Maximum length of time distortions

Hello, everyone. I was reading another thread, and somebody posted that he was able to stay lucid for what feels like a week (at least, thats how I understood it).

Now, there are tons of more experienced on here than I am, so let me ask you: What is the maximum amount of time you’ve been able to stretch a single lucid dream to? In that same thread, the idea came up about having a 5 year experience in one night. Is that even possible? Or is that too large a change in time?

Yes I want to know too! ^^^

Given the power of the mind, I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to have a super long dream. Focusing the entire time, however…

This topic, has been discussed alot. Skeptics will argue that Stephen Laberge proved that dreams happen in realtime, that they seem longer because of tricks, like in movies. They say there is no time distortion at all.
Believers will argue that one can’t rule out the possibility, and that people keep claiming to have these long dreams.
The number of people who have them seems to be rather small.
There is no shortage of theories, but none of them is really scientific.

In waking life, at school, one lesson may go extremely quickly and another may go very slowly, even though they both take place in the same amount of time.

I think you can distort time in dreams, basically. But not to the extent of 5 years… the reason things seem to go fast is because you’re thinking about how fast the time went when it’s already happened… so… for you to live 5 dream years with every little detail would not work… because…

damn this is confusing.

Whats-his-name once said he experienced a hundred years within two hours. I think that answers your question.

Whats-his-name isn’t a very credible source in my mind.
That is one nameless source, I don’t think that answers the question.

I am very curious about the subject of time distortion.
In my opinion, it is possible, but I don’t know if we are capable of experiencing 100 years in 2 hours and this point in time.

I think one of the best ways to understand this concept, if dreams do indeed happen in real time, is to look more at how someone could “feel” as though they’ve been in a dream for an extraordinary amount of time while only spending 30+/- minutes.

The dreaming mind is incredibly good at fabricating memories and recreating any sort of emotion/feeling that we may or may not have experienced in waking life.

Remember when you first learned to ride bike, or your first kiss, or any other past event that creates a sense of separation from current time? THAT feeling, not just the memory, but the distance of time itself, can be easily recreated by your dreaming mind.

Not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense, it’s a fuzzy subject I guess. Basically, the mind is capable of recreating MUCH MORE than emotions and memories. There are so many different situational “feelings” that are virtually wordless, at least in English, that it’s hard to explain exactly what I mean.

I do believe it is possible to spend a long time in a lucid dream which in reality is just one night. If you google a lucid dreaming FAQ, one of it’s sections will say that Robert Monroe was able to spend 100 years in a 2 hours OOBE. So I really do think you can stretch time within a lucid dream. :content: That is on my long listo f what I want to accomplish once I become an experienced lucid dreamer.

read writerscube’s DJ’s

I trust LaBerge over any other lucid dreamer when it comes to this subject. He proved that dreams happen in realtime- If they seem to go faster it’s, as said, the “movie effect”. You switch scenes and do timejumps, all this makes it seem as if a longer amount of time has passed.

Making a lucid dream go slower isn’t possible either, cause we can’t change the speed of our mind and thoughts- Sure, we can make it go in slowmotion, but that’s how we will experience it as well.

It sure is possible, but how you do it is just as hard to answer as how it happens.

Have you ever noticed that time seems to fly when your having fun? and seems to take forever when you are bored? If our perception of time can change in waking life, then why not in the dreamstate too.

You have to remember, that time is not a tangible thing. It is only our perception that gives the illusion of time. We think we are moving along a course in a linear fashion and events happen one after the other… but if you were to step back and take a look at the bigger picture of the entire reality, you would see that time is merely a concept of the mind.

The longest dream I had went for about 2-3 days, when in actual fact only one night of sleep had passed. but i can see how this could happen to people, like Ulver pointed out… you would get the feeling that a lifetime had passed, but its more just trigger memories that stand out. Like just before someone dies they see their life flash before their eyes, it would be similar to that.

However, there is one time when i experienced a 2 hour long lucid dream in the space of 2 minutes. I kid you not. I looked at my alarm made a note to memorize it then hit snooze, had a lucid dream that went on for ages… way longer than 2 minutes… and it doesn’t fit into the above category i just explained because the details of the plot outline is just way too much to happen in only 2 minutes. When I woke up I couldn’t believe that only 2 minutes had passed.

But yeah, they happen by random chance… at least with me anyway. If anyone has a working technique/method i would love to hear it.

I agree with Akorah. Modifying in an impressive way the time duration is said to be possible by buddhists monks, but it looks like it’s something you have to believe and never to see by yourself. I’ve read tons of DJ’s since 3 years, some of them by the most experienced LD’ers in the world. In Florence Ghibellini’s DJ (about 300 LD’s choosen amongst something like 3000 LD’s) there was no one time distortion (though she experienced a lot of things). I’ve to say I’ve also read here and there some claims of such things, but systematically they weren’t believable.

It’s possible to stop time… during a short time. It’s also possible to rewind time on a short period. As for Monroe’s account, curiously it’s generally just told of the result yet not of the content of the dream. I would be glad to read it once. :tongue:

In ND’s there are ellipses and false memory tricks. They may give the feeling of a long time past, but they are generally included in sorts of meta dreams: we watch a movie, a story is related, it’s on the third person view. FM’s may also happen in LD’s but it’s very rare they give the same feeling of a long time past cause we feel the time to be “real time”.

People assume that in order to stretch time, you have to speed up the brain. If that were the case, really long dreams are improbable. But, if you remove the experience of time passing, which is perfectly possible, couldn’t you dream something and the story will tell you how much time has passed?
Because I dreamed about taking LSD today I feel compelled to bring up the example of drug induced time-distortion. Many could testify that they experienced relatively short times as extremely long. It’s not a question of whether such experiences are possible. The question is if it happens without drugs, in normal sleep.
Also, dreams do use movie like tricks, even lucid dreams do. It’s happened to me and I didn’t notice until after I woke up.
Ulver mentioned that we might feel like a long time has passed, or something like that. I can relate to this by a lucid dream in which I met a girl, and a few minutes later, felt liek I had actually known her for years. I think I could even say how many years. I knew that I hadn’t really, but I felt it anyway.
Combine all these things, and really long dreams don’t seem very improbable at all. I mean, that it seems like the mind can easily create such experiences. For some reason though, it’s not that common. I think it might be because most of us are probably quite unprepared for it.

First of all, as someone else said, read Writerscube’s DJ. He’s had one for a month at least.

I believe that I have had dreams during the night that have lasted well over the amount of time that I was sleeping. On the other hand, I’m not entirely sure of those. The big reason that I know that time distortion occurs without a doubt is because of two things:
First, when I wake up in the morning and am drifting in and out of sleep, sometimes I will sit there for what seems like hours, having a dream that definitely is (without a doubt) at least an hour, then wake up, expecting it to be an hour after I last woke up, and it’s only ten-twenty minutes (other times when I’m trying to go to sleep I will roll over, close my eyes for what seems like five minutes, then wake up and find that it has been forty minutes, though that can be attributed to the fact that I fell asleep and therefore was not experiencing time and was not conscious.)

The other reason that I believe it is much harder (it’s nearly impossible) to explain. The only way that you can know what I’m talking about is if you have experienced this (for more detail, look in my recent posts and about five posts ago I posted in a similar topic, except it was related to RL instead of just dreams). Sometimes, during waking life, time seems to slow down. It may occur other times, but usually it seems to slow down when I’m looking at a clock.