Laberge`s experiment wasnt/couldnt be really representative.I mean-lds are different.And it is different when person tries to let someone whos awake how time passes.That can be accurate because the one concentrates on the task.With different ld-lets say one when you travel a lot or do many different things time doesnt have to be same.
Doh,its bit complicated to say what i mean ,i hope you can understand.
ps.and btw-i doubt time would be accurate if the experiment was longer.Such an effects u can have i guess only for short periods.
I don’t agree with the opinion that the brain works slower when you’re awake because there is a lot of information to process. Information processing is also brain activity, and more information means more brain activity. Actually, BRAIN ACTIVITY = INFORMATION PROCESSING, so less information means less brain activity. On the contrary, in REM-sleep (dreaming) we notice SLOWER brainwaves (especially theta = 4-7 cycles per second) while the waking brain shows much faster brainwaves (beta = >12 cycles/second)! BTW brain activity in REM-sleep is still fast compared to DEEP sleep, in which brainwaves fall down to delta = < 4 cycles/second.
On the other hand, I agree with “the brain is more free in dreams” (though what is the meaning of freedom for a brain?) because in waking life the brain is bounded by the limits of EXOREALITY, the world independent of your mind. But when you’re asleep, senses are blocked (though not completely) and when you become lucid you are in the dreamworld of ENDOREALITY. In this world, subjectivity is much more important, if you think that you have been lucid for an hour because you have travelled by train from this city to that city there is no objective clock to correct you’re subjective time experience. Even if in “real” time you just travelled for a minute or so. In endoreality, you are the slave of your thoughts, subjectivity is the master, and there seems no “real world out there” with objective time to compare your subjective experience with. If you are waiting for a bus in waking life, it could seem to last for hours because you’re so impatient, but when the bus finally arrives you watch your clock and you notice that the bus is just 10 minutes too late… and then you know what was real and what was subjective experience. Not in dreams! EXCEPT if you are doing an experiment like LaBerge, then you are very concentrated and hyperconscious, counting “1000, 2000, 3000…”. But if you are not very attentive and just believing every subjective thought then you will be easily caught by the well known
Yes, when we see a movie we “know” because there is an objective time to compare to, but in dreams there seems nothing to compare to. But it only SEEMS so because if you are attentive and conscious like the subjects of LaBerge’s time experiments, then you will be able to differentiate between the subjective and the objective, even in the endoreality of your dreams. This will be very difficult, but it’s possible. Time exists independent of your thoughts, be sure of that: many meditators experience a profound sense of wonder when they reach for the first time a state of “no thinking” because they notice that they are still conscious and experiencing, even without any thoughts. Thinking is extremely important for our subjective experience of reality but even without thinking there is experience of reality. I know it’s hard to believe because we identify ourselves so much with our thoughts…
It was just an idea, i’m not saying that this is what really happen, i never checked it, but it gave me a nice explenation to different between dreams time and reality time.
I tougth maybe the brain had much more to do. In real life it just has respond to all thats happening in the world, but in a dream it has to simulate this in the brain. lets use a metaphor, real world is like reading a book. just has to follow the words. but a dream is like writing the book. The brain has to make a world that looks like the real world, thats much harder. And Lucidguess wrote something about the brain didn’t have to hadle all information from sences and stuff, and could use this space to thinking, well 4 things. 1st. Compared to a coputer, we are like a multiprossesor computer, all sences are prossesed by different parts of the brain, so not using this won’t give free space for thinking. 2nd We are using the sences while sleeping, sound, light and tuches from the real world is either used in the dream or U will wake up from them. 3rd We only use about 10% of our brain, so why do we need free space? 4rd I forgot what the 4rd thing was, but I’m sure it was brainshocking information.
Keep in mind, this is only a thougth (not sure if I spelled thougth right, its such a hard word)
“it gave me a nice explenation to different between dreams time and reality time”-- Well it’s not really a nice explanation if it doesn’t match reality.
I would tend to agree with BrainHacker on this one. Perception of time is very attention/awareness driven. It is quite simple for time to feel different depending on your mood and focus.
Jack re your points against LaBerge’s experiment. Yes he did only test LDs and normal dreams are different. But could we trust the time perceptions of someone in an NLD anymore than we trust someone on magic mushrooms? LDs are the only ones we can hope to get a sobre report on.
Your point on how short the experimental time was may have something. We need someone to perform a long memorized sequence and see how it stacks up. I’m thinking a long yoga or dance sequence. Maybe someone has a long poem memorized. Until someone does that and proves LaBerge’s experiment faulty then I think its safe to assume dream time=real time. I am surprised that the LaBerge experiment is the only one I ever hear about. I think he did this 20 years ago and noone has tried to replicate it? It seems the science of LD is dead.
