For you who have lived for years in one dream;
When you wake up and recall your dream, does it really feel like you have lived those 6 (or w/e) extra years? When your actually 20, do you feel like 26 or w0ot? 
That would be kind of cool. And if you really could live for years during one night you could solve all your problems, personal twists so on during one night. That would rock. 
Its not exactly the same thing at all, but a few nights ago in a non-lucid dream, I somehow got to a point where I paused my dream and then rewinded it.
i’ve recently come across of a technbique for actually experiencing a time slowdown- only in RL! check out this link: braincourse.com/timea.html
if one did this while WILDing, maybe he would enter a lucid dream while there still is a slow perception of time
In my last LD I had fun with stopping time for people, making them “lag” as in Counter-strike 
Wow, cool stuff in this thread. Will try in my next LD.
Some thoughts on the idea of time dilation.
Even if you think of the brain as like a computer processor, with a maximum megahertz, with maximum physical hardware limits, you still cannot say that we are operating at the maximum speed. Even other animals like cats or flies, using the same basis for their neural systems (approximately), they have reaction times faster and quicker. Hummingbirds and other animals that can think faster because they can move faster.
So, even if the brain does have a physical limit, a cap to how fast you can think and feel emotion, that limit is not being reached. We have slowed it down to approximately how fast our bodies can move, due to muscle friction and mass/intertia limitation. If we thought any faster, we would tell our body to walk and it would take like… ten hours just to lift our left foot, because our brain was thinking too fast for our body. Then it would take another ten subjective hours to lift our right foot. So, our thought processes get slowed-down to the perfect speed for real-time feedback from our bodies. [I wonder if everyone’s minds are synched at the same speed… slight differences accumulated during the infant synching phase, due to genetic variance or physical differences could lead to mental excellence.]
SO, even if, in fact, dreams take place at the same speed as reality (i.e., even we cannot dream a lifetime within an hour nap), the logic above implies that theoretically, if we allowed the brain to think faster, we COULD dream faster, perhaps dream adventures lasting weeks within a single night’s sleep. It’s possible, even though the evidence seems to indicate that in practice the brain doesn’t ever let go of the boundaries that slow it down.
There could be practical reasons for this, such as that it would create a dysphoric, painful transition back into the slower body. Even though the brain as a processor is capable of running at ten times the speed it runs while awake, maybe it doesn’t because it is risky. After a dream, your speed-of-light dream body would be a far cry from the slow real body, and it might take some re-synchronization for your brain to get re-used to your real body. This would be bad if there was another caveman about to bash in your brains and you had to wake up quickly and fight.
Also, the memories accumulated during a limitless dream time might overload the neural networks, and might dilute memories from waking life with the more recent dream memories. That board meeting yesterday would seem like years ago and you would wake up after a ten year adventure and barely remember the board meeting.
Eventually, you might actually deplete the brain’s “theoretical maximum memory space”, or at least clutter the memory-webs with so many cross-references that thinking becomes painfully slow because each memory invokes too many irrelevant cross-references. (Like in free-association exercises.) This could also be a reason that you usually forget your dreams, and why dreams seem to “erase” themselves if you don’t practice the fine art of remembering them by bringing them into conscious thought to remember them.
time is a measure of speed and distance, so both are equally viable for measuring it.
Its not that simple. if it were, I could choose to have a lucid dream that lasted forever. This is physically impossible.
Also, its very hard to reach a level of lucidity where you are so godlike that you can actually alter things that are determined by your deepest subconcious. It takes more than a little confidence to alter fundimental laws like time and space.
Time isn’t an illusion, it exists. its the perception of time which is unreliable. There are actual real life applications of einsteins theory of relativity (basically, time isn’t a constant, its relative to the speed of light. Thus accelerating = going faster through time for people who aren’t accelerating), like adjusting clocks before sending them into orbit.
Good thread… I guess when I tell someone that my dream was 20 minutes long, its a perception of time based on the time I expect things to take.
After a great deal of lucid dreaming, I suppose this becomes a question of ‘how long is a piece of string’
Time in dreams is only limited by the amount of thought that has a chance to take place in that dream. If it spans several years (in concept) then each day had less thoughts available.
