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.
Althought I am a bit of a skeptic, that is a far too naive and easy explanation.
JJJ
Yes I agree. I frequently do a RC on my watch in a dream and the hour often changes with five or more hours. So far I’ve never assumed that I’ve actually lived those five or more hours.
How on earth should my brain be able to fill in the gaps in those few seconds between the RCs? And more important, why should there exist such a mechanism in the brain? This doesn’t make much sense to me…
Your brain doesn’t actually fill the memory in with false events to fool you into thinking that additional time has passed. You’re well aware that absolutely nothing has happened between the first and each subsequent glance at the clock - you simply accept that the time has passed.
It’s not a good example using an RC to describe this effect. Rather than the dream skipping entire hours or days like that, in most cases, it simply skips the various trivial details of a standard dream adventure without you even realising. For example, you’ve probably had a dream in whcih you’ve walked down the road, or around your house. You might think “Yeah, it took 5 or 6 minutes to walk to my friends house down the street”, but in actuality, the dream probably simply teleported you down the road, and you were there in mere seconds.
This happens frequently through most of our dreams, and rarely do you ever experience each step of a locational transition. This is also true with driving. You don’t notice wen thinking back over the dream that so, so much time has been skipped - but this is indeed the case.
LaBerge talks specifically about this effect, and how it’s very much apparent that time does only and always pass at almost exactly the same speed in both dreams, and the waking state. His experiments have shown this to be the case on every occasion. Check out this thread to hear his results.
Ok, I think I understand it better now. Thx for clarifying that Atheist
But still, do you think this effect also happens with greater time periods (years or even decades)? Then it might indeed explain why some people seem to live for years in their dreams.
I guess it’s possible that much greater periods of time can evade us without obvious indication. For instance, you might have a false awakening in which you climb out of bed and begin to prepare for school. You don’t bother questioning why you’re aready dressed for the occasion, nor why moments later you find yourself sitting in class with absolutely no recollection of driving there, or catching a bus. Regardless, and as far as your mind is concerned, you’ve just woken up, got ready for school, and arrived in time for class - something that might take upwards of an hour in waking life.
The class only lasts a few minutes, and probably deviates drastically from the comparative RL experience. A friend gives you something, the teacher opens discussion on a completely irregular topic, and that cute little object of desire who sits in the front row suddenly wants to be your girlfriend. Moments later, school’s over, and it’s dark outside. Perhaps the dream briefly touches on the ride home, and momentarily involves a talk from the ol’ parents. All in all, it seems that a long and event-filled day has elapsed, where really, only 25 or 30 minutes have passed.
We haven’t technically skipped a large time period in the above example, but we have skipped such a large number of trivial details that essentially we only experienced 5% of the day. Any subsequent day/night cycles that you experience before the dream ends will likely involve the same method of “recapping the highlights”, and chances are you’ll wake up thinking you’ve just lived 3 days in the time of a single night.
Next time you dream of embarking on a journey, try to recall each step of the way when you wake up. See if you can pinpoint the occasions where your mind has ‘helped’ you along a bit, by skipping or shortening certain parts of the venture.