Thread: Why is "everything", but dialating time possible in a lucid dream

^^ Damn, Dutchraptor, that post was sort of a downer. Where's the hope? Where's the magical mystical stuff like "consciousness does not equal brain, it only uses it?" Where is the surety that there is something "more" than our God-and/or-DNA-given machinery? Limits are no fun!

Seriously, though, everything you wrote is correct, and you make a couple of the points I can never quite fit into my posts, and you do a much better job than I in explaining why time-dilation is a literal fantasy; you should save the post and throw it up every time a time-dilation thread occurs. But...

Do we really need to establish such limits? Our brains are still, even after all the science studying them, unimaginably complex machines, with many trillions of synaptic connections firing in patterns, frequencies, and multiple-lobe complexity that makes a supercomputer look like a gramophone. Maybe there are things going on in there that could defy the rules of physics as we know them and, even if they're not, maybe our imaginations as created by this synaptic complexity, are capable of building believable worlds that exceed all rational science and rules of physics. Not a bad thing, I think!

It could be that the potentials of our dreams are limited by the physical nature and power of our brains, but perhaps those brains are less limited than you imply?

That said, I agree completely that the things you list are likely impossible to truly do in a dream, though I think it may be more due to limits of imagination than physics.

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Damn, Dutchraptor, that post was sort of a downer. Where's the hope? Where's the magical mystical stuff like "consciousness does not equal brain, it only uses it?" Where is the surety that there is something "more" than our God-and/or-DNA-given machinery? Limits are no fun!

Seriously, though, everything you wrote is correct, and you make a couple of the points I can never quite fit into my posts, and you do a much better job than I in explaining why time-dilation is a literal fantasy; you should save the post and throw it up every time a time-dilation thread occurs. But...

Do we really need to establish such limits? Our brains are still, even after all the science studying them, unimaginably complex machines, with many trillions of synaptic connections firing in patterns, frequencies, and multiple-lobe complexity that makes a supercomputer look like a gramophone. Maybe there are things going on in there that could defy the rules of physics as we know them and, even if they're not, maybe our imaginations as created by this synaptic complexity, are capable of building believable worlds that exceed all rational science and rules of physics. Not a bad thing, I think!

It could be that the potentials of our dreams are limited by the physical nature and power of our brains, but perhaps those brains are less limited than you imply?

That said, I agree completely that the things you list are likely impossible to truly do in a dream, though I think it may be more due to limits of imagination than physics.

Don't worry, I still like to fantasize about it myself sometimes
I just wanted to make a clear point that by our current knowledge the boldest claims that people make are likely over exaggerated and also that our dreams are as far as we know not entirely distant from real life (hence why they are still to some extent governed by the laws of nature). I was trying to address the OP more than the ongoing discussion about time dilation.
I honestly think there is still a lot more to be found out about the brain, I have had some pretty interesting discussions with physics students around here who showed me all kinds of funny ways our brain utilizes quantum effects. I totally wouldn't be surprised if shared dreaming or time dilation would be possible in dreams and I definitely recommend everyone to try it for themselves.

@ mzzkc

That is how hukif does it for major time dilation, when doing it for minor time dilation he has other ways. I think that it is one of the ways to do it, and maybe the most effective, but I don't think that it is the only way.

@ Dutchrapty
That is very non mystical. I am not of the idea that our consciousness leaves us, but I definitely think that it is possible. As I said before, I have had dreams that skip ahead and in the dream I thought it was a month, but when waking it was only a few minute ordeal. However I have had it happen when I can remember conversations (20 minutes a day) and games I played with DCs (15 minutes X2 a day) traveling (20 minutes a day X2) eating (10 minutes a day X3) for a week in a dream. The dream only lasted about 2 hours real time, but was at least 14 hours remembered of time that I really enjoyed. I have has other dreams that I can remember more time, but I can't categorize as well. One thing you said

Due to the nature of dreams you can however create the sensation of anything, since it is only a sensation you are never going to do something that isn't physically possible. We are capable of assuming what something would be like and this is what most people do in a dream.

