It’s not scientifically verified, but I’ve seen many claims of such dreams. I believe it’s possible myself. I imagine it’s some combination of the brain operating faster and the mind pulling tricks to make it seem like more time has passed than it really has. Or maybe the brain doesn’t operate faster, but you achieve a mental state of time dilation in which you actually perceive time to be slower.
I’ve seen mention of a man named Robert Monroe having experienced an OBE that seemed to last 100 years. I haven’t read his firsthand account, so I don’t know any more details. In addition, in EWLD someone wrote about a lucid dream he had that took place over 5 years (dream years, of course). He said he would actually fall asleep within the dream and “wake up” still in it, once again lucid.
Again, this isn’t a scientifically documented phenomenon, so all we have to go on is anecdotal evidence and alleged experiments. It’s certainly fun to think about, though!
I remember having an epic dream, where I was a totally different person, living in a different family, fighting a war or something like that. It was a dream that lasted for years and when it was at the end I cried for some stupid reason of my other-self. When I woke up, I realised, I had cried IRL.
I’ve experienced this in a normal dream actually. It wasn’t in the amount of time you are describing, but it was well past the REM time. Two days in a dream, and in all that time, I didn’t do one RC!
offtopic Mad Hatter, I love your username. Yay for Alice In Wonderland usernames!offtopic
ontopicI swear that I’ve had dreams that lasted a week. I don’t know about 100 years, but your 8 hours or so of sleep can be stretched out to a lot longer.ontopic
Haha! yes! Go Alice In Wonderland usernames!
…back to topic, I think I saw a topic by Bendrummin about how to extend dreamtime. I also remember reading about a guy who claimed to have been lucid for 100 years. Of course, I can’t find that article now… I think the general consensus is that it is possible though. I think thats probably because most dreamers have experienced it.
Thanks guys…I just get so frustrated on school mornings, it seems like I haven’t gotten enough sleep when I have to get up at 6:30 am. Maybe if I had really long several-day dreams, I would feel more rested…I dunno, just a theory.
The REM stage lasts, at its longest, about 60 minutes (12 at its shortest).
There are different theories on how dreams move faster then reality (or become longer). One is that your brain omits certian portions of the dream to make it feal longer. Another is that you are dreaming really fast in reality, but your dream makes it seem like normal speed.
How about if you have like a lot of dreams at the same time all on the same story at different times in the story wich are organised to be remembered in sequence. with film style tricks laced with false memories and a general distortion of time perception.
There is a japanese horror movie called “Long dream” wich is about a special kind of long dreams. You might want to check it out.
In my oppinion, when you wake up after a really long dream, I think it’s best to go over the whole dream and see if there are any missing parts or skipped scenes that might have made your dream longer.
Ok, I’ll try to do it myself…yes I’ve also heard that time is not a real thing but a concept made up by people, but I haven’t thought about it. Well, I’m still trying to figure out the best way for me to have LDs because it seems much harder now than my first time…My first LD actually didn’t use any methods that I’ve heard of so it’s weird. Well thanks guys for all you help!
I think the brain is far too complicated to have you notice all the dropped bits. Remember a lengthy conversation you had with someone. Can you remember all of it, at full length? I’ve had conversations that lasted an hour but were mostly smalltalk and unimportant stuff, and what I can remember from them wouldn’t be enough to fill five minutes. But I know how long it actually went, because it felt so long at the time and because I looked at the clock. Now, in a dream, you might have five minutes of conversation, have them in realtime, but they might feel really long. You’d have no way of telling if you talked one hour or five minutes in the dream, because you can’t remember all the actual words.
Just an example how the brain might simulate really long dreams. Nothing is left away, and nothing runs faster in your mind than in the outside world. It just feels longer.
Phew! Thanks for revealing that. Now when my boss tells me that I’m late for work, I can just grin smugly and reply, “How can I be? There’s no such thing as time.” This is going to help out so much! You’re a life-saver.
Of course there’s time. And while the rate at which time passes seems to be relative to physical parameters such as speed, very little progress would be made in society if people didn’t accept the fact that time passes on this planet with plainly observable and measurable consistency. All events take a certain amount of time to unfold, and actions that take place in a dream are still bound by this rule. The mind may employ tricks to make it seem as though more events are happening in the dream than real-world time would normally allow for, but there must still be a limit to the number of actions and events that your unconscious mind can simulate within the time that you’re asleep.
