Thread: Stay in a dream for eternity!

I see that the main things holding people back from doing this is that is it possible? And that there are families that they will miss or things that they want to see in this world. It is interesting how both of these issues get solved at once. Basically if you can stay in a dream forever, then where is the "real" world to wake you? How is there a "real" world if they do not wake you up.

And if they really miss their families, then how long will they miss it? for 100 years, of course this is because they only live for that long. And it is just idiotic to miss things when you can just create them in your dream world. Another issue is which is real? there are posts claiming that this world is real and that is fake which is not even considered a theory but an opinion.

Err, didn't it take only 1 night for the guy to sleep for 100 years? Okay possibly a bit more but still, it's just that your inner time stops and the dream lasts a lot more but with the same time spent dreaming IRL.
Ofcourse it's just my opinion..

Not your opinion, QuietFox. That it all happened in one physical reality night was indeed the context of this "100 year dream." This is more about experiencing a vastly expanded stretch of "subjective" time than sleeping through real time or changing time itself, which for me are respectively undesirable and impossible.

I see, well if one would achieve that level of dream control, I think every lucid you get now and then extend to 100 years- hell even 100 hours would be plenty.

I have heard that when going at a faster speed, that the light of the time measurer takes longer to reach you thus a "perception" of slowed time, but the time is still the same. So are we saying that we are going at a speed light in our dreams and what is that correlated to a time measurer? And laberge has studied that the time difference is not really true in a "dream" and "real life" but are the same so how is it possible that he stayed there for 100 years, did the other world he came from just froze or gone extinct for that to be possible? I only see those two possibilities.

And dont forget who you are in your own dream world. You are God in your dreamworld. So basically you become God if you are able to do this.

Well, I would for sure. There's nothing I can't do in dream, that I can do IWL...

Stay in a dream for ever ? Nah, that would actually, after some years, be worst than death. I mean, forever !? Like ever and ever and ever !? Unable to get back to reality !? I would hate it so much ! I' m not saying that because it' s not reality, it' s more ... you are stuck in a dream, for ever, without any hope of getting out of it, without even being able to kill yourself !

Oh and I've thought about it a lot of time : if you ever get to be in a dream forever, that would be like sopping the real time ! If it was possible, than that would, like, create a new universe, because you will, a one time or another, wake up, or at least die ! So there would be one universe with the you in the dream forever, and another with the real you, that would wake up normally ... Which means that while spending a lot of time, maybe days or week in a dream can probably be done, staying forever is another thing.

I would, though, spend some days in the dream, takes some vacations ...

^^ Though this thread is long lost to my memory, I believe we concluded that this "forever" dream would take place in one waking reality night, so you're not stuck anywhere, in terms of physical life. Also, for what it's worth, "forever" implies that the dream is without end, so death would be irrelevant, and the dream world would become reality.

Again, I could be wrong; it's been over a year since I looked at this thread, and I didn't feel like rereading it...

Originally Posted by Higat

Stay in a dream for ever ? Nah, that would actually, after some years, be worst than death. I mean, forever !? Like ever and ever and ever !? Unable to get back to reality !? I would hate it so much ! I' m not saying that because it' s not reality, it' s more ... you are stuck in a dream, for ever, without any hope of getting out of it, without even being able to kill yourself !

Oh and I've thought about it a lot of time : if you ever get to be in a dream forever, that would be like sopping the real time ! If it was possible, than that would, like, create a new universe, because you will, a one time or another, wake up, or at least die ! So there would be one universe with the you in the dream forever, and another with the real you, that would wake up normally ... Which means that while spending a lot of time, maybe days or week in a dream can probably be done, staying forever is another thing.

I would, though, spend some days in the dream, takes some vacations ...

If you messed with your perception of time and memory, than yes, you could probably make a dream that seemed to last for eons and have memories of all the events that occurred, but I don't see any reason why you should want to stay forever. Eventually you'll be tempted to come back here and post about it.

I agree it could last millions of years and all , but forever ?
I really don' t think so and here is why :

As you said, in the dream, you would never die, but in reality, you will !
See, while your mind will be in the dream forever, there will eventually be a ( real ) time where the dream will naturally end; that' s because you don' t just stop time in real life.
But your mind, your consciousness will be in the dream forever, for you in the dream, you won' t wake up.
So how do you wake up ( or die ) in reality if your consciousness is in a dream forever ?
You don' t , that' s impossible !

That a great example of paradox.

Lol I read myself it kinda looks like nonsense, anyway, I hope you get what I am saying

^^ Just to stretch the paradox, what if this "forever" existed only in the dream, and only within the 45 minutes or so of the physical reailty REM cycle?

Why not? We're completely bypassing reality here, and this agrees with the OP anyway, so maybe the point of view that if "infinite" time dilation is possible in a LD, it can certainly all be done within one REM period!

... might as well go all the way with this!

How about the others, in real life ?

