life and feel more real than your everyday routine, but we have a hard time talking about them and might not know how to integrate them into our every day life.

We’re a science focused society and science doesn’t quite know what to do with dreams and subjective experiences, so we have a hard time accepting that our dreams and other NOR experiences are real.  There hasn’t really been good data about NOR experiences. You can get a lot about what happens to the body and brain when they’re happening, but the only way to learn about the actual experience is to ask the person.  They tell you what happens in stories, which are subjective and hard to quantify.

Science grants these NOR experiences reality insofar that they are measurable through the brain and body because the data is readily available.  The internet provides the machine to collect data directly about the experiences in themselves through the stories people tell about them. There are millions of stories online people have shared about dreams and other NOR experiences.  

NORD’s mission is:

To advance the science of the collective unconscious by collecting and analyzing first person narrative accounts of non-ordinary reality experiences, such as dreams or meditations, then making them accessible through open data APIs and friendly citizen science tools.

Check out http://www.nordglobal.net to learn more or sign up for our newsletter.

Sign up for NORD’s first dream group here