Yeah in my experience dreams that feel like they last forever are due to your point of references. For example if in your dream you were living in a certain world let’s say you met a girl, and throughout the dream eventually you had a kid for example. Your mind will interpret it as if a long time has passed, you had a kid after all. But that could happen in a minute in real time.
Real life there are perceived time distortions as well. For example when you enter a state of flow, time will go very very fast. You have no point of references, you’re really absorbed and focused on what you’re doing. Let’s say you have to stare at a wall for an hour, it’ll feel as if you’ve been staring at it for days possibly a week.
The whole “dream within a dream” theory is wrong, it’s only one dream you’re in, it simply feels different because your mind tells you you had a false awakening. If that made any sense.
As for time, it is possible to “slow time down” in the dreamworld, but it isn’t easy and it doesn’t always work. Time is a relative thing… You can try manipulating it though through memories.
Ah, dang, I didn’t notice I my reply to this got lost before sending it. =\ Alright, I’ll write it again.
I wasn’t discrediting LaBerge either, it’s just that too many people read that part and come to the conclusion that stretching time in dreams must be impossible, while LaBerge showed something completely different, and merely hypothesized a working because of which many people report having dreams lasting several hours, days or such.
I recognize my words towards LaBerge were misdirected, and I apologize for that.
Only time I’ve ever tried slowing down time, it made the dream world actually go in slow motion, and I was perfectly normal. Which wasn’t exactly what I was aiming for XD
Concerning this subject I just realize that people discuss 2 different things as one.
Objective time scale and subjective time scale…
objective time is absolute time that is counted on your watch. Subjective time is the time pace as you perceive it. (Stephen Laberge’s experiment do not deny the time stretch possibility it is an attempt to evaluate accordance between those 2 time scales in specific cases.)
In a simpler way, just think about how time seems longer when you are doing something boring and shorter when you are having fun. All in all, 15 minutes is 15 minutes.
It is also scientifically reported that extreme condition in waking life can cause subjective time to stretch (example falling). Accelerating the thinking process by ten, causing the subjective time to slow down related to usual time perception.
More importantly in addition to those RL phenomenon i would add that in dream state the whole time perception could be even more bended due to the dream universe complete subjectivity.
So i state that objective time is absolut and cannot change its pace. Subjective time, on the contrary, can stretch due to various psychological processes (ND, LD, WL). I have my own opinion but i stay open to others point of views. In order to better understand each other, please, state clearly which kind of time you are taling about.
I do agree with Kairos, it’s a matter of subjective time, so in a way ,you can get a 1 week LD, but it’s still 9 hours of sleep, it’s subjectivity that count when you are dreaming.
Well it’s not like inception, but I believe that dream time can seem longer. I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it does. I myself had a dream I was in for what seemed to be months; and I’m not kidding. I lived it, and the dream was EXTREMELY vivid; I lived almost every second of it (besides some of the middle, but time had passed; I think I might have split the dream into two different dreams, such as one dream and then the same dream continued about 90 minutes later when I entered REM sleep again). It was really cool, and it was my last day of Christmas break in RL, so it was like stretching my last day for months!
In buddhism we have to seek full-awareness through our whole life (i.e. WL & DL). This means that your life experience is the sum of your conscious awareness time. So instead of opposing those 2 time scales, you add them. When you are dreaming, your real body is paralysed and your perception is almost entierly originating from the inside. And if you are LDing your consciousness is tuned on this inner universe. So when you LD your “real life” is the dream not your asleep body. So the time that should be considered is the subjective one. Then the objective time shouldn’t even be accounted as it has no meaning for your asleep body. (@Faraday’s point of view)
madison981 dream experience do not only state that subjective time can stretch. It also state that it is an addition to RL (objective time based)
I would even state that your actual life time span is counted in subjective time only (awaken or asleep). Because the consciousness is subjective as a product of one’s psyche. Objective time rules apply only for your body (thus physical brain).
Objective absolut time is merely a practical human convention. See Einstein’s theory on relativity.
As an example, take a photograph. You think it is an image that represent something at a unique T spot on the time scale? Actually it’s not due to light speed that is not infinite.
your friend on the photograph would be T+something old, the mountain in the background would be T+something more old, and the sunset behind the mountains would be T+8 minutes old. But subjectively for the photographer there is only T XD
@madison981 : Sometimes i just put a wall of text to make myself clear … but not (FAIL XD) To me, the way you explain your experience justify that time can be multiplied inside dreams. But also, implicitly, you put on an equal value real time (1 day) and dream time (months). That was the purpose of me quoting you.
As I said in my previous post. In your case, i would only consider the time you spent in your dream because at that moment your consciousness was there and not in RL.
Time can be slowed even without dreaming inside a dream I had a dream once that went on for days and it was in first layer plus the only time I was in 2nd layer it went as fast as in the first
I’m still a little skeptic about the slowing down of time in dreams, because I haven’t experienced it myself.
For instance, a couple of weeks ago I had a FA in an unfamiliar apartment with two girls (I have had worse dreams than that ). I didn’t remember how I got there nor did I remember the threesome, which the 2 girls claimed we had . They said I had had too much to drink. After that I thought I remembered all sorts of details from a long night partying on the beach that lead to ending up in the apartment, so it all felt logical. The dream continued for some time with 2 more dream scenes. If it all would have happened in real life it would have taken at least 10 hours to experience all that and go from one place to another.
When I woke up it felt like I had been dreaming for hours, but when I add up all the scenes of the dream that I actually remembered, it’s maybe no more than 20 minutes and I even wonder if I really had a dream about partying all night or that it was just a false memory to explain how I ended up in that apartment.
Are you guys sure that there aren’t huge gaps or false memories in these dreams?
I have had a dream within a dream before, it wasnt a false awakening either but isnt a false awakening a dream within a dream anyway? im new to this though
Maybe part of the time gap between dreams and reality comes from those fake memories. If in objective time i dream for an hour, and in subjective time it lasts 4 days. For example each quarter of an hour i had dreamt of a different day and the missing time gap is filled with fake memories. So it seems to be 4 days but I actually dreamt 15minutes of each day on a 4 days long dream. With this theory there is a direct connection between objective and subjective time. I let this as an open theory because i can’t rely on personnal experience on that. If you already had some very long (subjectively) dreams maybe can you argue the pros/cons of this?
I had a dream once that went on for days and it was in first layer 
plus the only time I was in 2nd layer it went as fast as in the first 
. They said I had had too much to drink. After that I thought I remembered all sorts of details from a long night partying on the beach that lead to ending up in the apartment, so it all felt logical. The dream continued for some time with 2 more dream scenes. If it all would have happened in real life it would have taken at least 10 hours to experience all that and go from one place to another.