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

I see quite often people say you can do anything in a lucid dream which is true for the most part, but why is time different I can do things impossible on earth like fly, create entire cities and worlds, and meet interesting DC's but I can't affect how long I experience it. I have an idea, so whenever i have a lucid dream it's like I tell my subconscious what I want to do and most of the time it works very well, so next time I become lucid I'm just going to tell my mind to multiply the time I would normally spend in the dream x10 and see how my mind would react. Are there any really experienced lucid dreamers that want to give this a try with me and let me know how it works for you?

Everything is possible in dream, including time dilation, i am not exactly sure how to control it though, but it should be possible if you fully believe and find a good way that works around in dream, maybe try using a clock of some kind? :zzz:
Good luck! ;)

*Moved to Dream Control*

people have experienced lucid dreams that felt like it was an entire life time (on purpose)

Yep. Dilating time is possible. I guess it depends on who you ask. :P next time someone says it is not, then ask then about their WILDs. I have went to sleep at 6:00, woke up in one second dream time and woke up at 6:45. So one second vs. 45 minutes. Sounds like accidental time dilation, and if it can happen one way, then it can happen the other way. Also, hukif, sageous, and lucidis all have experiences with major time dilation. All trustworthy people IMO.

All you can do is altering time's perception. Remember that you are still asleep, and you'll wake up at some point. But altering that perception? You do it every time you're awake. When you're having fun, the time seems to fly, and when you're bored, the time seems to slow. When you're in panic, the time seems to stop. And so on and so fourth. There's even studies going on regarding top athletes that experience time slowing down experiences.

There's actually some range of "abilities" that are still left to be explored, even in a scientific point of view. Things like synesthesia, time dilation, dream characters, etc etc. I would use BrandonBoss's direction and ask one of our most experienced lucid dreamers about their experiences, and hopefully try to make some sense of it. I don't think that anyone has come with a solid way to perform it though, but it's for sure worth a try ^^

Well hukif can. :P I don't know about sageous, I think he said he could. Lucidis is looking more into it. Last I checked. I am waiting till I get a few more LDs. Probably after summer.

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Originally Posted by dreamer7

people have experienced lucid dreams that felt like it was an entire life time (on purpose)

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Who exactly spent a lifetime in a lucid dream.? Now that would be something else, I'd live a different lifetime every night..!

The obvious problem with this is that there are only so many hours per night and so many hours of REM sleep in a single night.

I have had non-lucid dreams that I would have sworn had lasted more than a year, but when I remember the actual, literal events that occurred during those dreams, there usually wasn't more than an hour or so of activity. Stephen LaBerge has said--and I agree--that we can experience the illusion of time passing but cannot actually dream for longer than the span of a night. Contrary to what people say, you don't only use 10% of your brain--we're using almost all of it all the time. The idea that we could speed it up to experience a true lifetime's worth of actual thoughts in the span of 45 minutes is a lot to swallow.

That said, I fully believe it would be possible to, say, convince yourself that you spent a year training at a mountain shrine in a lucid dream if you had enough dream control. I think the events of that year would have to end up being concentrated, like a montage, but that you would come out of the dream feeling like a year had passed.

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Originally Posted by Salathor

The obvious problem with this is that there are only so many hours per night and so many hours of REM sleep in a single night.

I have had non-lucid dreams that I would have sworn had lasted more than a year, but when I remember the actual, literal events that occurred during those dreams, there usually wasn't more than an hour or so of activity. Stephen LaBerge has said--and I agree--that we can experience the illusion of time passing but cannot actually dream for longer than the span of a night. Contrary to what people say, you don't only use 10% of your brain--we're using almost all of it all the time. The idea that we could speed it up to experience a true lifetime's worth of actual thoughts in the span of 45 minutes is a lot to swallow.

That said, I fully believe it would be possible to, say, convince yourself that you spent a year training at a mountain shrine in a lucid dream if you had enough dream control. I think the events of that year would have to end up being concentrated, like a montage, but that you would come out of the dream feeling like a year had passed.

