Thread: Can We Really Spend Years In A Lucid Dream?

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

No, I know. By 'you', I meant people in general, not you, specifically.

Ah, I thought so but wasn't sure since you quoted me specifically

I'm no expert on lucid dreaming, but if you could spend years in a dream, wouldn't that mean your brain is perceiving days within mere seconds. That's a lot of brain activity.

Well if you know AL3ZAY on DV, He Said he had opened up a Time Warp Portal and he opened the door to the portal he had a realtime watch and a dreamtime watch, and he had his dream companion to help him remember that he was dreaming. So in the end he said he spent 60 years in a dream and when he got out he said he was in a biiiiig daze.

You cannot expand time in a dream no more than you can with a day dream, in a book, or in a movie.

Signals in your brain can only fire off so quickly, it most definitely has limits, and it does not have infinite capabilities.

Yus. I have.

I'm not too sure about "years" but I remember one experience from not too long ago that was pretty cool.

I woke up and looked at the clock. Clock said it was 5:45, so I still had 15 minutes to go before I had to wake up.
I went back to sleep and I had the longest dream. It was such a long dream, I remember every moment of it. The dream was basically me on vacation with my family and we went to the beach, some amusement park, on a cruise, etc. In the dream, a couple hours must have passed.
I woke up thinking "holy shit, I must have slept way past my alarm" but only 10 minutes had passed in real life since the dream.

@goodkat How do you know have you tried it? Anything is possible.

In regular dreams we can 'feel' as though much time has passed as we will fill in the blanks between dream scenes. However, lucid dreams have always occurred (for me anyhoo) in real time. Entertaining the idea of fanciful 'month long' lucid dreams belongs in science fiction or possibly with coma patients.

I think it'd be badass if a dream could last a continuous amount of time that stretches out without it taking up the amount of time in real life. I have done studies on DMT, dimethyltriptamine (if I misspelled that, give me a break, it's a big ass word), but a lot of people say that they can spend hours on a trip, and yet in real life, it's only about five to ten minutes at a time.

On a side note, I had a dream last night that spanned like two days time, BUT even though there didn't seem to be breaks in the dream, from the journal entry, I can tell that it was simply the same plot, characters, etc., and like O said, it was basically like a movie, it stuck to the main parts and skipped across the minor stuff.

Still hoping toward the idea of a dream lasting days straight with zero breaks.

Aside from asking why it's so important to spend years in a LD (don't we all waste enough time in waking life as it is?), which I won't do, I'd like to throw a different wrench altogether into this conversation:

You cannot expand time in a dream. Or contract it. Or anything else it. Want to know why? Because time does not exist.

That's right, folks, there is no such thing as time. There are no time particles, no time waves, no "thing" at all out there waiting to be slowed down, sped up, or whatever in any dimension. Time -- and space, for that matter -- are concepts humans use to make sense of the world around them. Time is also instrumental in making the physics equations work, but that still does not make it a physical, bendable ting -- just a workable constant, another concept. Concepts are not real things. Yes, we use the concept of time to measure our reality, but that doesn't make it real, any more than numbers and letters are actual things.

Yes, there is causality, and yes, you are born, grow old, and die, but this has nothing to do with time. It has to do with mass and energy, the two things in nature that do exist. And you can do lots of things with both of those things. But you can't change a thing that does not exist. Period.

That said:

There is something about time that I imagine could be changed with enough effort, and that would be your own subjective perception of time. In other words, altering a major tool you use to make sense of reality. Perhaps, in an LD (and in waking life as well, I would imagine) you can change how you perceive time, and alter the amount of information passing through your mind accordingly (to perceive that great amounts of time are passing, you would also need to invent or gather great amounts of information to fill that passage -- aka hours, days, years, and everything that comes with them). Making such changes to your subjective time would be enormously difficult, because you would need to change mental programming that's been in your DNA for millennia. This could have a real effect on your sanity -- not that that's necessarily a bad thing! And yes, I understand that small changes in subjective time happen naturally, and are common -- time "slows down" when you are bored, and "speeds up" when you are enjoying yourself. But these are tiny adjustments relative to actually adding days and years to your very existence.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but this is one of many threads addressing this subject, and it's been driving me nuts that you guys are discussing changing a thing that does not physically exist, and therefore cannot be changed. In any direction.