Besides, has anybody considered the psychological impact of having a dream that lasted 100 years? That’s longer than most people’s lifetimes on this planet. Waking up after experiencing an entire “lifetime within a lifetime” would be a shock that I’d wager you simlpy wouldn’t ever recover from. For a moment, let’s pretend that you’re 40 years old. You have a wife/husband, a number of friends, a house, a job… everything that constitutes an active life. Now imagine waking up one morning and realizing that you’re still 20 years old, and that everything you just experienced for the second half of your life was simply a dream. Could you resume your life as it was when you were 20? Would you want to?
Now multiply that by 5, and try to imagine how traumatized you’d be after waking up and discovering that none of the last 100 years were real. Lucid or otherwise, you would have established and become accustomed to so many things in the dream, that it would be devastating to suddenly lose them. Your dream powers, which you’ve used for a hundred years, no longer work. You’re bound once more by the laws of physics, even though you’ve spent about 80% of your life in a realm where you could do anything you liked.
I accept that dreams can appear to last a length of time that’s disproportional to the number of hours that you slept. But it’s all tricks, and it isn’t really “free” time. As fun as it is to speculate on the idea of extending your life by cheating the system and gaining a bunch of extra time from your dreams, it just doesn’t make sense. Not in my humble opinion, at least.
Maybe thats why people go to live on the tops of mountains. They’ve already lived their lives in dreams. I still like the idea of extending dreams to have time to do fun stuff, perhaps not to that extreme, but I think the perceived extra time would be worth it. Although the shock upon waking would be rather traumatic, you don’t have to worry, because you can go back to that life you were just living.
I don’t think anyone ever proposed the time in the dream to be real. While it would certainly be “tricks” of the mind that make the dream seem that long it would still be percieved as that long. if you are tricked by the dream to think you’ve lived 100 years in in it you would STILL get the same shock when you awaken because at that last moment of the dream you were certain that it had been 100 years. And i don’t think one would aútomatically be that shocked either. No more than if you wake up to realise you aren’t actually rich. Certainly one would expect a great reaction after a life time in a mental space and that it would change you… and why wouldn’t it? Would it be so bad? There have been people who took hallucinogens and experienced years in a matter of hours. and Yes it has a profound effect on them. You can’t walk away from an experience like that and pretend nothing happened.
They may be met with the same scepticism. “You can’t have experienced that, there wasn’t time.” or “you just imagined it” well duh. it doesn’t change the experience. it’s possible, and it happens. It’s all mental and not restricted to drug experiences. Who is to say the brain cannot produce a lifetime of events in a few seaconds? I think saying it can’t is rather arrogant.
I am. Is that arrogant? Well, then, I do apologize for applying logic to the subject.
It’s all well and good to say, “anything can happen inside the brain, because we don’t know exactly how it works,” but that’s a little short-sighted, and seems to be a show of faith more than anything else. We know that thoughts take time to occur. We know that emotions and feelings are, if not the result of, then at least represented by physical reactions that take place in the brain. To feel a set of emotions, or engage in a conversation with a fictional being, our mind is still working to process and present that information. It still takes real-world time for neurons to fire, and for chemicals to accumulate or dissipate depending on the emotion or experience in process.
Therefore, it seems sensible to conclude that events which take place in a dream will also take at least some time in the real world. I’m not disputing the mind’s potential ability to function faster while you’re asleep, allowing you to think and experience more than you would normally be able to in the same amount of time while awake. But I think there’s a limit to it, and basic physics doesn’t smile on the possibility of living years worth of emotional experiences in the time that your brain would normally take to assume just one or two emotional states. We can even watch this occur on EEG readouts, pinpointing moments of distress or happiness in the observed subject’s dream as it’s taking place. A massive increase in mental abilities would be right there on the chart, and it simply hasn’t happened yet. At least not to the point where we’ve been able to witness a vastly sped-up thought process that might be providing the dreamer with a distorted sense of time.
Now, I think it’s time for another routine disclaimer. If you believe in paranormal activity, or you don’t think our brains are directly responsible for our experiences either while awake or when dreaming, then please disregard this post. I’m presenting a strictly scientific view here, and unless your rebuttal is along the same lines, then we’re not going to establish anything other than the fact that we have differing views on reality.
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