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See a lot of people explain the "science" as to why it shouldn't and that it was like a montage, but I have had both experiences, so I know the difference. People try to convince other people that it isn't possible, but it has happened, so I can't be convinced. :P

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Originally Posted by Checker666

Everything is possible in dream, including time dilation, i am not exactly sure how to control it though, but it should be possible if you fully believe and find a good way that works around in dream, maybe try using a clock of some kind? :zzz:
Good luck! ;)

*Moved to Dream Control*

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This is the worst advice in this thread.

The only way someone is going to get time dilation to work is by activating a very specific sequence of abstract schema which will vary from person to person as the archetypes for evocation will be highly personalized. Relying on belief will just screw the pooch, since it's a crap schema to begin with and has absolutely nothing to do with dilating time.

Hukif's approach involves some weird combination of focused counting and abstraction that I don't quite get. I don't know about Sageous' or Lucidis' approach, but mine relies on abstracting out repeated forward time skips and combining that with a sort of raw, intrinsic melding. Haven't done it in awhile, but the headache isn't worth the experience, IMO.

But no matter how you look at it, belief doesn't play a part and would likely just distract from the goal at hand.

Some advice for everyone out there: don't believe anything, and don't disbelieve anything, only consider, identify, and act accordingly; you'll be much better off for it, and not just when it comes to dream control.

Wow quite a bit of replies, I already knew that some forms of time dilation were possible, but I think we need to focus and come up with ways to control time, like telling your mind how long you want the dream to be in your mind or trick your mind into deceiving time differently.

I've spent 6 months in a dream, but I wasn't lucid and it wasn't like i had 6 months of memories. I bet quite a few can remember an instance when they went to sleep and woke up after what felt like hours to find that they had only slept a few minutes. I found it to be similar to when you get wrapped up in a movie or book, and you feel like you are experiencing the passage of time that is depicted instead of the real time until you snap out of it. It was slightly more convincing than that.

Whose to say what advice is good or bad. In the end no one yet knows the true potential of our dreams. I see no reason this isn't possible

Here's the thing, as I see it, about time dilation.

There is no such thing as time. There is no thing made of mass or energy that can be called "time." There is no time wave or time particle (sorry Star Trek fans). Time is simply the tool for measurement that we use to understand actual physical events like change, movement, velocity or acceleration. Unfortunately (for these purposes), that tool has been so completely embedded into our psyches that we are hard-pressed to experience reality without time on hand to help us wrap our heads around what we see. Indeed, our invention of time the tool was so complete that it has followed us into our dreams -- a dream, especially a LD, will pass in about the same amount of time as whatever time is passing in waking life. Under the rules we've created for observing reality, even dream reality, there seems no way to experience reality without using time to measure it, and apparently that yardstick of time is ruled immutably.

So, you cannot dilate time because it doesn't exist, and how can you change the dimensions of a concept that has no dimension? Also, you can't dilate time because its "length" has been perfectly fused into our psyches, giving us a nearly indomitable "sense" of time that can only be slightly effected by things like boredom or excitement. Seems a pretty tough nut to crack.

But what if, in dreams, you can possibly eliminate the nut itself? As the OP suggests, since you can do anything in the reality that is your dreams, instead of dilating time -- which might be impossible for the reasons I just said above -- why not simply ignore it? Why not just remove it from the process of how you observe and participate in the reality of your dreams?

This would be extremely difficult, because the programming is so perfectly imbedded in us to use time, but it seems that, with enough effort, you ought to be able to produce a dream that does not include time. Here's the irony in successfully doing so, though:

Erase time from your dream and suddenly your existence in the dream is eternal. You might be in your dream world "forever," but you won't know it, because eternity is no more than an endless here & now, with no time passing.

tl;dr: So, Tye, your conundrum might be more simply stated: Yes, you can do or change everything in a dream, but time, unfortunately, is not a thing, so it cannot be changed... it must instead be ignored, erased, or rather removed from your mind's toolbox for comprehending reality.