Maybe we can do this , sometimes in SP 5 sec. seem to last 5 hours.
Maybe we can do the same in a LD , that would be fucking awsome.

I often dream of living a couple of days in the dreamworld. They are not lucid and not intended but inside the dream I notice how the sun rises/goes down and I even go to sleep in my dreams and have a dream within a dream. When I wake up from those dreams I'm still where I was in the first dream and continue it. My longest streak was 4 days and nights and I remember all the dreams inside the dream and all the stuff I did...When I woke up only 3 hours have passed. Of course I didn't feel every second and I'm sure my mind skipped a few hours but it still feels like you dreamed for ages when you wake up.

I have never experienced any time lapses in my dreams such as was seen in Inception, but in real life I have experienced something similar. A few years back I "experimented" with certain substances, one of which was Dex (aka robo, the stuff in cough medicine (I was a stupid kid back then)). One time when I did a large amount of the stuff, I remember looking at my watch a few times, maybe each glance at my watch being 30 seconds apart. I was actually at school waiting for the bell to ring, which was only in a few minutes, but at the time it seemed like each interval of me looking at my watch was at least an hour, and the few minutes that separated me from the bell was more like several hours. It wasn't a lifetime, but it felt endless. This had me come to the conclusion (obviously when I sobered up) that time perception is a conscious thing, and being a conscious thing you can alter it. It is more easily altered in a non-normal state of consciousness (ie under the influence, sleeping, effects of brain injuries). Our normal conscious state perception of time is influenced by our environment (our physical surroundings, things we are doing), and since we have such a "human" environment, we perceive time as we are now. For example, we consciously tell ourselves that we have 40, 50, 60, 70 years left, we have time; we schedule things all the time, organize certain tasks, and expect things to happen between defined times, or within a relative undefined time. Our mind then produces a certain sensation of passage of time directly related to these 'schedulings'. I have a cold which is effecting my ability to articulate properly currently, so I hope I explained this well enough.

A summary of this: to the universe (or more rather in 'universal time'), the 14 billion years the universe took to evolve to what is today, the 4.5 billion years the earth took to be what it is today, could be only a split second in relation to our time perception. But to us, this amount of time is incomprehensible.

The same thing could very well happen in our non-normal consciousness during sleep (dream state).

Think of it this way. Is it even possible to remember years of your waking life? Not really. Our perception and memory is complicated, and does not work according to a time table. We remember things that are important. We sometimes forget things that are even more important. Time can be perceived as moving slowly or quickly. We anticipate the future and ignore the present.

When I think back on the last 5 years of my life, it seems like a dream. It feels like it flew by, or didn't even really happen at all.

Originally Posted by Robot_Butler

When I think back on the last 5 years of my life, it seems like a dream. It feels like it flew by, or didn't even really happen at all.

It does for me, too. But when you try to remember for example the last year, and go through it day by day, you can "track" them back and finally get a picture of what you did in the whole year. I don't think you can do this in your dreams because you actually skip some scenes there. But it still feels the same and that's the important thing

I would imagine you could convince yourself time is passing slower than it really is. I don't really know. I wouldn't want to spend years in a single dream.

yes it is possible to expand time in a dream, but not to years or even one year. Maybe you can get a day or two at most but it is done by your brain processing stuff faster then normal and so when you woke up you would feel very tired because your brain would be worn out from doing so much processing in such a short time. Also your dreams can be very short in which case you are probably closer to deep sleep and your brain is processing slower therefore you perceive real time slower (but your dream would play at the same speed). That's why time goes fast when your doing something fun (because it is relaxed and just enjoying whats happening) and time passes slower when your doing something boring especially if it is something like math since it ups your brain activity. Since dreams are a simulation of a virtual world, I think they should be just a bit expanded because of how much your brain is processing the simulate the world. Thats just my knowledge/thoughts i felt like sharing.