The sensation. Everything we are doing in a dream is creating sensations that aren't real. "I can fly!" You are actually creating the sensations of the sight and the feeling and the sound, while your actual self is lying in bed. Dilate time is changing the "sensation of time passing." I hope this makes sense. you aren't making your brain process anything more, just sending it different sensations we think that we couldn't process that much time and info or our brains couldn't process it, but isn't all of the info and everything already in your brain? Wouldn't it just be reviewing it and thus not reprocessing it?

@sageous.
I have nothing to say to you. I like your posts, don't agree with all of it, but it is interesting. makes me think.

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

@ mzzkc

That is how hukif does it for major time dilation, when doing it for minor time dilation he has other ways. I think that it is one of the ways to do it, and maybe the most effective, but I don't think that it is the only way.

That's 'cause it isn't the only way. More than anything else, time dilation requires the dreamer to figure out their own way of doing things.

Why? Simple: the schema at play, as Sageous pointed out, are some of the most ingrained in the human psyche. To modify, overwrite, or remove them requires a certain level of mastery over your own thoughts at the most basic level.

The "everyone should fly like Iron Man!" mentality ain't gonna cut it.

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

The sensation. Everything we are doing in a dream is creating sensations that aren't real. "I can fly!" You are actually creating the sensations of the sight and the feeling and the sound, while your actual self is lying in bed. Dilate time is changing the "sensation of time passing." I hope this makes sense. you aren't making your brain process anything more, just sending it different sensations we think that we couldn't process that much time and info or our brains couldn't process it, but isn't all of the info and everything already in your brain? Wouldn't it just be reviewing it and thus not reprocessing it?

I will use a hypothetical computer game as an example to try prove my point.

Imagine a game in which anything is possible as long as the computer can handle it. The system specifications of the computer is simply a processor which can handle 500 objects per second.
We will create our own racing game on this computer. Generally we load the world and it looks normal, it runs at the same rate as which we perceive time. There are trees in the background and a few buildings around you, totaling to around 250 objects in the scene. The moment we start driving the computer is forced to start processing much more, it must render what is ahead of it, behind it, the speed of each object etc. There is a threshold as to how fast the car can go and the computer cant perfectly render every object on the screen since more than 500 objects are passing at any point.

The human brain would function in a similar way. The first explanation of time dilation I will address is that of people saying that they are actually witnessing 2 hours of dream time identically as they would in a normal dream but in only a 1 hour time frame. While the human brain can process a significant amount of data there still is a threshold just like the computer.

How would the computer handle the situation? It would create the effect of a car driving really fast by minimizing the power needed by other objects in the scene. Game developers use methods where only objects directly in your line of sight are rendered, the resolution is lowered, the complexity of the scene is reduced etc.
The same is applied to our brain, there is only so much power we can use to render an environment and it's properties, the only way to possibly do it would be to create the sensation of it (Don't ask me how ). But in the case of just making up the sensation one can argue whether you are actually dilating time, if you are just making up the feeling, while it may feel good you can't actually do twice as much work in such a dilated dream. Really using an illusion for time dilation would make it obsolete.

There is no discussion to be made over the fact that there is an actual latency between processes in the brain. This shows that the brain is capped to an extent in it's functions.

dreaming you can manipulate time from your first lucid dream would help

Depends. Can you think up of a long story really fast? Time dilation is only limited by your mind and your willingness to sacrifice vividness for quantity.

Another example I have of the "Life flashes before your eyes" phenomena is a car accident my Daughter was in. She was driving and the car flipped end over end three times. Judging from the Bruce Willis movie car stunts I estimate that the crash took less then 5 seconds. During those 5 seconds my Daughter had the "Life Flash" and also a long question and answer session with a invisible DC? pretending to be God. Her boyfriend stayed conscious during the crash and can confirm the short time duration. I don't think this is an example of the typical NDE where a heart attack victim quits breathing and his brain has time to go into chemical imbalance or whatever happens to create the NDE hallucinations.
Even at very skeptical time estimations my daughters Life Flash and interview had to have presented an enormous amount of data to her consciousness in that 5 seconds. At that rate of time dilation it seems to me that living a full day in a LD could take very little Rem sleep time. What do you think?