A lucid dream can have one quality hour, or one crap century
i once woke up from a dream, and in most of my dreams time seemst to go alot faster. however when i awoke from this particular dream time was still going fast. i was breating faster. the clock ticked faster. i was thinking faster. all in all it was really scarry. i did a reality check the make sure it was not a FA. so i sat down and w8ed as time slowly seemd to sink back to normal. time is something thaught up by mankind. it does not really exist. change in “space-time” is all that really happens. time as we observe it is the only way our brains can cope with this. time can seem to speed up or slow down depending on how we absorbe this “data”.
thats my theory NEway
Cool link.
But yeah, it seems like you can slow down time in dreams.
Last night I had WILDed into a dream (at least I think it was a WILD, maybe something close). The dream had seemed to last a really long time, but I woke up 20 minutes later. Shocked me at first because I didn’t think you could do that, but oh well.
Something interesting to point out:
In the LD above, I had stated an intention to slow down time. Though it was later in the dream, so I’m not sure if it mattered.
Also, if it matters, someone at the beginning said something about bullet time, Later in the dream, I was walking down the street, when the area around me had blurred (it was in 3rd person) and it sorta zoomed in. I was walking slowly forwards too. Drove me nuts, but I broke out of it later. Kinda interesting really.
Well, that’s my really long 2 cents.
I think the time thing is all about perception. when i took mushrooms recently (not enough to get any visuals)i was outside having a smoke and listening to people around me talking i noticed how fast they where talking i could barely make half have the words out (yes when i’m drunk i’m nosey). Then i looked at my smoke and it had burnt in a way that only happens when smoking fast, i noticed my heart beat racing and when i started to slow it down the people where talking at a normal speed. I know it wasn’t a lucid dream example but in dreams your perception is not perfect even if lucid.
pedro i would like for you to explain what it was like when you woke up from the 6 year dream… and time does exist or we wouldn’t age
Everyone would like Pedro to return, but dont count on it…
As for your deduction, ilovelucid, I do believe it to be an oversimplification. However, yes, time exists; it is, in fact our perception of it that is faulty…
I believe time in a dream can be seemingly slowed down, to make the dream last for days or maybe even years.
As Einstien proved, time is relative. Also, there is a meditative technique called time distortion which some musicians practise, where you meditate untill you’re perception of time is actually slowed down, thus, you can perform incredibly difficult or fast peices of music in ‘slow motion’, allowing you the time to make sure you play it right
I believe the exact same thing can be done in a lucid dream, so I tend not to agree with LaBerge’s theory about the ‘movie’ trick making our dreams seem longer.
It’s a combination of these 2 factors most likely. And slowing time down to the extend that you experience days or more in 1 hour or much less seems highly unlikely with only your explanation.
I think time is time no matter how you look at it. There are still 24 hours in a day.
During dreams you can slow down time but not in RL.
okay, time is just the measure of motion. if everthing in the universe right down to the last atom stopped moving right now…time wud effectively ‘stop’. now in a dream, the is no movement (unless u want to count the electical pulses in ur brain…but then ur talkin about the speed of ‘thought’ which ,as far as i know, has not been measured). without motion there is no time. i dare to suggest that our concept of time in dreams (whether lucid or non lucid) is simply a product of what we are used to IRL. time is a law of physics just like gravity, and how many of us havnt at least bent if not broken the law of gravity in our dreams. laws of physics cannot be applied to dreams because there is nothing physical about them…which actually makes this entire thread pointless…if u want to put a time limit on dreams then u might as well try to weigh them next .
Ofcourse I haven’t experimented with time distortion myself, so I was just speculating. I guess what I meant was, LaBerge’s movie trick can’t account soley for all ‘time extensions’ in dreams.
Your probably right, it could be a combination of the two theories.
Time is relative. Einstein came up with a formula for his relative time that has to do with your speed and its effect on time. This formula is called the time dilation factor. The time dilation factor theory says that the faster you go the slower time gets for you, because of this fact (it is also proven(, time is elastic and relative, not constant and thus time is not absolutly defined. Time and space are connected and this space-time could be stretched.
Also, adrealine released in your body in large amounts, slows down your perception of time, making you move faster in dangerous situations.
However this is only a theory, but a widely accepted one, which I beleive to be true 