I don't think I'm being very helpful or clear here, and I'm confident that my opinion is in an extreme minority, so I think I'll stop ... just thought I'd share my thoughts, and maybe plug the thread I started about the nonexistence of time, because I think that's what really matters in a conversation like this.

Thanks for your response Sageous and i did actually find your post helpful. I think the topic of "time" is a great mystery no one will understand for awhile hopefully one day I can find a way to permanently alter my perception of "time".

You can't do anything in a dream, you are still restricted by the laws of the real world. The dream world is an illusion that we can manipulate, it doesn't mean everything is possible. Whatever happens in a dream isn't exactly actually happening in real life, it is just us interpreting a series of neurons firing in a certain pattern. You can affect which memories you recall or how the dream goes on etc but there is no evidence to say that you can actually dilate time because it require you to process more information in a shorter amount of time. Just like an old computer trying to play a new game our brain probably couldn't keep up with some of the radical claims members have made about dilating times up to ten or twenty times.

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. If we don't know what something feels like we use existing feelings and memories to simulate it. People claiming that they are "Dilating dreams" may in fact just be creating a false sensation of a lengthy period of time and not actually have a two hour dream in one our time frame for example.

Here are a few examples of other things which are potentially impossible to truly do in a dream.
1) Render an entire scene 360 degrees around you in full detail
2) Occupy and command the bodies individually of 100 people
3) Do maths calculations ten times faster than in real life

All of these things would probably be impossible to do in a dream because your brain just doesn't have enough processing power to be capable of such activities.

^^ 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.

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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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Erase time from your dream and suddenly your existence in the dream is eternal. You might be in your dream world "forever," but you won't know it, because eternity is no more than an endless here & now, with no time passing.

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That reminded me of a false lucid I had a while back. I knew I was dreaming, but I quickly became convinced that I was an injured football player in a coma and stuck in a dream. This realization destroyed my sense of time and I couldn't even begin to try and understand how long I'd been asleep. When I woke up I realized pretty quickly that I was only there for a few minutes. That sense of eternal here & now combined with the stupid coma thoughts made it a very miserable experience.

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.

@ 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. :P 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

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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.

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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. :P 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. :P I like your posts, don't agree with all of it, but it is interesting.:uhm: makes me think.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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... Now that is an excellent point.

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

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.

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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. :P 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?

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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 :P). 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.

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).

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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?

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Originally Posted by Mzzkc

Experience is experience.

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

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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."

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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

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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...

I think my op was misunderstood, at the end I clearly asked people to try to and dilate time and report back details, I feel this took a wrong direction into an angry debate. I tried to focus more on experimenting and finding answers instead of constant arguing. So, if anyone is still interested on experimenting with time dilation pm me,

There's no anger in here. This turned into a really good thread.

^^ Agreed. Also, sometimes a good debate leads to new ways of seeing -- and doing -- things.

^while I do agree that debates are most often good, I feel like the main point was misunderstood, this thread has been fantastic, but still no one is trying and experimenting with the length of dreams which is what I've been focusing on. We all know time dilation in dreams is possible, but how is what we need to ask and what control do we have over it that's what I want to know, and that is why I made this thread more as an open discussion about results and tactics.

maybe its as simple as intending minutes to feel like hours, much like when we intend for gravity to cease to exist or fly or anything else. The dream world is us, we are it, so there shouldn't be anything off limits. Hell if we can defeat gravity (an all pervasive powerful force in the universe), time (which doesn't inherently exist) should be no issue

I've experienced time dilation many, many times, but I have yet to figure out how to control it or do it on purpose. I've had WILDs that lasted 4, 5, 6 hours dream time and only 15-20 minutes of real world time had passed. I can speak from experience and say that it is very possible. I'm sure there are those out there who can control it to a certain extent. At some point, I'll work on it in the lucid state. To be honest, I haven't put a lot of time into experimenting with it during the dream state. I've worked more on prolonging and extending my dreams by evaluating things that often cause the mind to wake up. Time Dilation is deep stuff that I'll touch one day after I have accomplished some of my other goals.

Perhaps the OP has missed the observations of several posters suggesting there is no one way to dilate time. People figure out ways past limitations using their own strengths in their own way. There is no one solution is any particular problem.

