Dreaming for years upon years.

I know it’s powerful (this IS a Lucid Dreaming forum), but I also have a functional (and technical) understanding of it’s various shortcomings, one of which is keeping track of multiple ‘items’ while your concentration wanders freely. If you stop thinking about something, it’ll probably stop happening in the dream. I know what you’re saying about our mind getting used to rules and applying these same rules to our dreams automatically (simply because we’re so used to them) - but the mind just isn’t powerful enough to maintain them at all times.

In RL we have the physical world itself constantly moderating our actions, even when we don’t remember to consciously consider the rule prior to our attempts to defy it. I might absent-mindedly try to pick up something far too heavy for me to lift, but low and behold, I’m quickly informed by the unyielding and permanent rules of our reality that it’s not going to happen. In the dream, however, there’s no underlying rule stopping me from doing this. My mind is only going to prevent me from lifting the heavy load if it expects that I won’t be able to.

For that reason, a dream lasting several days (though I don’t believe that’s physically possibly) would be inconsistent, random, and after a little practice, almost entirely under your control. Above all, it probably wouldn’t be realistic. Our brains depend on external stimulus to maintain stability and consistency. A dream can only remain so true to RL.

Jack: I’m not too familiar with psychological disorders, autism, and so on, but I’d be inclined to believe that those people you spoke to had some form of disability that provided the seemingly lengthy and scary experiences. I’ve heard stories from people who have had sleeping disorders that prevented them from entering deep sleep, and instead caused them to experience REM throughout the entire night. This gave them the impression that they had dreams lasting months, and at various points they felt that they had control. They were also sincerely depressed and fearful of going to sleep.

But I still don’t get it. If their was no gravity in a dream then everything would be floating everywhere right? Well I’ve never had that. So in a sense their is an essence of rules? If our brain was really lazy why would it create dreams and then incorporate rules into them?
My mind is only going to prevent me from lifting the heavy load if it expects that I won’t be able to. Shouldn’t it not expect you to pick it up? I mean the box looks heavy and in RL you couldn’t pick it up so why should you be able to in a dream? Because your brains lazy? So if we thought and the brain might I add that we could pick up this box in RL we would?
How can the mind not be powerful enough to incorporate rules into dream should it take any effort to maintain them.
The mind: It stores information about our lives, creates unique universal scenarios, applies rules to them, gives us total freedom over them but it can’t maintain it? We will be dreaming for all our lives, learning new things incorporating new rules to RL. But our mind can handle that. Right? If our brains were lazy why would we even dream or see or hear? We don’t need these elments to keep us alive. Their just there for some unknown reason that in the end only will we know and maybe we will still won’t know as we fall into the abysmal world of emptyness(what ever you belive is the end of life).
Funny we’ve been talking as the mind and brain as a single entity away from us.

King, the sentence in bold is all you need to understand. In a dream, if I expect that there will be gravity (which I will expect, because every second of my waking life is governed by it), then there will be. If I expect that my hand won’t be able to pass through a wall (which I will expect, because I’ve never been able to do it in RL), then it won’t be able to. This is the one and only rule that determines what happens in a dream.

Weights can be deceiving. Sometimes in real life I’ll try to pick up a box, and even expect it to be light, but I won’t be able to lift it. As it happens, the box contained something heavy that I didn’t know was in there. This is real life (and its unbreakable rules) coming into affect and stopping me from doing what I expected was possible. In the dream, however, as long as I expect to be able to lift the box, I’ll be able to.

The point of that example was to demonstrate how the real world works on the basis of consistent rules, and the dream world doesn’t. It only works on what you’re expecting, which due to your extensive experience of life in the real world, is often very similar to the rules that exist here in waking life. As soon as you realize that you’re dreaming, and are no longer bound by these mere ‘simulated’ rules, you can begin bending them.

Anyway, all I’m saying is that a dream that did somehow last several days or months, wouldn’t at all be similar to RL. Particularly if you’re lucid, which you’d have to be in order to experience the time subjectively rather than just 2 months worth of memories upon waking in the morning. So, I don’t see how the experience could be that real, or that disconcerting, as mentioned in the initial post. Just my opinion, though.

There was a batman episode where the madhatter drugged up batman and gave him a lucid dream(he didn’t know it was a dream though but he was consious). He noticed all the weird stuff and how he dad was alive and everything was better. He started to adapt but then he relized little things like not being able to read the newspaper and the another batman running around. Anyway, he started to go crazy and got the cops after him, He relized it was a dream and then decided to exit the dream by…Killing himself! He jumped off a tower and woke up and proceeded to kick the maddHatter tilled he cried.

So if your ever stuck in a LD for long periods of time, simply kill yourself…well not sure if it would work but I can’t imagine it not working either.

as little experience as I have with lucid dreaming, I can say that such an occurrance is possible, as I had it happen to myself.

it was about3 years, ago, during the summer. I went to sleep and entered a dream, everything was vivid, but I didn’t know about lucid dreams at time. I had no idea I was dreaming. I was in the dream world for approximately three years. I can’t say for sure, but that’s the best approximation for time that I can give. I remembered almost everything from those three years, and it indeed was in a mystical world. Real life rules applied, simply because I didn’t think it was a dream. Things I didn’t think I couldn’t move, I didn’t move. Everything had properties to it.