LaBerge has fallen asleep some years ago, his last interesting research was about WBTB or napping method (article published in 1994: lucidity.com/NL63.RU.Naps.html ). The only thing those Lucidity Institute-guys are doing these days is selling NovaDreamers.
Still, we need more research, not only about dream time and real time, but also about possible new methods that make lucidity more easy to attain.
Also, nobody seems to be interested in finding out WHERE lucidity takes place in the brain, maybe that could learn us a lot about possible substances and other factors that could make lucidity more likely. Why does nobody open the black box of the brain?
In the last years we are witnessing a big revival of LDing on the internet, for example this forum is the living proof of that, and now films like the Matrix or Waking Life could make LDing more known in larger circles of the population. I hope this will eventually lead to a renewed interest in scientific LD-research!
Good point Helmut,i guess i didnt make myself clear(its damn hard to talk time relativity in english:)
What i was trying to say was that his experiment might be right under some circumstances.But because we have some reports about lds lasting for a day,week or month we cant say for sure how exactly does it work.Your idea about poem or dancing also might be proved right-but still,it will not give us an answer-what about paradokses like travelling in time,doing two things at the same time and space,so on so on-there are too many exceptions and our understanding of time we percieve now works “against” us.
Someone said that dream realm is far more relative than our reality-we are trying to solve the hard thing-we have some relativity in real world and we still struggle to understand it.
Yes you have something there. There are 211 members and a few “guests” on this forum, and many of them are lucid dreamers. That would make a great research group. Maybe someone on this forum could post an experiment, collect results, and then write a report on it, like they do/did in the Lucidity Institute? What do you think?
EDIT: Damn the acronym doesn’t work in the quoting
[size=75][color=red]acronym fixed[/color][/size]
This is all intruiging stuff but as I don’t have many lucid dreams I’m not at the stage of being able to do this kind of experimentation.
For lucid dreamers who have a computer near where they sleep (not me) it should be easy enough to get it to play a metronome type regular beeping or clicking sound which could be used a way of observing the passing of objective time during sleep.
This idea came from a story my mother told me about my great grandfather. He had a dream where a clock was striking, but very slowly, so he waited a long time between each sound, but he woke up his clock finished striking the hour at normal speed. This makes me sceptical about the conclusions drawn from LaBerge’s experiment. It seems like the volunteeers concentration on estimating a certain time accurately could have allowed them to do so.
Anyway, once a lucid dreamer is able to pick up on a regular sound, eg. a once a second beep, during a lucid dream, they could concentrate on slowing down the beeps, and making the gaps between each one longer and longer. If it worked… well, it would be fantastic. I’m sure somebody will want to try this, or maybe has tried something like it, and it would be very interesting to read the results.
Well I found this “Time Distortion Exercise” on the Internet. I haven’t had success with it myself, but if anyone else is interested… self-hypnosis then time distortion exercise
I read a martial arts fiction novel one time about monks training them selves to slow sand in an hourglass… Sort of a KUNG-FU type thing (the TV show) any how one of the things he did was to count the blades on a rotating fan because he could “slow” his perception of time enough to see it…
In my opinion, time travels normally in dreams. But I also think that it’s easy to lose track of time in a regular dream, just like daydreaming. Also, it’s difficult to judge time based on traveling from place to place, because often you’ll warp from one point to the next while walking a long distance.
Measured time is not the same type of thing as experienced time. Measured time is, e.g., the movement of the hands of a clock from one position to another. Experienced time is a much more complex thing, perhaps the most basic structure of consciousness. Husserl describes it in “The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Perception” as being centred around a more-or-less fuzzy present, with memories of the past and anticipation of the future. The human experience of time is much more like that than it is like mathematically measured time, which is surely a technolgical artefact, since the natural experience of time pre-exists the artefact of measured time. It has often been observed that linear time is a relatively modern concept (as is the concept of a relatively modern concept, etc.) and the time has often been thought of as circular in various ways - THE day cycles through light and dark, and we act within it.
In a more advanced development of the phenomenology of time, Gaston Bachelard in “The Dialectic of Duration” describes how we are always making a memory at the same time as we live through something. This particularly applies to dreams, which in a way only exist as memories, as they are so easily forgotten. There is a complex inter-relation between past, present and future. They all define each other.
So maybe the ‘real length’ of a dream doesn’t mean very much.
Isn’t it interesting how dreams are so much more difficult to remember than LD’s? Maybe this is why non-LD’ers can gloss over the possibilities of LD’s: because unless you’re conscious in a dream you don’t really “experience” it. Maybe if people could really experience and remember their dreams, LD’s would be more mainstream and popular. All I know is, if Nintendo or Sony made a video game system with graphics half as realistic as an LD, people would be buying them like crazy.
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