Yes and no.

I'm using LaBerge's studies as well as "quotes" from other LD scientists I can't remember the name of that I remember reading about on here during the first DVA courses.

Literally, no. LaBerge demonstrated that dream time and perceived time are roughly the same; brain activity is near the same and he also had subjects move their eyes in time. The exact timing was an average of 13 seconds in real life to count for 10 seconds in a dream, but that is also the average for people who count ten seconds out in real life.

Another scientist concluded (and I think this was referenced in ETWOLD) that false memories can fill in the blanks between dream scenes, creating the illusion of a long long dream. (Who cares what happened? What you REMEMBER is what matters. After all, that's all that you remember.) The example given was that this guy had a LONG dream about being executed by guillotine in a public square. He was woken up by his billboard over his bed falling onto his neck, and thus concluded that the dream was made upon awakening.

I've personally had dreams that have lasted up to two years, usually my "long" dreams (maybe 1/6th of my recalled dreams) last a few hours perceptually. But in reality, the time is the same. The brain activity is near the same. My brain is just filling in the gaps, much like when, in a movie, a scene changes and you, in your willing suspension of disbelief, feel as if time has passed.

Everything Jarrhead said is spot on. That story about the execution dream was really fascinating. I'd imagine that many people (I probalby would have too. lol) would jump to the conclusion that it was a precognitive dream but he thought about it scientificly and found something amazing.

True time dialation doesn't happen very much under normal circumstaces but I think it may still be posible. The brain doesn't have to think about the senses and the external world which helps free up the mind to create such detailed worlds in the first place so there probably is some room in there to squeeze in some faster processing. Would that really make the time perception speed up though? What about when a lucid dreamer perpously uses a time dialation technique, does that cause true time dialation or false memories. Also the most important thing seems to be to what extent would it be posible. We are just left with more questions than before that can't really be solved with out tests like LaBerge does. Maby some day we will have access to a sleep lab and tons of cool equipment and find out.

Because EEG activity shows normal brain wave frequency, it is false memories.

The only documented cases of REAL time-alteration are people in fight-or-flight situations and fight situations. Most notably military and drug abusers; huge doses of adrenaline can speed up the processing of the brain.

The brain can hold some 1,000,000,000,000,000 gigabytes or so of information, and some things can be rendered in real-time Think of it like having the graphics code, which takes up a few megabytes while your graphics card uses 1.2GB per second or so of rendering, creating the beautiful world of Skyrim, but not using up so much space.


Besides, one million billion gigabytes is a TON of space. In the past 11 months I've only filled up 1.1TB of a 1.36TB external hard drive, and 912GB of that is a backup of software I bought -- not really data that is used.

Well to actually have time go faster in the dream relative to "reality", information would have to move and be processed at the appropriate speed.

Say you dream what is 5mins here, to make this feel like 20mins, information would need to move 4 times quicker whilst you are inside the dream, then return to normal speed once back in base reality.

Given we are not rellying on the normal feed of data from the external surrounding, but rather the internal world, thus shaving off considerable lag time, possibly enough to "slow down time" to the extent of making the dream last years.


See, time dilation is about how fast you can see, which determines how long it "feels" time has passed.

This concept can be extrapolated into the real world, I call "base reality".

Imagine 2 people who live an equal amount of time measured. One guy processed information 2 times quicker than his peer, he see's and feels his surroundings twice as quickly. He is in affect paying attention to twice as much information as his peer is in the same amount of time. What feels like 80years to the average person will in effect feel like 160 years to the guy who percieves twice as fast.

Can you see how important improving your awareness becomes when you come to understand concepts like these?

I wouldn't imagine it to be impossible. Although a whole year seems to push it, I've had a 5 minute dream that seemed like a whole day. It's possible if the dream is like a film, with miniscule stuff skipped.

No Because:

1. Die of starvation
2. Die Of No Water
3. You can die if you stay still for a certain amount of hours

Originally Posted by Ermac

No Because:

1. Die of starvation
2. Die Of No Water
3. You can die if you stay still for a certain amount of hours

Winning quote.

/thread