Thread: Perception of Time experiments.

I never noticed Beyond Dreaming. Sounds fun...

Originally Posted by ThePieMan

At that point, reality wouldn't be enough to satisfy us. (Thats from inception). So under no circumstances should you have a lucid dream for that long, if it is even possible.

I think this would actually be an exciting experience. Simply because life is no longer so epic, it can fuel more interest. Happened to me from a year-long LD before. What you can't do in Lucid Dreams is learn what you wanted to. Do it. If you can't play guitar, go do it. In a lucid dream, learning guitar would be incredibly inaccurate and, as a musician, I can say not fun.

Plus, you can always look forward to another lifetime in 18 hours or so. It's almost like you're God. You live your day as a normal person, then you go live another life.

Originally Posted by carwashguy

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.

I highly disregard this theory because, well, my theory, which LaBerge actually states to believe in ETWOLD, is that much of dreams are created upon awakening. Whether it was during being woken up or during recall he did not state, but the latter sounds more likely.

These "year-long dreams" are simply memories that are created even though they may or may not have taken place. The brain fills in the gap between two events. Brains have insane processing capacity, and since they don't have to necessarily render it all at once, it's very likely. In my experience of recall, once I hit a scene, I then think of a word which sparks a still-image which sparks a scene. With these year-long dreams, I just go right thorugh it from still image to still image and if I take the effort remember the entire scene.

Originally Posted by tigerstar186

Only problem is, it wouldn't actually have hardships. You're lucid, and I doubt you'd have the patience to not skip the hardships with lucidity, and if you did you probably wouldn't needs to learn from the hardships in the first place.

That seems to be a matter of personality. I always have dreams that end in a life-death struggle. For instance, last night was a headcrab invasion. While I can't use that for my next bit, I'll use another one.

I had a shootout with some terrorists in a cafeteria once. I was in total control of the dream. After being shot, rather than just magically healing it as I did the others, I said "Hurts like a bitch, but let's see what it's like." and continued the course of the dream crippled. I woke up in about ten minutes so I can't say I wouldn't have skipped the months of healing.

Originally Posted by Stubert

I remember reading a thread a while back about someone who took themselves to a blank world with nothing but a clock in it and sat for hours to try and make lucids last longer. I think he said he could go in for months or years. I can't remember it too well though, wish I could find it now. :/

HERE'S THE LINK! http://www.dreamviews.com/f11/extrem...bility-106651/

and where the heck is Skullyy??

^wouldn't that be rather boring?

That's the point of it. He says that it's to not let the dream implode on itself just because it gets boring.

Originally Posted by fOrceez

That's the point of it. He says that it's to not let the dream implode on itself just because it gets boring.

Interesting. I've never had a boring LD though. Haha.

I'm wondering why no reply on my comments yet. People gone absent?

Originally Posted by jarrhead

That seems to be a matter of personality. I always have dreams that end in a life-death struggle. For instance, last night was a headcrab invasion. While I can't use that for my next bit, I'll use another one.

I had a shootout with some terrorists in a cafeteria once. I was in total control of the dream. After being shot, rather than just magically healing it as I did the others, I said "Hurts like a bitch, but let's see what it's like." and continued the course of the dream crippled. I woke up in about ten minutes so I can't say I wouldn't have skipped the months of healing.

Simply in agreement.

Wish that the Skully guy was still here..

Might try that one day, once I get pro as at Lucid Dreaming! xD

Originally Posted by SergSG

What if you had a lucid dream that seemed like a lifetime(literally) and because you were lucid, you fulfilled all your desires and fantasies. When you awaken from that dream would real life even be worth living anymore?

The thing is, you probably wont even remember the beginning of the lucid. That's why people say its important to work on dream recall. I've only had one pretty long chain of lucids, and I didn't even remember the first lucid I had that night, just a slight recall of it. My most memorable lucid was one where I became lucid at a beach at night and I did that lasso thing from Bruce almighty where he pulls the moon closer. But instead of it getting closer, the sun came up instead lol.

Originally Posted by NrElAx

The thing is, you probably wont even remember the beginning of the lucid. That's why people say its important to work on dream recall. I've only had one pretty long chain of lucids, and I didn't even remember the first lucid I had that night, just a slight recall of it. My most memorable lucid was one where I became lucid at a beach at night and I did that lasso thing from Bruce almighty where he pulls the moon closer. But instead of it getting closer, the sun came up instead lol.

yea you're probably right. I mean remembering a whole lifetime worth of a dream would take some superhuman dream recall

Originally Posted by SergSG

yea you're probably right. I mean remembering a whole lifetime worth of a dream would take some superhuman dream recall

I see what your saying though. People do fulfill some fantasies in lucids, but you have to keep good dream recall. But people do use lucids to help out their life, like myself who wants to use lucids to help my anxieties and become more outgoing. Im looking into acting a little. Just try and see if Like it, and I can use lucids to help out acting. You probably know about the benefits of lucids already.

Originally Posted by jarrhead

I highly disregard this theory because, well, my theory, which LaBerge actually states to believe in ETWOLD, is that much of dreams are created upon awakening. Whether it was during being woken up or during recall he did not state, but the latter sounds more likely.

Can you please tell me which section of EWLD you're referring to? I don't remember anything like that in EWLD. It seems inconsistent with his belief that eye movement (along with other bodily functions) tend to correspond with the dream as it's happening in the dream.

Originally Posted by Laberge

"The method of having lucid dreamers signal from the dream world by means of eye movements has demonstrated a strong relationship between the gazes of dreamers in the dream and their actual eye movements under closed lids.

Originally Posted by SergSG

yea you're probably right. I mean remembering a whole lifetime worth of a dream would take some superhuman dream recall

What if you have natural recall? That could make it interesting.

Originally Posted by dakotahnok

I think it was correct

Since people are talking about 50 year dreams and so on.

This has nothing to do with you post, but we have almost the same signature