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

To the best of what's actually been verified - that I know of - we can simulate the feeling of living years, in a dream. However, this simulation is caused by 'lapses' in dream time (basically hopping from moment to moment, in a sequence that makes it seem like years have passed - kind of like when you try to recall the past few years of your life, and you remember it by individual moments, with gaps in between).

@Oneironaut so it's possible to basically live in a dream for years and wake up back in reality in the morning like nothing happened?

I'd add to what Oneironaut said in that some of tha gaps can seem filled in by false memories that make seem more consistant. It is posible for your perception of time to actualy go slower but the limits of it are still unknown. It has been proven though that in a typical dream time is perceived at about the same speed as in waking life.

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

To the best of what's actually been verified - that I know of - we can simulate the feeling of living years, in a dream. However, this simulation is caused by 'lapses' in dream time (basically hopping from moment to moment, in a sequence that makes it seem like years have passed - kind of like when you try to recall the past few years of your life, and you remember it by individual moments, with gaps in between).

Exactly. Plus.. a two year long rem period..? I thought this forum was past the inception stage

Originally Posted by afnan

Exactly. Plus.. a two year long rem period..? I thought this forum was past the inception stage

The time dialation in inception is based on reality. I have actualy heard multiple first hand stories of people having dreams that seem to last months or years. One of them was a good friend of mine who is a reliable guy.

Originally Posted by LucidDreams17

@Oneironaut so it's possible to basically live in a dream for years and wake up back in reality in the morning like nothing happened?

Not necessarily. More acurately, it's possible to live a few dozen minutes in a dream, but have the dream skip from moment to moment, so that - in the timeline - it makes it seem as if years have passed. But, no, you wouldn't actually feel like you've 'lived out' a full few years.

It's like when you're watching a movie, and the movie timeline spans two years. You don't actually feel like you've spent two years watching the movie, but you still got 2 years worth of (relevant) story.

I think it's quite possible.. I mean in our minds, we can do ANYTHING. Our minds have the potential to expand time in a dream. So why not expand it to a few days, months, even years..especially if we're consciously controlling it.

Originally Posted by LucidDreams17

I think it's quite possible.. I mean in our minds, we can do ANYTHING.

There is a difference between 'doing anything' within the dream state, and doing 'anything', with implications on physical impossibility. People often use the 'we can do anything in a dream' to believe that they can see the future, or communicate with Gods, or travel to other dimensions and turn into werewolves and things. People tend to take the word 'anything' a little to literally sometimes, I think.

this is intresting topic, I believe that it is posisble to have a dream and feel like if a couple of years has passed in a single moment, flowing seamlessly. I have had dreams which generated the feeling that years has passed and I have become an old man, but I know that is impossible and a false reality. Oneironaut I agree with you 100%.

Have you ever when to sleep and feel like you only took a short nap but in reality work up the next morning or have you ever felt like you slept through the entire night, only to look at the clock and realize that you only slept for one hour.

Hmm, Up until last month I would have agreed to the sensation or feeling of time, specially when false memories are included. I have had dreams (not LDs) where I literally had completely different time lines- 1 was an alternate childhood to my actual one where I visited an old farmhouse which was my birth place (in the dream ) and was able to recall and reminsce on many past childhood experiences (completely different from the waking world) and in another dream I did a similiar thing where I sat and chatted with 2 friends about many detailed (but completely false) adolescent incidences. This was so utterly real for me that when I woke it really shook me the depth and intensity of these emotional memories. It certainly got me thinking on the whole parallel universe issue.

However last month I did have a Cobb style dream. Where after an emotional breakup with my wife I wandered off into a desert where I spent over 30 years during which the tiny sleepy dust covered settlement that I visited for supplies slowly involved in to a large modern city (think LA in Bladerunner) where finally as I was dying I re encountered my wife and incidently became lucid for a very short period before waking. But what stood out was the eternal slowness of time as I trudged across the desert re examining again and again where I had gone wrong in life and how this was literally limbo of sand and dust. It was my "punishment" as it were to suffer every individual second of those many endless years. And the people I met during that time slowly helped me to reintegrate myself through a series of particular actions,and the things they explained to me.
I really DID feel that imense stretch of time.
IMO The higher self, source, subconcious or what ever you want to call it uses the dream plane to comunicate with us. If it can create a seemingly physical world for our minds while we are dreaming, the notion of time can be equally molded / stretched / shortened to provide the necessary backdrop for these experiences. I dont believe there are any limitations to what it can do.