I also have been thinking about other apparent time dilation events in hopes of improving my expectation for them in LDs. I spoke at length with a guy who survived a plane crash and claimed that he had one of those near death experiences. When you Google "life flashed before my eyes" there are many examples of people who saw their entire lives flash before their eyes in the couple of seconds it took for a car crash to happen. Seems to me that if these "life review" accounts are true ??? then obviously our brains have the capacity to process a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds. I can't see why we can't dream a whole lifetime of events in a few seconds.

Let me ask a simple question here: What would happen if you dilated time to an infinity and someone woke you up?

Originally Posted by PostScript99

Let me ask a simple question here: What would happen if you dilated time to an infinity and someone woke you up?

Let's set aside Mzzkc's answer* as just another of his attempts to drown the hopeful fantasies of another innocent soul in the icewater of cold reason, and answer your question:

If you did manage to "dilate time to infinity," which I assume would be the same as creating an eternity, or an endless dream, an odd paradox would happen:

Because you created a world of infinite time, your dream cannot end, so from your perspective you would never wake up. And yet someone could wake you up. So you would never experience being woken up, even after you were awake. Infinity is a funny thing that way. Maybe that's where comas come from?


* All kidding aside, Mzzkc's answer is of course dead-on accurate.

Then you would have experienced an eternity, which as has been established is as illusory a concept as time itself. In this physical universe, nothing is eternal--entropy all but guarantees us that much.

Siding with DutchRaptor on this one. The brain is a biological computer, dreams are based on material processes. We don't transcend out bodies (the body you experience in the dream is the same as in waking life, we don't experience our bodies directly, only our body map). In the dream you're only inside your skull.

You can manipulate space because the reality around you is virtual, but you can't escape time, your body is still in reality, progressing through a rem cycle. Any time dilation is illusory (still cool IMO).

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

Siding with DutchRaptor on this one. The brain is a biological computer, dreams are based on material processes. We don't transcend out bodies (the body you experience in the dream is the same as in waking life, we don't experience our bodies directly, only our body map). In the dream you're only inside your skull.

You can manipulate space because the reality around you is virtual, but you can't escape time, your body is still in reality, progressing through a rem cycle. Any time dilation is illusory (still cool IMO).

I don't know, I'm still siding with Sageous on this one. Since time doesn't exist in the first place, so your experience of it is already a construct, why can't time be just as virtual as physical reality in a dream, if not more so? Yes, you're simply existing inside your head the whole time you're asleep, but you are still asleep (for what it's worth: you're existing inside your head the whole time you are awake, too). And, since all time is illusory, of course any dilation would be illusory too... why would that matter?

Extreme time dilation is likely not possible, or would be extremely difficult, for all the reasons we've already discussed, but I'm not sure this would be one of them. I'm also not sure you and Dutchraptor are giving your brains enough credit; they're capable of quite a bit.

Originally Posted by Sageous

I don't know, I'm still siding with Sageous on this one. Since time doesn't exist in the first place, so your experience of it is already a construct, why can't time be just as virtual as physical reality in a dream, if not more so? Yes, you're simply existing inside your head the whole time you're asleep, but you are still asleep (for what it's worth: you're existing inside your head the whole time you are awake, too). And, since all time is illusory, of course any dilation would be illusory too... why would that matter?

Extreme time dilation is likely not possible, or would be extremely difficult, for all the reasons we've already discussed, but I'm not sure this would be one of them. I'm also not sure you and Dutchraptor are giving your brains enough credit; they're capable of quite a bit.

Sorry that was a rushed post, I haven't articulated myself all that well. I certainly didn't intend to belittle the discussion.

"Yes, you're simply existing inside your head the whole time you're asleep, but you are still asleep (for what it's worth: you're existing inside your head the whole time you are awake, too)."

This is very true. Does 'time' exist? This abstraction? I think what is true is that things change, from the Big Bang to the present, entropy and all that jazz. Time is an abstraction that we have reified so that we mistake it for something real in the world, like the concept of credit, or love for that matter. But credit and love are still based on material process and objects.