They are going to wake up, them, and they are maybe going to see you awaking, in reality, you dream from their point of view would be as short as the other ones, so in reality it ends ...
Only you are in the dream for ever. Forever implicates that you never wake up, ( I understand that it' s your perception of time that you change ) but eventually you will, though, in real life.
So tell me this : How in hell can you never wake up in the dream world, if at one point you WILL wake up in the real world ?

I don't think that finite amount of time can be dilated into an infinity. But i understand what is asked here. If we put reality, universe, science and other people aside and only thing that exist is me and my dream, would i want it to be like that? Probably not. Infinity is way to long to be alone,or with just the projections of my subconscious.

^^ Well, if you're truly staying in the dream forever, then waking up would not be an issue because that day, from your perspective, will never come. But let's say it does...

Maybe, if you're in your dream for a very long time (subjectively, of course; this whole thing would be happening during one normal REM cycle), and know it's going to end with waking up eventually, you might tend to think of that waking back into your physical life and time as a death of sorts -- and it would be, because you're leaving the dream life that you have made your own for years, centuries, or longer, only to return to a physical life that you no doubt have long since forgotten. That return would certainly be like a rebirth after the "death" of waking, I think.

Of course it must be said again that all this is based on an extremely fanciful premise...

... From your perspective, you won' t wake up. But you will from other' s point of views ... But never mind.

I guess the "rebirth" after waking up is why I would never try more than weeks in a dream, if I could .

Originally Posted by Higat

... From your perspective, you won' t wake up. But you will from other' s point of views ...

From others' points of view, your "forever" was but one REM cycle.

So, when you emerge from what to you was an eons-long existence in your dream universe to this "afterlife" by waking up naturally into a long-forgotten physical reality, others will just see you rise from a normal night's sleep.

Of course, those others will be confused when they also see you've apparently forgotten who they all are, or where you are, or what you look like, etc., because you haven't been there in, well, forever.

I guess the "rebirth" after waking up is why I would never try more than weeks in a dream, if I could .

Limiting yourself to a few days or weeks at a time might be a good way to balance both worlds ... you won't have forever, but you will still be able to live another complete life in your own universe without losing track of your physical life... probably better than subjecting your physical body (and family & friends) to the pain and confusion of returning/dying after "forever."

All this, of course, depends on whether a dreamer actually can infinitely dilate his perception of time, and I for one have yet to hear a believable account of this miracle.

Originally Posted by Sageous

So, when you emerge from what to you was an eons-long existence in your dream universe to this "afterlife" by waking up naturally into a long-forgotten physical reality, others will just see you rise from a normal night's sleep.

Here !
So do you agree that while it is possible ( but very unlikely ) to have billions and billions of years in a dream, an infinite amount of time is not ?

To answer the OP’s question .

Yes definitely without a doubt but it would have to be eternity , I wouldn’t want to wake up from years of lucid dream to the waking life it would be way to depressing for me . Even though I’m not complaining about my current life.

For the people who say the dream is fake , maybe scientifically even if that’s the case but I’ve had lucid dreams where I can clearly say it felt no different to waking life , I could even say its better as everything is enhance visually and emotionally.

I love my family to bits , but I can replicate that in my dreams . I’m sure after a while of dreaming you’ll learn to accept and adapt to the concept and live with it , just like the same way you would accept something in real life.

And NO I would not get bored there are endless possibilities in a dream , even having endless amounts of money on earth would be nothing compared to the things you could do in a lucid dream.

Sorry, Higat, I missed your post:

Originally Posted by Higat

So do you agree that while it is possible ( but very unlikely ) to have billions and billions of years in a dream, an infinite amount of time is not ?

Though I think that if you get to the billions and billions of years stage, "infinite" would become a meaningless term, yes, I do agree: In the context of what I was saying, there would have to eventually be an end to your "endless" dream because your body is bound to return you to the waking world after your night's sleep.

And for what it's worth, infinity works in both directions; since your dream had a beginning (when you first entered REM), by definition it cannot be infinite. Infinity knows no end or beginning.

Originally Posted by tekkendreams

To answer the OP’s question .

Yes definitely without a doubt but it would have to be eternity , I wouldn’t want to wake up from years of lucid dream to the waking life it would be way to depressing for me . Even though I’m not complaining about my current life.

For the people who say the dream is fake , maybe scientifically even if that’s the case but I’ve had lucid dreams where I can clearly say it felt no different to waking life , I could even say its better as everything is enhance visually and emotionally.

I love my family to bits , but I can replicate that in my dreams . I’m sure after a while of dreaming you’ll learn to accept and adapt to the concept and live with it , just like the same way you would accept something in real life.

And NO I would not get bored there are endless possibilities in a dream , even having endless amounts of money on earth would be nothing compared to the things you could do in a lucid dream.

Very well said!

That you would literally be in your own universe (as its god, BTW), it does make sense that this independent, unique universe ought not end. It is, after all, a universe; that's what they do.

After reading your post I must revisit the response to Higat as I was thinking too linearly: An eternity (or rather an infinite amount of time) in a dream could be possible, given that you will be existing in a separate universe, where "forever" could be as much of a given as anything else.

