Dream time

Anybody here who actually pays attention to how much time passes in the dream, according to the dream world? I never really cared about this much but one time found it interesting so I kept checking a clock in my dream. Shortly before I woke up, it showed that I had been in the dream more than two hours. Wish I knew how long it really was.

Hi,

well I dont think that a clock in your dreams would be accurate at all.
I think most dreams last for only several seconds. Sometimes you can have a dream that seems to go for really long but it could be only going for 1-2 minutes.

Some say that the reason dreams feel to go for long somtimes when really they lasted just a matter of seconds is because in dreams there is no such thing as time.

interesting topic though,
-stranger

Hmm. Maybe if you used WILD to enter a dream and then wake yourself up during the dream and check a [waking life] clock, you could get a bit of an idea of how long you were dreaming. I’m no WILD expert; I’m not sure if it would work.

Otherwise I agree with stranger, and the comment that time doesn’t exist in dreams.

I think another topic is around here somewhere about ‘lengthening’ your dreams in a way: getting the dreams to seem to last a few days, even a few months, while only sleeping for a normal amount of time. You might want to look at that if this subject interests you, sno_isulli.

The research which concluded that dreams last only a few seconds is old and, worse, wrong.

Dreams last for 10 to 45 minutes and get longer through the night. Boring parts are ‘skipped’ - you can get on a bus and, a few seconds of real time later, get off. In fact, you might never get on the bus at all, just go out of your house and into you destination :tongue:

Hi r3m0t,

How do you know that dreams can last for that long?

And if its true that a dream can seem to go on for days/months then how is that possible.

I had a dream not long ago that seemed to go for hours, and I am sure I only slept for a couple of hours, so unless I dreamt for the whole duration of my sleep I dont see how dream time = real time.

-stranger

There has been plenty of scientific research about how your dream time is linked to biological things like rapied eye movement, PGO spikes, etc. I won’t go into detail here.

That is possible. What happens, as I said, is that parts are skipped. You lie down to sleep and in one second or less you get up again. Unless you have a dream in a dream, of course :wink:

You sit down in a waiting room and in one second the doctor is ready to see you. You certainly don’t remember it as one second. You know full well you “waited” there for half an hour. But that half-hour wasn’t actually acted out in your dream. It was just skipped.

I know what you mean now,

thx,

I thought you meant dreams go for up to 45 mins ‘real’ time,

-stranger

I didn’t actually mean the dream time being realistic. I was just wondering if anybody had seen how long their dream lasted, according to the dream. I know quite a few of my “long” lucid dreams are very short IRL.

A hypothesis on dream time.

So let’s assume a few things

  1. Your brain works like a computer, but the processor is not on/off (1,0,1,0,0,1,1) but has hundreds of states (0,3523,8933,1,435), it’s computing power or operations per second is virtually infinite

  2. Your brain has a infinite storage capacity as compared to a 100gig computer drive (a lifetime of memories, that’s a lot)

With that said…

Take your current computer and fill it with ten Hollywood movies (memories), write a program to blend elements of each movie into a new movie, randomize this process and do it over and over, you end up with some really strange new movies (dreams). Let’s say it takes 1 hour for your computer to create this new movie because of it’s limited processor capability and the computer can store 10 new movies on your limited hard drive.

Now do the same process with your brain. Except you can create 1,000,000 movies in a second and store them all in your brain. Think of the amount of content you can create.

Time and your brain is all perception. We perceive limits based on time and experiences and we live them in our waking life and our dream life.

There are scientific limits to the processing power of our brain and storage but maybe we aren’t even close to the limits. Using the pentium to play “Pong”.

People have claimed to live a whole lifetime in one dream, if the above assumptions are true then it seems entirely possible.