This thread could just descend into a debate between Newtonian and kantian models of time, but that may not get us any closer to answering whether time dilation is possible in dreams. In the phenomenology of a dream can you experience 'eternity?', yes, but in my opinion there is nothing more nor less than what is going on in any other area of subjective experience, like falling madly love or being in the throes of deepest depression, physical occurrences in the brain. To me this does not detract from the profundity of experience.

I am not sure what your personal philosophy is, Sageous, but I do not believe in certainty and I see I came across as arrogant when I have no more claim to truth than your view in our subjective experience.

Experience is experience.

Obsessing over the "why?" seems much too...human, for my tastes.

Originally Posted by Mzzkc

Experience is experience.

Obsessing over the "why?" seems much too...human, for my tastes.

My high school physics teacher, a catholic priest, had the same answer every time a student asked "why" a particluar law or phenomenon happened (like light traveling in either waves or particles, depending on the observer). He simply said:

"Because God says so."

I think this is going to be my last post on this thread. I guess my main point is you never know something for sure unless you try and experiment with the limits you see in front of you, if you just accept the limits put in front of you no progress will ever be achieved. Just look at our world some of the greatest things in this world have come form people challenging things that used to be considered the accepted theory. For example, spontaneous generation was accepted as by many of the people of the time until Pasteur came along and disproved it with science. I think there may be a scientific way to adjust what we experience we just haven't found the answer yet, but just saying it's impossible won't help anyone.

Originally Posted by Tye

I think this is going to be my last post on this thread. I guess my main point is you never know something for sure unless you try and experiment with the limits you see in front of you, if you just accept the limits put in front of you no progress will ever be achieved. Just look at our world some of the greatest things in this world have come form people challenging things that used to be considered the accepted theory. For example, spontaneous generation was accepted as by many of the people of the time until Pasteur came along and disproved it with science. I think there may be a scientific way to adjust what we experience we just haven't found the answer yet, but just saying it's impossible won't help anyone.

I don't think you've been paying attention to this thread.

The question--at this stage in the game--isn't "is time dilation possible." So far as I know, we're all under agreement that time dilation happens at an experiential level--anyone who's been around this block a few times knows as much, and everyone taking part in this discussion is more or less a veteran block walker by now.

More pointedly, the current debate revolves around the possible mechanics and implications of said experience. In your post, you seem to be (quite ironically, actually) giving up on a discussion that explores and seeks to progress the very ideas--of progress and understanding--that you're pushing. Thanks for the chuckle, I guess?

I don't think you've been paying attention to this thread.

The question--at this stage in the game--isn't "is time dilation possible." So far as I know, we're all under agreement that time dilation happens at an experiential level--anyone who's been around this block a few times knows as much, and everyone taking part in this discussion is more or less a veteran block walker by now.

More pointedly, the current debate revolves around the possible mechanics and implications of said experience. In your post, you seem to be (quite ironically, actually) giving up on a discussion that explores and seeks to progress the very ideas--of progress and understanding--that you're pushing. Thanks for the chuckle, I guess?

Sorry I guess the point i meant to get at it is like you said trying to understand the mechanics of it and coming up with ways to control like i said in my original post i wanted me and others to try and experiment and see if we could control such a thing, I know it is possible I've gone through it myself I just want to know the process of why it happens and if we can control it.

Sorry if i came across as ignorant or stupid by my earlier post, the point was we should try to explain how it happens instead of just saying it happens.

I think time dilation is possible in the way that we can trick ourselves into thinking that we have experienced huge amounts of time, within the small amount of time we actually have in a REM stage of sleep, but that it is simply the brain filling in gaps of our memory of that time we perceive to have passed.