Y'know, I think that it could be possible to spend a long time in a dream, maybe not a year, but a day or two. If your brain sped up the events in your dream, to where one real minute equals one dream hour, then that could work. Sort of like Narnia. :p

Originally Posted by Twisty

If your brain sped up the events in your dream, to where one real minute equals one dream hour, then that could work.

Exactly, and this is pretty much the premise that most people use, when wondering whether we can spend years in a dream - the whole 'time dilation' thing.

But, the way I see it, time dilation in a dream works much like it does when you're in waking life. Some things can happen in your waking life, which makes your brain perceive that time is happening either faster or more slowly than normal, however, even with this being the case, it is not a extreme case of time dilation. It's a perceived case, where one looks back and says 'well that seemed to have lasted much longer than it actually did,' but when it comes to, say, turning a single minute into a full hour, that's a tall order to fill. I think people get caught up in the mysterious nature of dreams, so the subjective experience makes them come out of it saying "OMG, THAT WAS A WHOLE YEAR", but what they experienced wasn't a full year. It didn't even actually feel like a full year. But the images and the timeline were cut up so convincingly so that what seemed like it might have been a much longer dream than normal actually lasted much, much longer.

Time dilation - even while awake - can slow down a 95mph fastball so that you're able to hit it with a tiny wooden bat, but it can't slow it down enough to where you can stop, mentally review all the items on your grocery list, and then still have time to hit the ball.

I agree with Oneironaut. It's not physically possible to spend more time in a dream than the length of one's REM periods, let alone stretch that time out to a year! You could create false memories in the dream where it seems like you've been in that dream for a long period of time, but it's mostly just lapses in time (made possible with dream control by teleporting to new situations or locations) that create that illusion.

Time is such a difficult concept to grasp. When on psycho-active drugs, one typically feels an effect of time dilation because their mind is enhanced and the passage of the moment seems much slower than the passage of clock-time compared to normal. But then it doesn't matter because though it feels like time is an illusion things don't change in this state at the rate you'd expect, that happens according to clock-time, locked to patterns and cycles.

There are essentially two ways to experience much more time in the dream than actually passed. To feel "years" one can only perceive an increased passage of clock-time according to the size of the time-line that passes, like O said.

The second, one can feel like they spent an eternity in the moment by opening up to higher levels of awareness.

Originally Posted by Omnis Dei

Time is such a difficult concept to grasp. When on psycho-active drugs, one typically feels an effect of time dilation because their mind is enhanced and the passage of the moment seems much slower than the passage of clock-time compared to normal. But then it doesn't matter because though it feels like time is an illusion things don't change in this state at the rate you'd expect, that happens according to clock-time, locked to patterns and cycles.

There are essentially two ways to experience much more time in the dream than actually passed. To feel "years" one can only perceive an increased passage of clock-time according to the size of the time-line that passes, like O said.

The second, one can feel like they spent an eternity in the moment by opening up to higher levels of awareness.

I totally agree. IMO it is wrong to view the subconcious, the source or whatever from the physical linear limitations of our base existence. You cannot compare timeframes to a state with there is NO time, where the concept of past, present and future do not exist. So the subconcious when it presents these basic dreamscapes to us can do what ever it likes with the idea of time irrespective whether we are lucid or not.

It is like watching Harry Potter. The movie takes place over an entire year but it only last like 2 hours. Like Oneironaut pointed out you basically skip everything. So you don't eat, sleep or go to the bathroom and all travel is nearly instant. Dreams are good at cutting stuff out. If you step out you front door and into a shopping mall an hour away, you don't even realize you teleported that far.

I have never had a LD that lasted hours, days, weeks, months or years ... nor do I believe they can. For me LD time is equal to real world time.

speaking of inception...has anyone lucid dreamed while lucid dreaming?

or is that also hollywood pepperoni

Well LD time isn't equal to real world time. Time isn't even such an mundane concept for it to be possible to call a second always a second. Time is relative. Now you have to understand what relative actually means. Time passes depending on circumstances.
Now to put it simply, taking all things about reality, like physics and the concept of humans: It is theoretically possible to spend years in dreams. And it is at least practically possible to spend more time within dreams, than you spend dreaming lying in your bed. Talking without gaps and false memories.

