Dreaming for years upon years.

Over two years of being here ive met few people who claimed it happened to them.Most of the cases werent something extraoridinary- they knew that time passed similarily to how we percieve it during watching the movie-10years passing in 1 hour or so.
But there were one or two pople asking for help about how to stop lucid dreaming cuz it took them to the extreme levels- they had lived in there for proper 10 or more years,had wives,even kids,got used to the world had their ups and downs,even attended to funerals of their friends.After awakeing it was very painfull to them to adapt to reality again and thewy were scared of falling asleep again because of the fear it happening again and eventuall mentall sickness.
I believed in it especially after talking to them on chat-they were extremelly unhappy and sad and begging for help.So i believe its possibile.
Btw-as we know time is different in dream and it might be the case that in one 20 mins rem we can experience unlimited amount of happenings in time.

Yeah, a fraction of time in the real world can be an infinite amount of time in the dream world, that’s just what i believe. I know it sounds crazy.
Thats nuts that people got attached to their 10 year dream like that… with having a family and all that. Did they not know they were dreaming, or what?

Ya thats what I meant you lived a life for 6 years not just that it seemed like 6 years you had all the memory of 6 years how you slept each night. Other dreams in your dream, how you grew, everything and always knowing it’s dream but you couldn’t do anything so you releaised you had to live on. Then after 6 years the real world is gone you forgot it.
After this you have all new skills. You know new thinks skills on how to cook certain things and new games to play.

Hey Jack, This time thingy, I’ve heard all the same things said about the Fairy world. Strange how these themes seem to keep popping up…

I dont think i would be able to forgot that im in a dream after 6 years… its like remembering important stuff that happened 50 years ago, it never leaves you. Im pretty sure the fact that your in a dream wont be forgotten. Plus all the impossible things that happen in a dream. Maybe, that person grew to love his new dream life because his real world might have been real rough.

Except in this dream every thing is normal except for the fact that you’ve gone back in time. That was the only thing that tipped you off that your in a dream.

Provided it was possible for time to slow down in dreams, I certainly don’t accept that someone could live out a realistic ‘alternate’ life in there. Particularly if they were lucid; things would be forever inconsistent, and there would be no rules. If your friend died, you could bring him/her back by tapping your heels together three times if you really wanted.

It’s difficult to accept that anyone could be unhappy with a dream that lasted the equivalent of several years to their perception. Firstly, you know that while you’re asleep in RL, you’re not missing anything substantial in your life. This is basically FREE time! An additional 10 years in between 2 arbitrary days one year is a bonus - given that you only have 70 to 90 years to live on average before eternal void anyway (depending on your beliefs).

Plus, you wouldn’t be locked into doing anything that you didn’t want to do. If you were, then it’s not really an LD. If it’s not really an LD, then I don’t believe time was actually slowing down, but rather the memories of an extended time period were simply available to you upon waking (as mentioned by Badcandlejack).

There’s also the issue of how your brain can process that much information in only a few minutes real time. Time is all about perception, and to me, this means how fast your brain is going. It might be possible to enhance the speed of your brain, hence slowing down time, but probably not by any significant amount. Maybe you’d get an extra 6 minutes to the hour by increasing your brain speed 10%, but it wouldn’t healthy or easy. Anyway, you can test this now.

I propose time perception is based on the frequency at which your brain is operating. If it slows down, more things will happen between cycles, and it will appear that time is going faster than usual. If you speed it up, less will happen between cycles of observation, and it will seem that time is going slower. Now, increasing the frequency of your brain’s cycles 100 or 1000 times is just preposterous. You’d melt your brain, or something.

(Insert generic disclaimer that the above opinion is based on the physical brain, and not the spiritual mind.)

I think you could still be lucid by placing yourself in a dream where you dont use your LD powers. I’ve done it a few times, but you do tend to lose lucidity after a while, but if you were to practice, I’m sure you could. I like doing that because it is like an alternive reality, its just cool how something you did once in a dream, could effect your next dream. Like you could in your mind create a world that you would continually go back to.

Well…i had similar doubts like you Atheist but i never got to solve it.The guy wasnt regular to the forum,i think i talked to him maybe 2 hrs in total.And i remember it was all difficult back then because of many people talking at the same time,so on.Im not able to repeat exactly what he said(it was about a year ago) maybe our irc regulars would remeber that case.
I was actually more interested in psychologicall consequences of such a dream then how and why.

I think the only way he couldve lived out 6 dream years w/o snapping out of it and becoming attached, is that he had a lucid dream, but didnt know what a lucid dream was.
It’s like when we were all younger, and we had a lucid dream adn could control our actions, but didnt know we were in a dream. Since he didnt know he was in a dream, probably nothin wacky happened like flying pigs because he was in the mental mindframe that it was reality.
So i think that’s the reason, next thing happens thunder roars outside his window and wakes him up 15 minutes after his dream started, then total mental meltdown, not too pleasent.

Their is nothing stopping you to not have control. I always wondered why in most FAQ’s about LDing it says a good RC is to pace you body through a wall but don’t try your hand because it’s used to be placed onto wall in where your whole body is.
Atheist: What if their was rules and you lived a life full of them “just because you think you can doesn’t mean you can.” What if you couldn’t bring him back(Your friend) these rules bound you down to RL just in a dream.
Actualy, it’s quite easy to see how some one can be upset about a dream that lasted years. If this whole dream was a horrid nightmare. 6 years in this nightmare you could never get away from.
To what I understand Lucid is when your aware not control as stated in many places. You can be Lucid but still not have control. What about sommoning people into dreams people are have a tough time with that but their still Lucid.
Edit* Mrvanhelen posted when I was typing.

The Golden King of Avalon

I don’t buy that. The mind isn’t powerful enough to simulate 6 years of realistic events without tremendous instability. You just wouldn’t be bound by rules as you are here, while awake. You wouldn’t have to sleep, or do ANY other obligatory task (such as eat, breathe, etc). I mean, what could happen? It’s not like you’re going to die or something.

People would disappear as you turned your attention to other things, objects would randomly appear everywhere, there would be NO regular day/night occurrences, etc. Not to mention a couple of hours in a dream would allow you to develop the skills necessary to control every aspect of the dream. If not, certainly a day or 2 would be sufficient to get a feel for what was happening. Sorry, but it’s fantasy as far as I’m concerned.

The mind is more powerful then you can ever imagine Atheist.
Still I don’t get it what is stopping you from not having full control over the dream? Nothing. If the mind can genertate realistic eviroments and events and plus we live in a world bound by rules why can we imagine a world without boundrys and not one with boundrys?

Well it’s alot easier to make a world without. Think aobut it, if your world doesnt contain gravity for instance, then your brain just has everything floating, if it does have gravity though, it would be kind of weird if a piece of paper fell to the floor as fast as a rock would. Your brain has to somewhat calculate the boundries.
Your brain tends to be very lazy as well. You know the light RC? Thats based pretty much on the lazyness of your brain. Your mind doesn’t want to calculate how one color looks in the dark or how much of a shadow this would have, so it takes a shortcut, the light isn’t working = no work for the brain. In the real world its not that hard for you to remember something, or focus, because you arn’t creating the world, you’re just observing it. The brain would have to remember where everything is, and all the rules for it to be like reality, all while interpreting the nurons or whatever into a dream. For these reasons dreams tend to be very fluid.
Does that make sense or am I just rambling here…?

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. :content:

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. :tongue:

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.