A Question about time in lucid dreams

**Cethulsus** · 01-02-2011 10:50 PM

does anyone know how long a minute in a dream is in the real world? This would be useful because you can figure out how long an LD can be in a night. I've been wondering about this for a while.
Plus, what is the longest dream you've ever had?

Thx

**zebrah** · 01-03-2011 02:39 PM

The time in dreams is varriable. The longest I've had was about 30min dream time. Although some have lived lifetimes.

**Cethulsus** · 01-03-2011 10:51 PM

Originally Posted by Zebrah

The time in dreams is varriable. The longest I've had was about 30min dream time. Although some have lived lifetimes.

Cool. Thanks. I couldn't imagine living a lifetime in a dream, though, I'd feel so strange when I woke up...

**zebrah** · 01-03-2011 11:34 PM

Yeah I'd imagine feeling very weird. I feel strang enough after a long dream. But even days or weeks would be crazy.

**dakotahnok** · 01-03-2011 11:43 PM

Dr. Stephen laberge reasearched this and found that time in dreams are the same as time outside of dreams.

**zebrah** · 01-04-2011 12:20 AM

Originally Posted by dakotahnok

Dr. Stephen laberge reasearched this and found that time in dreams are the same as time outside of dreams.

But perception of time differs. Just like IRL how somethings seem to last forever. But in dreams there are no clocks to compare the time. So in the end time is how you perceive it in dreams.

**dakotahnok** · 01-04-2011 12:43 AM

Yeah but that's very minor. If a dream last 10 minutes it will feel like 10 minutes give or take. If your having fun it will feel like less if your having a boring time then it will feel longer.

**zebrah** · 01-04-2011 12:55 AM

Laberge isn't like a dream god. His word isn't law. If you are trying to keep track of time then yeah it's going to be similar to the real world. Dreams are so shapeable and changeable listening to one side of the story is bad.

**dakotahnok** · 01-04-2011 11:22 PM

He proved it scientifically. You arecdefinitly not the person to talk against laberge's word

**JesterKK** · 01-05-2011 12:38 AM

that's right its been researched by more people than laberge. time in dream roughly passes at the same speed as waking life. The way people have dreams that feel like they last a very long time is using incomplete scenes, shorter days and nights, longer REM periods and continuing the same dream in different REM periods. Another way is making up occurrences that happened in the dream world which you haven't directly experienced. This way you can believe that a lot has happened somewhere in the dream world and it would have taken hours for such events to transpire, but it only takes a second to believe that all of that happened. It's pretty much like false memories except it occurs during lucidity.

**zebrah** · 01-05-2011 01:38 AM

Yeah I understand the actual time but IMO the subjective time is more important. But now I really want to read some lucidity related scientific papers.

**lotsofface** · 01-05-2011 01:45 AM

Laberge's experiment worked like this. Seeing as one can correlate physical eye movements with those in a dream due to a lack of Sleep Paralysis in those muscles, this is a very useful tool for dream research. The experiment was quite simple once they got this down. He got himself a lucid dreamer and told them to give a very specific eye signal to alert him that he will begin the task, the dreamer would count to 10, then give another eye signal. The time between the two signals in i'm pretty sure all cases was approximately 10 seconds, give or take a few. Meaning, that the perception of time is typically parallel with that in real life.

however,

I do believe it is possible for someone to in a way alter the amount of time they seem to experience (insignificantly of course), but can convince themselves that a larger span of time has passed.

i know Laberge isn't a God or anything, but he does have a degree for Psychophysiology with Stanford, and if that's not ethos for this topic, then I don't know what is.

**zebrah** · 01-05-2011 03:38 AM

Read this if you want to know what i'm talking about. It's more about your perception of time.

**dakotahnok** · 01-05-2011 05:13 AM

Originally Posted by Zebrah

Read this if you want to know what i'm talking about. It's more about your perception of time.

That doesn't have anything to do with dreaming.

When in danger the brain releases chemicals causing that to happen.

Completely irrelavent.

**zebrah** · 01-05-2011 05:39 AM

I mean you can recreate the effect in dreams....

**JesterKK** · 01-05-2011 07:07 PM

that is an interesting article. It still shows that the brains processing speed doesn't increase. How would you recreate that effect in dreams though without inducing constant fear?

**MindGames** · 01-05-2011 08:10 PM

If you dilate dream time, it feels as though the dream lasts longer. Some have reported successfully accomplishing this, with effects reaching up to 2+ years. Anything longer seems absurd, but there is a guy who supposedly had a dream that lasted 100 years.

Dream time dilation isn't proven, but it isn't researched very thoroughly, either. Researching time dilation is one of my current goals.

Without using time dilation techniques to alter subjective time, dream time passes generally at the same speed as real time, as others have explained. LaBerge did prove this through REM eye movements. That isn't the question anymore; whether or not dream time can pass more slowly or quickly is the question. Nobody has done definitive research proving this either way, and the large majority of evidence is anecdotal with little proof to back it up.

Even so, we can't count active time dilation as an impossibility. It just hasn't been researched enough.

