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

From my own personal experience with things similar to the life flashing before my eyes, I come up with a montage ( a technique which uses rapid editing, special effects and music to present compressed narrative information) as the closest comparative.

I am not trying to downplay anyone's experience. I think when something like this happens to someone, it gives them some feeling of having a special story, and that brings some pride in the story itself. What I remember, when honestly reviewing something like the life flashing thing, is short sequences flashing by rapidly giving a hint at many portions of life, but lacking any detail. exactly like a movie montage.

You may see a image of your grade school and you playing with an old friend, then an image of loading the car to move away from that school and friend, followed by an image of the first day at your new school.

I hate to down play it, but that is what my own experience causes me to think. I believe when someone experiences something like this, they do not want it reduced or made less special, but in the end, if they are honest, I think it was just brief flashes, not reliving their whole lives.

Originally Posted by sivason

From my own personal experience with things similar to the life flashing before my eyes, I come up with a montage ( a technique which uses rapid editing, special effects and music to present compressed narrative information) as the closest comparative.

I am not trying to downplay anyone's experience. I think when something like this happens to someone, it gives them some feeling of having a special story, and that brings some pride in the story itself. What I remember, when honestly reviewing something like the life flashing thing, is short sequences flashing by rapidly giving a hint at many portions of life, but lacking any detail. exactly like a movie montage.

You may see a image of your grade school and you playing with an old friend, then an image of loading the car to move away from that school and friend, followed by an image of the first day at your new school.

I hate to down play it, but that is what my own experience causes me to think. I believe when someone experiences something like this, they do not want it reduced or made less special, but in the end, if they are honest, I think it was just brief flashes, not reliving their whole lives.

actually most people who have these experiences don't tell anyone due to how personal and powerful it was, it takes years and years for deep NDE experiences to integrate, and they drastically change people for the rest of their lives (there has been long term research on this). A lot of people also mention it to a nurse or doctor and they get a negative reaction much like sageous just gave, basically reducing it to a faulty brain and viewing it as fake and false, and that goes so completely against what the people experienced (completely clear, coherent, more real than physical life, etc) that they become afraid people will think they are literally insane and so stop talking about it.

Also, research has been done on NDE experiencers in regards to memory. They quizzed a group of people on the experience right after it happened, then they let them live their lives for a decade, then asked them to recall the experience and describe it, then went back to them some years after that, etc. It is the same, the story didn't change and the memory was still as clear as it was the day after it happened. So the memory of the event is stronger and more stable than any other memory.

You guys really should look more into the NDE, it flummoxes scientists who aren't so egoic as to think they have it all figured out already and who aren't so rooted in one particular view of the world as to become defensive of it. Something really crazy is happening to these people, and I agree with Sageous that the NDE doesn't parallel a dream at all, the time dilation in an NDE isn't just dilation, its the complete absence of time, that when people look back on it the best word they come up with to describe it is eternity. They were there for eternity then popped back into linear time.

If time dilation is possible in a lucid dream or psychedelic experience, and NDEs are a form of lucid dreaming or psychedelic experience, does that mean that when we die, we start to experience a lucid dream of infinite duration? It's an idea that I've seen people mention on other forums: that at the time of death, our sense of time gets stretched out to infinity, and even when the "outside" world goes on we're still inside that moment of death for eternity. Could that be what the afterlife is? A lucid dream that feels like eternity to us but is squeezed into a split-second?

I really don't know. But it's an awesome idea, and I'm interested in time dilation in lucid dreaming regardless. It'd be cool if I could enter my own personal Matrix and be there for days and days, and then come back and it's only been a few minutes or hours.