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Originally Posted by dreamer7

people have experienced lucid dreams that felt like it was an entire life time (on purpose)

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This reminds me of a particularly disturbing comment I saw on YouTube.

Someone said they kept having horrible nightmares every night that seemed to last for a year each... just imagine being stuck in a nightmare for an entire year. Shit.

Well, I google searched time dilation and lucid dreams. I found plenty of discussions, but this one guy on another forum uses a computer to massively manipulate time. I mean, he claims to spend weeks in a lucid dream. Basically, all he does is type in the time on a computer. He types in the number of hours he wants to stay in the dream. So, I decided to try this. I tried my best to suppress any expectations and doubts I had for this technique. I haven't typed the dream up yet, but once I do, I'll link it in this post. Basically, I waited until I was pretty deep into a long LD (about 2 hours or so into the dream, in dream time). I did this because I wanted to wait for a dream that already had time dilation active in one way or another (in reality this dream lasted about 45 minutes, but it lasted much longer dream time). I found a DC and told them I was looking for a computer that can dilate time and extend my lucid dream. The DC pointed me toward a bathroom. I entered and found the computer. I typed in 3 hours and hit ok. It "confirmed my order." The dream lasted maybe 30 minutes (dream time) after this point. I guess its possible that my doubts for this method bled through, but I thought I adjusted my mind pretty well in preparation. I just don't think that time dilation is something that can be controlled so easily, but I'll continue to experiment. I just think that computer typing isn't going to do it for me :P.

Nice thread everyone.

It's gotta be an ability we are able to hone and develop, that of experiencing it (which as far as I'm concerned is what really matters at the point we're in). I mean, people are talking about experiencing hours within minutes, often twice the amount of time actually spent dreaming, if that's so, with proper understanding couldn't that be escalated? Also there are people consistently experiencing lucidly different degrees of this phenomenon which begs the question, what do they all have in common to different levels and intensities? Or are we better of assuming it is impossible for us to figure it out and put it in a box?

I have experienced time contracting (?) extremely with conscious awake meditation where for example an hour or two (not sure anymore) felt like a couple of minutes. Time / perception of time is edgy, it's much too soon to close the case my friends :)

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Originally Posted by KingYoshi

Well, I google searched time dilation and lucid dreams. I found plenty of discussions, but this one guy on another forum uses a computer to massively manipulate time. I mean, he claims to spend weeks in a lucid dream. Basically, all he does is type in the time on a computer. He types in the number of hours he wants to stay in the dream. So, I decided to try this. I tried my best to suppress any expectations and doubts I had for this technique. I haven't typed the dream up yet, but once I do, I'll link it in this post. Basically, I waited until I was pretty deep into a long LD (about 2 hours or so into the dream, in dream time). I did this because I wanted to wait for a dream that already had time dilation active in one way or another (in reality this dream lasted about 45 minutes, but it lasted much longer dream time). I found a DC and told them I was looking for a computer that can dilate time and extend my lucid dream. The DC pointed me toward a bathroom. I entered and found the computer. I typed in 3 hours and hit ok. It "confirmed my order." The dream lasted maybe 30 minutes (dream time) after this point. I guess its possible that my doubts for this method bled through, but I thought I adjusted my mind pretty well in preparation. I just don't think that time dilation is something that can be controlled so easily, but I'll continue to experiment. I just think that computer typing isn't going to do it for me :P.

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Interesting idea I'm going to have to try that myself next time I'm in a lucid dream. I'm glad to see suggestions, I'll try some more ideas I have and I'll post results if i have any.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Here's the thing, as I see it, about time dilation.

There is no such thing as time. There is no thing made of mass or energy that can be called "time." There is no time wave or time particle (sorry Star Trek fans). Time is simply the tool for measurement that we use to understand actual physical events like change, movement, velocity or acceleration. Unfortunately (for these purposes), that tool has been so completely embedded into our psyches that we are hard-pressed to experience reality without time on hand to help us wrap our heads around what we see. Indeed, our invention of time the tool was so complete that it has followed us into our dreams -- a dream, especially a LD, will pass in about the same amount of time as whatever time is passing in waking life. Under the rules we've created for observing reality, even dream reality, there seems no way to experience reality without using time to measure it, and apparently that yardstick of time is ruled immutably.