Yes, your physical body in this universe will wake up normally, but it would do so without the "You" living eternally in that dream. If your dreaming Self is in an eternal situation, it would never encounter that moment of waking, because your reality would be encased, fully and eternally, in one 45-minute REM cycle.

And, because that eternal existence would be completely separate from your waking-life existence, the newly awake physical You would have no conscious memory of the eternal world your mind and body just hosted (universes are cool that way). Who knows? maybe we all strike off into new eternal lives every night!

I'm rambling and not making sense, so I'll stop; just wanted to make that small correction.

It seems to me that dreaming is at least partially dependent on the physical body, and that time in a dream is at least partially dependent on time in the physical body. Biochemical reactions in the brain are involved in the dream, and you can only do so much before the necessary chemicals run out and you have to wake up and go eat.

I also question whether anyone's lucid dream is as rich in detail as waking life. Yes it can be very very vivid, often more vivid than waking life, and the thoughts and emotions can be stronger, and the intuitions can be more interesting. And you can have cool experiences which are difficult or impossible during waking life, such as being able to see an object from several directions at once. And you can have weird experiences with time, where a lot of subjective experience seems to be compressed down to a few seconds of external clock time. But does the dream world contain the full volume of detail as the waking world? I don't think its even remotely close. Suppose, for instance, that you knew how to solve systems of differential equations while awake. Could you do that while asleep? I doubt that you could. You could pretend you're doing it, and you might even get a relevant insight, but you can't actually do the details. But lets suppose you could do it. Could you write a computer program in a dream which could run and find you the answer to a physics problem which does not yet have a known answer? No you can not, you can only pretend, you do not have resources like that in a dream. If I were to give you a real waking life problem to solve, you would not be able to find a real answer in the dream. If the dream seems less limited than waking life, I think its because its so limited that it doesn't even occur to you recognize the limitations.

(Also, if you love someone, you want good things for them irrespective of what you experience. You would not be happy replacing them with a dream substitute unless you knew that your other, prior family was doing OK outside of the dream. Or if you would be happy in that way, then I think that its the experience of your family that you love, and that you will quickly betray and abandon them in the pursuit of a better experience if the opportunity presents itself, if you can find a way to rationalize it and forget it so that it doesn't trouble your conscience. Even supposing that the waking life dream has no higher reality than any other dream, the waking life dream-people still exist when you aren't thinking about them and still need to be cared for.)

^^ I find myself agreeing with all your statements, Shadowofwind, especially the parenthetic bit at the end; but not in the context of this thread (at least from my perspective). This is for two reasons:

First, I make these suppositions as a thought experiment premised on full-throttle fantasy. Spending more than real time in a dream, much less "billions and billions" of years, is highly unlikely -- mostly for reasons you and others (including myself, I think) have already stated, primarily because consciousness must assume the passage of "real" time whether we like it or not. So, aside from small changes caused by perception-altering things like boredom or excitement, LD'er's are not going to see real changes in time in their dreams (and yes, note that most reported weeks or years-long dreams were NLD's, which could relate more to how they were remembered than lived). This was an exercise in imagination, I think; nothing more... unless of course in NLD's we are witnessing the fact that there truly is no such thing as time and we really are all living forgotten lifetimes every night!

Second, my suggestion was that these very long adventures would take place in just one REM cycle, so your physical body would be unaffected by your journey, and your loved ones would not notice your long absence.

Regarding your suggestion that the richness of waking life far exceeds the potential richness of dreaming life: By real measures, that is absolutely true -- the waking world offers much more than even the most astonishingly imaginative dreamer can imagine, the greatest of these offerings being surprise. But what about by the unreal measures we mention here? I have to believe that if a person were to enjoy godlike powers for billions of years, he would eventually establish a reality that imagines on its own, offering, eventually, all the diversity and surprise of his waking life -- perhaps even a novel functional math system. Indeed, I would imagine that it would require just a few thousand years for the pretending to become a thing of the past, overtaken by the resources you've been compiling for centuries. Remember that we're talking about time-spans that exceed the evolution of life on earth -- surely something new could be invented in that much time!

Finally, regarding loved ones: This bit is a real problem, because there may never come a time when you can successfully produce truly lovable DC's -- the complexity and imagination involved in producing a sprite who is somehow not you seems impossibly staggering, but perhaps once your world begins producing surprises on its own, then thinking, feeling people might be a side-effect of its creation... this seems a stretch, but overreaching is the theme here (and come to think of it, isn't that the basic theme of most creation mythology?).

Also, assuming a dream-sharing friendly cosmic consciousness exists, if you have unlimited personal time to explore your own universe, what's to stop you from exploring the rest of them? Who knows? Your waking-life loved ones might become fond memories as you develop new relationships with other independent entities who also have little respect for physical time and space!

Maybe some time in the future I will decide to enter into an infinite dream. Then after many eons maybe I will have gained so much mental ability that I can create not just a universe but THE universe. So perhaps all of creation as we know it exists purely because my future self dreamed it and you are all a part of my subconscious like super advanced DC.

Or maybe someone or something already did something like that.. and that is why we all exist now..
I wonder what would happen if God decided to stop dreaming and wake up.