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

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.

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.

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?

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 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.

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

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.

Originally Posted by dms111

I don't believe time dilation is really possible in a fully lucid dream. By fully lucid I mean not only knowing it's a dream but also having a clear mind like you normally would while awake. If you are lucid and have all your normal mental faculties within the dream, you are not going to be able to mistake 2 minutes for 2 hours. Just like you won't mistake 2 minutes for 2 hours while awake unless your mind is being seriously hindered in some way. You can't be lucid and at the same time trick your mind. That's a contradiction. So dilating time in a dream would involve sacrificing true lucidity and making it more like an ordinary dream.

It's not a contradiction. You don't need a "seriously hindered mind in some way" to experience time dilation. Check this.

^^ 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.

Someone should try making a Total Recall type machine in a LD to implant memories of fictional events. If you could implant 300 years of memories into your brain during an LD it might be a cheat way of time dilation haha.

^^ Though it sounds silly, that is an excellent concept... I would definitely want time on that machine!

Time is a river, a landslide, and we are the water, the dirt.

Time dilation already exists. Slow motion, and fast forward are obvious examples. The coming and goin of the universe and our libes is as the blink of an eye. Yet also as an inching glacier. Without time, we tend to lose our meaning, and that can be discomforting.

Look at the black hole, and the creation of matter. They are like springs and tributaries carrying the flow of life. Sure time can be changed. A river can be dammed, diverted, navigated or dried up. It takes a strong mind to change the flow. However, even the lesser minds can remove themselves from the flow with enough effort.

Enjoy those metaphors

^^ Downright poetic, Chimpertainment!

I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but very pretty!

Originally Posted by Zoth

It's not a contradiction. You don't need a "seriously hindered mind in some way" to experience time dilation. Check this.

That's not at all the type of dilation I was talking about. I'm talking more about minutes to hours. That article looks to be about seconds and microseconds. What's described in that article is experienced by everyone on any ordinary day. We know this basic dilation exists and can be experienced in a dream. We can easily mistake one second for three seconds. Also the test subjects are not dilating time on purpose. It's not their choice it's just something that is happening to them.

But since time doesn't really exist the dilation should be able to extend to any amount of time that can be perceived. Our brains can absolutely mistake one minute for an hour, but it requires the brain to be operating under abnormal circumstances. Drugs, trauma, sensory isolation can all lead to extreme dilation.

Most people think Time is like a river, that flows swift and sure in one direction but I have seen the face of time and can tell you they are wrong. Time is like an ocean in a storm, you may wonder who I am and why I say this ,sit down and I will tell you a tale like none that you have ever heard.

A really nice quote from the beloved game series prince of persia!

I think that i'ts not possible to dilate time, simply because you do not know how you would do something like that. You could create the illusion I think. But if anyone does, do tell me how! :p

I ofcourse know that in your dreams you can do things that aren't possible like flying or doing the craziest things, I've done it :p But I think it would be something that goes way beyond our capabilities, even in the dream world.

Originally Posted by dreamstudent123

I think that i'ts not possible to dilate time, simply because you do not know how you would do something like that. You could create the illusion I think. But if anyone does, do tell me how! :p

Flawed logic is flawed.

Please read one of my above posts above for an overview of how I and others have accomplished the feat.

Alright, let me formulate that differently. I do believe it's possible to dilate time, heck for all my human brain knows we could be doing unimaginable things. I'm just not sure how it can be done....I understand that this discussion has already passed the 'is time dilation possible?'. Sorry if my post was a little bit dull...