I think the way the mind handles this, is that it just goes off of what you think. I had relationships with people, formed bonds, went on adventures (it was a mystical world in a somewhat medieval time period), did loads of stuff in this period. If you’ve been somewhere before, the mind doesn’t necessarily have to remember the whole world. When you return to the place, you simply expect it to look a certain way, and it most likely will look the same way as when you left it, because it’s your mind giving off the same impression. Atleast, that’s how I assumed it to work. And new places? They didn’t exist in your mind yet, because you’ve never been there before, so it was up for grabs. It could look like anything, and you would accept it because that’s what you expected it to look like, perhaps other characters in the dream gave impressions of what it looked like, told stories to you before you visited the place?

I don’t know how it works, but it is indeed possible.

This is why I am trying to introduce myself into the world of lucid dreaming. I miss this place, it was fun. I wasted a whole three years there, and two days in my room afterwards, sulking and questioning everything that happened, wondering if I indeed was awake or if I was dreaming again (didn’t know about being lucid, so I had no reason to RC or try to do amazing things). Everything that is in a dream, you take for granted because you’re not under the realization that it is a dream. You think it’s reality, so real rules apply.

That’s about all I can say about that

Wow, hated one cool experience. I wish I could have one of those, all my lucid dreams were short and not usually too sweet.

well, the thing was, it wasn’t lucid at all. i accepted the reality i was presented as it was, and everything seemed natural. when i awoke and found it all to be simply a dream, i began to question life’s own reality itself.

the movie vanilla sky got me interested in luid dreaming, as did other small sources, but mainly the movie. I stuimbled upon this website and am trying various methods to reconnect myself with this dreamworld, as I miss it very much. Three years was a long time to lose.

If it was interesting write a book! Infact I was thinking of giving writing a try since I love reading and figure it’s got to transfer to writing skill so if you can’t write worth crap I can also try writing your story(basically I hear it and embellish like hell, I’m really good at it).

i am already writing a long story based on what i remember, of course, certain things are changed… i’m going back over the first 5 chapters i have done now and adding in more detail, as my writring was very good when i first started, then it got really bland… so im going back over it and giving it a touch up or two

how real exactly was it?

when you travelled would it take regular time and be normal distance?
or like in a regular dream would scenery change and you took it forgranted that you had travelled there?

would characters just sort of appear? and it’s forgranted they came through a door or something?

i’m really curious about this stuff…

how wack would it be if we suddenly “woke up” from this life only to realise we were back living our true life in our childhood years or whenever we forgot wut our eariest dreams were lik. Maybe our kid dreams we cant remember were just lik this, real life and the real life is realer than this sumhow. sure u may think there r ways to prove other wise, but if it were how could you really trust me or anyone or anything else was real. sorry for strayin off towards the matrix and wut is real path, this topic just got me thinkin.

a great king or buda guy had an experience… “he was a butterfly, out flying around, doing his daily buisness, when he woke up. He asked the question, perhaps he is a butterfly dreaming he is human, and not the other way around”.

its kind of like what you said, exept instead of a butterfly, just a whole different person in your case

very intersting this gives me the idea of dreams within dreams within dreams as in when we die you consider this life just a dream and are ready to start another one

Basically, everything I experienced was like real life. I think because I didn’t know any better, I forced myself to believe that i had to walk everywhere, because that’s how I got around. Nothing ever really appeared out of the blue, it always had a way to make an appeaance, door, I moved around a corner. THis happened about three or four years ago, so I don’t remember a whole lot anymore really. All I remember is that I couldn’t distinguish it from real life, it was just lkike an alternate reality.

I believe that was Lao Tzu, the Taoist… maybe Chuang Tzu… double checks

Yup Chuang!

Why stop here? Imagine you go to bed and start dreaming for years as described in this topic. In this dream you may also go to bed and start dreaming for years. In that dream inside a dream you may also go to bed and dream for years, and so on… You get a whole spectrum of dream levels, each involving a life experience, or at least a few years. How then would you know for sure that you’re in the real world if you’d wake up from one level?
Perhaps our reality itself is in fact one of the many dream realities (a bit like the butterfly paradox from Chuang Tzu). Every dream reality has a different time scale and consists of slightly different rules (such as the level of influence by thought and awareness), and comparison between these different time scales gives seemingly ridiculous results. Therefore it’s possible that our entire lives in this level, which seem to last for 70 or more years, are in fact only a dream of about one hour in the next level. Perhaps death is only the awakening in the next level from that dream we’ve just led. And then the cycle starts again… Just an idea
What do you think?

thats really interesting thinking mystic im so interested in what will happen in our after-life and i like this idea
another idea is that once this life is finished we will then start a new life which will be like another dream similar to reincarnation where we still have the same mind and spirit just no memories

I like to think we will still have it all-mind,memories,experiences…its just expanding this perspective into something broader…more like growing up than being reborn.

death is an awakening.

one of my bizzare ideas i have is that the “afterlife” where we return when we die may be stuck with a problem “The Problem” just like we are stuck with so many problems left to uncover. And the best way to go about solving a problem is to start from the beggining. Well wut better way to do that then creating a universe and starting it from nothing to the very beggining. Wut better way to start from the beggining than to erase all ur knowledge and be born into a life which is meek and very simple to the universe around it and all that lies past that. perhaps one reason we are here is to solve the problem which may seem hopeless because how can we solve one if we had it erased from memory. well all the stuff we dont understand lik miracles and wutnot may just be clues sent from the “afterlife” i doubt if many people take me serious but we all need thinkers and people to come up with these ideas.

There is no such thing as a dream that lasts for years. What actually happens is this: When you look at a calender and it says 2003 and you look at it agian and it says 2007 you will assume 4 years have passed and your brain will fill in the gaps so it appears as if you have dreamed for 4 years.