So, you cannot dilate time because it doesn't exist, and how can you change the dimensions of a concept that has no dimension? Also, you can't dilate time because its "length" has been perfectly fused into our psyches, giving us a nearly indomitable "sense" of time that can only be slightly effected by things like boredom or excitement. Seems a pretty tough nut to crack.

But what if, in dreams, you can possibly eliminate the nut itself? As the OP suggests, since you can do anything in the reality that is your dreams, instead of dilating time -- which might be impossible for the reasons I just said above -- why not simply ignore it? Why not just remove it from the process of how you observe and participate in the reality of your dreams?

This would be extremely difficult, because the programming is so perfectly imbedded in us to use time, but it seems that, with enough effort, you ought to be able to produce a dream that does not include time. Here's the irony in successfully doing so, though:

Erase time from your dream and suddenly your existence in the dream is eternal. You might be in your dream world "forever," but you won't know it, because eternity is no more than an endless here & now, with no time passing.

tl;dr: So, Tye, your conundrum might be more simply stated: Yes, you can do or change everything in a dream, but time, unfortunately, is not a thing, so it cannot be changed... it must instead be ignored, erased, or rather removed from your mind's toolbox for comprehending reality.

I don't think I'm being very helpful or clear here, and I'm confident that my opinion is in an extreme minority, so I think I'll stop ... just thought I'd share my thoughts, and maybe plug the thread I started about the nonexistence of time, because I think that's what really matters in a conversation like this.

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I'd hate to reply to a post more than 1 month old, but I feel compelled to do so.
With that said, I can say with near certainty that time does exist, that it can be altered, and it's effects can be observed.
For a long time (pun not intended) physicist couldn't really explain what time was or if it even existed, however, Einstein's theory of general relativity explains how time works. In his theory Einstein claimed that space and time were intimately woven together like a straw basket. He also described how any object with mass bends space around it. This bending of space was his way of explaining gravity but this is also interesting because it states that because the object bends space it also indirectly bends time. This has the interesting effect of "slowing" time down around the object. For small objects with little mass this is barely noticeable with even the most accurate atomic clocks man has ever built. However, this time-bending effect becomes much more noticeable when the object in question is extremely large and massive.

Black holes, for instance, are the most massive and densest objects known to exist in the universe. This means they have an extremely powerful gravitational force (the most powerful of any know object) and it also means they bend time to an enormous extent. How enormous? Well, imagine you had a space craft that could teleport you into orbit around the closest super-massive black hole near you. Should you orbit this black hole for what you believe would be 1 year and then teleported back to earth, you would find that while you have only aged 1 year while earth has aged many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This is not a trick, people on board you spaceship will have experienced time at a different rate than people on earth. What is amazing about this is that you would not notice it. People on your spaceship would feel like time is moving exactly how it should be. Concurrently people on earth would feel like time is moving exactly how it should be moving as well. It's actually quite mind blowing. (And yes, this is kind of a way to time travel into the future without aging all that much but it is a one way trip)

To give a real world example on why this is important let's talk about GPS, or Global Positioning Systems. Our GPS systems are all based on satellites in orbit around earth. Now GPS satellites have internal atomic clocks in them that are extremely accurate. However, scientists found that atomic clocks in orbit around the earth ticked slightly "faster" than atomic clocks on earth. This is because an object's gravitational pull gets more powerful as you get closer to it's gravitational center and thus time is bent more on the surface of the object than in orbit around the object. So why would this be a big deal? Because the GPS systems in our cars are all based on receiving signals from 4 different satellites around earth. All 4 of these signals reach your car at different times which tells the car's GPS exactly what it's position on earth is. However, should the satellite's atomic clocks get out of synch with the GPS clocks in your car your GPS systems will not work properly. Thankfully scientists identified this problem and adjusted the satellite's clocks accordingly to insure they stayed in synch with our clocks our surface clocks.

