Thread: Perception of Time experiments.

A person's "judgment" of time may be a better way to phrase it than to say his "perception" of time. When you ask two people how long they've been on lunch break, one might say an hour while another might say an hour and a half. This doesn't necessarily mean that the second person perceived an extra thirty minutes in the sense that he experienced the same lunch-eating phenomenon but at a 150% rate of slowdown. It may be that they both perceived the same amount of time and one may've simply misjudged how long it took.

For this reason, I like the way Laberge put it when he compared dream time with a movie. In the movie The Godfather, one scene we see Michael in Italy and the next time we see him, he has returned home. We don't actually see him take the bus to Pisa, then the train to Paris (and see him watch all the houses as he goes by), then the flight to America. We just fill in that stuff and assumed it happened. Should that happen in a dream, the dreamer might fill it in the same way and assume he spent days of travel between two separate dream events. He perceived thirty minutes, but judged far more than that.

As for these extreme year-to-hour anecdotes, they create some problems when you break it all down. According to Popular Science, your brain needs 0.1 calories per minute to stay alive. When you think harder, it'll burn 1.5 calories per minute. So, when a person says they spent a year in a dream, they're claiming they experienced a year's worth of perception--a years worth of utilizing their brain's resources to make sense of the dream around them, to move around it, to think about it, and to just live in it. They are claiming to have fit 8760 hours of mental processes into one hour. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they've only burnt the minimum of .1 calories per minute. In the alleged one year of dream time, their brain has burnt up (60m*24h*365d)*.1 = 52,560 calories! There's an estimated 3500 calories in a pound, so after one hour they've lost 15 pounds at a minimum (hell of a weight loss plan). That kind of rapid weight loss sounds dangerous, not to mention absurd. Do these dreamers wake up emaciated?

That doesn't even mention how your eye movements in REM sleep likely matches how your "dream eyes" move, as is alluded to in EWLD. If your dream eye movements match your real eye movements, then one cannot move slow while the other moves fast. In other words, you couldn't fit in twice the number of "left-right" eye movements in a dream without moving your real eyes, too. Wouldn't year's worth of eye movements crammed into one hour likely cause damage if not blindness (not to mention more calories)? This alone should be enough reason for skepticism. But really, just look at the evidence. I'm not saying it's impossible, but right now we have Laberge's experiments and anecdotal evidence in favor of equal time perception, but only anecdotal evidence in favor of distorted time perception. Believe me. I'll be the first one celebrating if one day we find out it's possible, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw all rational thinking aside in the meanwhile.