Top down dreams, concurrent dreams and time loops

I was reading a thread about 'time' in dreams, and I'd like to discuss this more :)

I just wondered if anyone else experiences dreams from outside of them and outside of time?

I'm just wondering what your understand it of it and if you have drawn the same conclusions I have, it's funny cause my childhood nightmares seem to have been built on all my life to lead me to my current grasp of this (I'm sure it will change)

I'd experienced dreams running concurrently before - were I was split in two and had 2 separate dreams, I woke up with the memory of being split and the 2 dreams also.

I've also now started to have dreams were they are running back and forth in both directions (so hard to describe) almost like an overlay of 2 of the same film running both backwards and forwards. Or watch the dream from above a bit like a game in 'god mode'

I've also started to hop out of the dream into a place were I can see & influence many dreams at once

Just one dream at a time for me. In the past, there is always a song in parallel with the dream, but the song has a symbolic connection to the meaning of a dream. Occasionally I'll get two different songs going at once, but not usually, and they're not equally in the foreground at the same time.

Previously I had one carefully scripted dream per night, like playing a movie, but those have gone away. I'm usually not 'in' a dream in the sense of having a body in it, so I don't think the 'god mode' distinction quite applies in my case. Off hand I can't think of anything running backwards. Only a few times in my life have I ever dreamed the same thing twice, and each time there was a clear reason for it, in terms of expressing the meaning of the dream.

Interesting Shadowofwind :)

I think I've experienced the same as you with a 'song' Is it like were a song is suddenly playing. Then when you are awake and look up lyrics or think more about it it seems to have a definate specific meaning to the dream?

Do you experience these time splits and slips in LD's, or NLD's, Dreammouse?

The reason I ask is that NLD's tend to be remembered differently -- and much more hazily -- than LD's. LD's are recorded in short-term memory like any other interesting conscious event might be, so you can have, upon waking, a decent record of where you were during the dream. But NLD's are generally not stored at all, so their record tends to be whatever you could manage to recover upon waking.... and that recovery can be haphazard at best, even if you think you're remembering everything clearly (also, when remembering NLD's you might tend to "fill in the blanks" with things that make the story work, but might never have happened at all in the dream, which is pretty common but I don't think matters here). So, if you were not lucid, there is a chance that the contents of several dreams that occurred independently and in their own time might have been jumbled together and -- in your mind's effort to make sense of it all -- were sort of "layered" on top of each other, giving the impression that you were moving back and forth among several dreams, all at once.

I've had this experience of "layering" many times with NLD's, and would describe the experience itself pretty much the same way you did. However, I have also had more than a few LD's where two or more separate dream plots were unfolding at the same time. I only experienced one plot at a time, but I knew during the dream that another plot was unfolding, and could move to it simply by adjusting my attention, and when I arrived its plot would have progressed, implying things had happened while I was away. I'm not sure this is the same as what you are describing, but it seems similar. The difference may be that, perception-wise, there was only one dream at a time going on, and I never watched, say, a split screen of two or more dreams happening at once (though it wasn't for trying: whenever I attempted this, the two plots -- the splits -- would inevitably and instantly link up into a single stream of imagery.

Also, in full disclosure, I really think that we only dream one thing at a time, and tend to experience them in the same linear manner that we do in waking-life. However, I've also said more than once that time does not exist, especially in dreams, so there is certainly a chance that whay you are describing could really be happening... how's that for ambiguity?!

So: if these were NLD's there may be another explanation beside stepping outside of time to explain what happened, Sure, it's a more mundane explanation, but one worth considering.

Heya Thanks for that Sageous, That was the thread I was interested in but I don't have the necessary permission for that board :)

I'm fairly open to any possibility :) In answer to if they are LD's or NDL's I think a bit of both.

For instance - when I blew myself out of a wall in a dream, I knew I was looking threw a hole into were I 'had' been dreaming.... I don't remember a point in the dream were I suddenly became lucid though oh, actually... I do- it was when I stopped controlling the dream and all the DC's turned round and looked to were my consciousness seemed to be located (I had no body but was up in the 'sky' above a town) the DC's melted like wax and I popped out of the wall into a void type of place... from there I started accidentally making dream words in pockets in the void. I sometimes end up in a void observing dreams going on in tunnels???? It's really hard to try and describe as very fractal looking, but I do often opt to go back non LD into on of the 'tunnels'

MY LD and NLD's are fairly similar in terms of flying/teleporting and manifesting stuff so the line between is quite vague it's never a surprise when I realise I'm dreaming and I have fairly good recall of both types.


The concurrent dream was again a bit of both... I was in NLD when a disembodied voice that I recognise and often speaks to me butted in -making me lucid. 'She asked, do you want to continue with this?' (I was being a real bitch in the dream) I snapped back at the voice 'yes, I do!' Voice answerers 'Ok, well we have to split your soul in 2'

After that there was a massive 'POP' and I ended up in 2 NLD's running what seemed like - side by side. In one I was a junkie selling heroin in a horrible tenement block and in the other I'm a gardener in a beautiful garden looking after huge colourful poppy's. I certainly felt like I was in both dreams at the same time - It felt like I woke up from them both together thinking 'WOW, what just happened' -- but it's possible they happened at different times.

Over this last weekend I've been dreaming of being more than one DC at the same time - I'm like a mesh overlay that can feel each characters emotions and motivations I've woken up in the morning feeling like my minds been exploded... as I'm looking out of lots of sets of eyes at once and can see events happening from different view points. I can't adequately put it into words, it could be like you explain that I'm experiencing them one at a time (flicking quickly between them) and my brains mashing them together in an attempt to make sense of it.

Pretty cool topic, and that sounds like a very interesting experience. Myself I don't remember having "seen" two dreams occuring at the same time, but what Sageous is describing sounds very familiar. There are times where I am aware that I have several dream bodies experiencing different things at the same time, and I can switch inbetween them when I feel like it.

Oh and I don't get it often, but I love getting theme music to my dreams :)

I usually get the same as you MilkyDance. Where I know I'm all the people in the dream and can swap between which DC I 'play' Sometimes I can be lots at the same time, I usually 3 at once though.

lol last week I was a tree, badger, Hawk and a dryad type thing all at the same time :P Dreams are fun!