To make it even more beautiful there's such a thing as percepted time and passed time. Both are relative, even to each other.
Then what is a second? It is an amount of time relative to our earth drawing circles about the sun.
Percepted time: Is relative to each individual human. Let's take human A and B as an example. A processes information twice as fast as B. Both will feel one second of the real time to be as well one second of their percepted time. A percepted second of B however will be twice as long as an percepted second of A. Likewise a percepted second of A will be half of the percepted second of B. And now what's important: if A processes information twice as fast while dreaming compared to waking life, he will experience 4 hours of dreaming within 2 hours of sleeping. Now what actually happens is even far more complicated, this is just to put it simple.
Passed time: Now how is this relative? Time changes with speed, the faster you are in relation to something else the slower your time will pass in relation to theirs. That likewise goes relative to the speed of light. How old do you think is a photon after travelling for 30 years? Exactly 0 seconds, and no moment more.

You can spend 1 hour as: 1 hour passed time and 1 hour percepted time with 1 passed second per percepted second. Or as 30 minutes passed time and 1 hour percepted time with 2 percepted seconds per 1 passed second, making things around you seem 50% slower. Or 2 hours passed time and 1 hour percepted time, making everything around you going twice as fast. Depending on how fast you currently process information -you maybe guessed it- relative to your average speed.
Not to mention that you have both "variants" of time within dreams, further inertvining with the "real" time.

So it is very well possible to spend long times within dreams. Given your brain processes time differently within dreams. If that's not the case you can say LD time is equal to real world time, for you that is.

Hmm a friend of mine says she can spend a week in one of her dreams. It's awkward to wake up afterwards. I don't know why she would lie about a thing like that though. Seems unreasonable to me.
Maybe the amount of time you experience when spending time in your dreams is the amount of time you want it to be. Expectations and attitude makes a big difference on everything concerning Lucid Dreaming. If it contains false memories and gaps is irrelevant since it still feels like a very long time when experiencing it.

Originally Posted by StaySharp

Well LD time isn't equal to real world time.

It's indeed a wonderful and mysterious idea, but unfortunately there are not a lot of facts to back it up. Sure, we all say that 'everything is relative', and what seems like X amount of time to one person can seem like Y amount of time to someone else. However, there has never been verification of time being stretched that drastically, that I can recall. It's very easy to say 'well one person can experience time slower than someone else', which is true, but when you start trying to quantify it and say that "it's possible that one second to someone can equal an hour to someone else" (etc), then you are getting into the realm of making assumptions, or trying to use unconfirmed logic to support an idea that (theoretically) could be possible, however is not probable.

As Dr. Stephen LaBerge says, dream time does not pass all that much faster/slower than 'real world' time. There are tricks and perceptive fallacies that can make the passage of time seem different from one person to another - true - but to assume that it is possible to spend A Full Year in a dream simply doesn't have any scientific basis to it (unless maybe that person's brain has some kind of damage to it, where the passage of time is abnormally skewed).

I've had dreams that seemed 'incredibly long', and that are 'weird to wake up from', because it seems like you've been away for such a long time, but even when recalling those dreams, I will only have a couple of hundred words for a dream entry. Why? Because there are so many different details that simply do not exist. You know that living a year in a dream entails having 300+ dinners? Think you actually dreamed about that many dishes? How about lunches. Trips to the bathroom (as someone said)? Trips to the grocery store? Etc.

Even when people are insane, it's not very often that you hear of time dilation like that. A year is a long time to condense into a matter of minutes, and even with time dilation being a real phenomenon (and it is), I think it's a bit of a stretch of the imagination (albeit understandable, since dreams are 'so mysterious') to assume that it is possible to fit an actual year or more worth of experiences - even in a dream - into a few minutes of sleep.

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

"it's possible that one second to someone can equal an hour to someone else"

Um did I say that anywhere? At least be sure that wasn't what I was talking about.

Originally Posted by Oneironaut

I think it's a bit of a stretch of the imagination (albeit understandable, since dreams are 'so mysterious') to assume that it is possible to fit an actual year or more worth of experiences - even in a dream - into a few minutes of sleep.

I as well. That's why I said theoretically possible, not practical. It might work under specific circumstances like an ridiculous fast brain, including the proper setup.
The only thing I claimed to be practically possible is to spend more time within a dream than sleeping in reality, and be it just 60 minutes of sleep with 61 minutes of dreams.

Just think of it as Narnia. When you enter the wardrobe, it is possible to spend a very long time, days or even years in a matter of seconds. It only dawns on you that such little time has passed once you're out of the wardrobe and back to reality.

Originally Posted by StaySharp

Um did I say that anywhere? At least be sure that wasn't what I was talking about.

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