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

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.