I think a good example of this is that it is the same way that we magically get to different places in our non-lucid dreams and we think nothing of it. The brain fills in the gap of memory between there and here, and until we truly question that, our dream won't become lucid from noticing it.

so has anyone actually tried this as a result of this thread? if I wasn't so brand spanking new to lucid dreaming I'd be all over this

I think the simple answer yes. If it can happen In waking life then it can happen in the dream world, but only the same amount. In waking life: as much as when having fun makes time pass fast or how boredom makes it pass slowly. Or even as much as when in a near death experience like in a car crash how people have reported how time nearly stood still. Although this is my opinion I am still optimistic that even more might be possible.

yeah I know a racecar driver who has told me he always experiences wrecks in slow motion. Like he has all the time in the world to prepare for the impact and to try and make the crash less horrendous. I don't know how you reproduce that effect at will though, maybe ask the subconscious or whatever is co-creating the dream to make time pass very slowly, or just kind of intend that to happen? Robert Waggoner talks about this kind of thing working, theoretically it shouldn't have to be more complex than that.

the nde's are a whole other subject, im surprised there isn't a thread about that on here. They report time ceased to exist, and they were in eternity, that time was non-linear. NDE's are no joke, scientists have been trying to disprove them for awhile with no success, and the evidence that they are real is pretty compelling, although incomplete at this point.

^^ Not to mention that if you are fully lucid you also have the capacity to choose to change your "view" of time's passage, just as you choose to change your view of the dream scenery around you. If you are fully lucid, you know that nothing in this world is real, including time.

Yes, it would be really, really hard to do so because of the depth of its embeddedness in our psyches, but it should be just as possible to change time as it is anything else in the dream.

And regarding that link: makes sense to me, because, as I keep saying, time doesn't exist; it is a tool rather than a physical force. Why not be able to change our perception of it as needed? It's also not a surprise that the change seems always to be involuntary, thanks to that embeddedness (is that even a word?) in our collective psyche... Maybe some intrepid advanced LD'er will change that?

This post is very interesting, so I'll put my thoughts here:

Is possible to extend time in LDs? Watching it from every point of view, yes, it's possible, but the limits and how-tos change from point of view to point of view.

If we think that for that our brain must process more information, we can only extend it a certain amount, or create a false sensation of extending. But what happens if we create a false sensation of extending the sensation of time to infinity? We must awake, but when we do, we would have an infinite number of memories accumulated. Is it even possible? And if it is, how would it feel like? Because if you had sensation of inifnity, then for pure estadistic you must have every last possibility of any possible event in your brain, and since imagination is infinite, you would have infinite memories in your head. But according to this theory, our brain isn't capable of doing that(Meh, what a boring theory).

If we go by the theory that time is completely relative (this is the most juicy in my opinion), we could possibly extend it as much as we want. But that makes some interesting questions: What happens if you decide to extend time to infinity or delete it? Let's put an example:

Subject A is going to have a nap, which will have a REM cycle, and will be lucid and in full control with a 100% chance. Subject B is going to awake Subject A after 10 minutes.
Well, in some moment during these 10 minutes, Subject A, with full control over his inconsciusness, commands his subsconcious to extend time to infinity or delete it completely. What happens then? Subject B must awake A at some point. But for Subject A time is infinite. Then, the time will not pass until he wants so. So, he cannot get awake because time doesn't exist in his perception, but Subject B must awake him. Thus, at the time Subject B awakes him, he cannot be awake because time hasn't passed.
So, the question(s) is(are): Does Subject B ever awake Subject A?
Does time pass in the real world? Or the time in real world stops until Subject A decides to let it pass again? But what if Subject A never creates time again? It's an interesting paradox, and the only answer I can think of is that the time would only continue in the universes in which A lets the time pass again, and in the universes he never does everything gets frozen forever, or maybe never, because there is no time.
But that is only if we assume that there are infinite universes with infinite possibilities, and that is another interesting theory, including the possibility that you would never die, because every time there is a chance that you die or keep on living, you would only experience the possibilities of you living, so if that is true we have died infinite times and we will do so another infinite, but we will also live during infinite time because there is always a chance our heart won't stop beating at that moment, thus making that we will at a time get an infinite LD during our infinite existence. That is a very interesting concept, but isn't the topic right now, so, for the moment, we should all agree that:

1- It's possible to extend time
2- We don't have a clue how long.
3- There are a lot of theories about it.
4- It's possible that, in some paralel universe, we all wear cowboy hats around all day and the most extended religion is the cult to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.