**Sogol** · 01-05-2011 10:23 PM

I had a dream that lasted a couple months or more. It was one of the greatest experiences I've ever had. But things were different and measuring time was very difficult. For instance I had no need to sleep, but I still needed to rest every now and then. Or maybe I did sleep but there were no dreams or anything. I have no memory of what happened when I rested. I just "woke up" and I was still there. I was also in another planet or something, because sunlight lasted for entire weeks and then night time lasted for weeks too. I had to ride really long distances from one place to the other, like I'm pretty sure the ride (in horseback) from the place where the dream begun to this white castle in the middle of the desert took weeks, it would have been impossible to cover that distance in a few hours. And its not like I teleported myself, I remember riding and riding and riding for hours and hours... I remember I had to stop and set up camp several times.

I also think there is a huge difference in subjective time perception in lucid and non lucid dreams. My long dream wasn't lucid. When I lucid dream time seems exactly the same and when I'm awake. But when I'm not lucid time seems a lot more elastic. I think entire years could go by in the dream in just a few minutes irl, although I havent experienced anything like that.

**JesterKK** · 01-06-2011 12:58 AM

hmm yeah i guess I agree about the lucid vs non lucid thing.
research shows that eye movements aren't massively reliable during dreams. The theory that they correspond to looking at dream images has mixed results in experiments. In the book I'm reading called Sleep by Ian Oswald, he concluded that the movements were directionally random, but they might increase with more exciting dreams purely because of physiological rather than mental events. And also people who are blind from birth still have REM, so that kind of goes against the whole looking at things idea. Maybe this is different during lucidity.
Also people can supposedly dream during NREM, so we might have a different sort of time perception in those dreams. just a thought.

**vbooy57** · 01-09-2011 04:22 AM

Couldn't you, potentially, slow down time in a dream?

**LabRat** · 01-13-2011 03:41 PM

Ive been dreaming once, woke up, fell asleep when hitting the snooze button, and had a dream that felt like roughly an hour and was only the 9 minutes before my alarm went off again..

**whiterain** · 01-13-2011 11:31 PM

Originally Posted by dakotahnok

He proved it scientifically. You arecdefinitly not the person to talk against laberge's word

i think that what laberge proved was that under lab conditions, a lucid dreamer is able to have a good idea of how much time has passed in reality while they have been dreaming. this is not the same thing as you seem to be suggesting and does not take into account time dilation.

i have had dreams that definately feel like they have lasted far longer (days) than i have been asleep for, although it is very hard to say whether my mind was filling in some blanks. some dreams are weird and i wake up feeling like the whole thing has just happened in the seconds that it took me to wake up. the mind definately plays silly tricks on you sometimes

ps anyone who doubts time dilation in dreams really should try a large dose of something

under supervision of course. salvia will take you away for a lengthy vision and you will come back to earth realising that only minutes have passed

im just reading my first laberge book now, and although it is very good, he does come at everything from a rational scentific viewpoint which may limit how deep he can get into the subject. ill see when ive finished the book, but dreaming is not such a rational subject

**Robot_Butler** · 01-13-2011 11:50 PM

If you try, you can keep track of time in a dream. This doesn't mean it always happens that way. You can have false memories, knowledge of past an future events, and scene changes that jump around to make the dream feel like it has lasted a lifetime.

Think of re-reading, or even skimming your favorite spiderman comic book. The comic book is only a few pages long, but it is an episode in a larger, epic story you already know. When you glance at these few pages, they bring to mind the entire history of spiderman. They also remind you of how the story ends, your other favorite comic books in the series, spiderman movies you've seen, ect. It may only take you 2 minutes to actually flip through the pages, but it triggers all your memories of the hours you spent reading it the first time around.

If you have ever experienced vivid HI, you know how this works. You can have instantaneous glimpses of imagery, but you somehow already know the entire story behind each image. It is gone in a flash, but it feels like you lived it.

**dakotahnok** · 01-14-2011 01:48 AM

Originally Posted by Robot_Butler

If you try, you can keep track of time in a dream. This doesn't mean it always happens that way. You can have false memories, knowledge of past an future events, and scene changes that jump around to make the dream feel like it has lasted a lifetime.

Think of re-reading, or even skimming your favorite spiderman comic book. The comic book is only a few pages long, but it is an episode in a larger, epic story you already know. When you glance at these few pages, they bring to mind the entire history of spiderman. They also remind you of how the story ends, your other favorite comic books in the series, spiderman movies you've seen, ect. It may only take you 2 minutes to actually flip through the pages, but it triggers all your memories of the hours you spent reading it the first time around.

If you have ever experienced vivid HI, you know how this works. You can have instantaneous glimpses of imagery, but you somehow already know the entire story behind each image. It is gone in a flash, but it feels like you lived it.

Very well said, i have to agree.

**SilverBullet** · 01-14-2011 08:02 AM

Originally Posted by dakotahnok

Very well said, i have to agree.

Why exactly are you putting all you're posts in bold? Its a little annoying, I don't know why.

Ontopic: I don't think any of us have a say in whether or not time can vary in a dream. As much as you or I would like to think we know a lot about dreams, we don't. Same with every single other average person on this earth.