Because of Einsteins breakthroughs most physicists are now quite certain that time is a real thing and not merely a concept invented by man to explain nature's law of cause and effect in a coherent and understandable way.

(Sorry if this was too off topic or if there are glaring errors in my grammar or sentence structure. I wrote this hastily just to get my point across and not waste too much time. If it is determined this post is too off topic I will gladly edit it into something more topic friendly. Also, if you would like to learn more about how time works and how gravity/mass/energy effect it I suggest you google it as it is quite a fascinating subject)

^^ Okay, the backup for your statement is compelling, but aren't all your examples really showing that changes in the state of actual matter and energy require changes in our use of time as a tool for measuring that change? And you repeatedly said that time gets "bent." What exactly is the material or force that is being bent?

Also, from where did you hear that, since Einstein, "most physicists are now quite certain that time is a real thing?" I had heard exactly the opposite, that time "existed" quite soundly until Einstein et al came along and showed that time can be quite different from perspective to perspective, and that its once-assumed concrete "behavior" broke down pretty regularly. Indeed, from what I've seen, quantum theorists are using time more as a mathematical place-setter than ever before... what have I been seeing wrong?

I'm not being facetious here, or playing with words. I think my original thesis still stands: there is no material or force that can be quantified as a thing called "time." No particles, no waves, no anything at all. Yes, motion and change exist, and from our perspective there must be time present to understand that motion and change. But is it present as a tool for observation and understanding, or would it be there even if we were not? I'm still going with the former, I think. Plus, our perspective can change, can't it?

The changes in time that you list only more clearly note its lack of substance: What other item in physics can change its very nature like that? Yes, particles in a black hole might be mightily compressed, but they are still particles (and should they stop being particles, I believe something cataclysmic happens, like a big bang -- so they can return to their "correct" state, perhaps). The same goes for the forces: gravity increases in a black hole, but it is still gravity, and that gravity still behaves in a uniform manner. Light seems to "bend" as it passes through gravity wells, though it is still going quite straight, and its particles are continuing to behave in a predictable, relatively unchanging manner. How is it that time actually gets bent, even though there is nothing to bend? Could it be that time must change in order to make the formulas work and enable us to somehow grasp events like change and motion? And doesn't it make sense that, as a tool rather than an object or force, time would be the part of the formulas to change? I does to me.

So, though your argument is clear, I think it might do more to describe time as an unreal tool than as an existent article of energy or matter. If all physicists now are sure that time is real, where are their experiments splitting time particles, or generating time waves? Shouldn't someone by now have bottled time?

Please note, Tranquility Trip, that I speak respectively and with no sarcasm. I think this subject is important, and innate human acceptance of time as a real "thing" might form a formidable obstacle that prevents us from making great new "outside the box" strides in consciousness development. Like, for instance, functional methods to change the tool and dilate time.

And yes, I would love to be proven wrong, because, if time did have presence as matter or force, that would make it a thing we could physically manipulate ... which would be very cool, because we're already very practiced at manipulating things physically, as opposed to consciously.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Okay, the backup for your statement is compelling, but aren't all your examples really showing that changes in the state of actual matter and energy require changes in our use of time as a tool for measuring that change? And you repeatedly said that time gets "bent." What exactly is the material or force that is being bent?

Also, from where did you hear that, since Einstein, "most physicists are now quite certain that time is a real thing?" I had heard exactly the opposite, that time "existed" quite soundly until Einstein et al came along and showed that time can be quite different from perspective to perspective, and that its once-assumed concrete "behavior" broke down pretty regularly. Indeed, from what I've seen, quantum theorists are using time more as a mathematical place-setter than ever before... what have I been seeing wrong?

I'm not being facetious here, or playing with words. I think my original thesis still stands: there is no material or force that can be quantified as a thing called "time." No particles, no waves, no anything at all. Yes, motion and change exist, and from our perspective there must be time present to understand that motion and change. But is it present as a tool for observation and understanding, or would it be there even if we were not? I'm still going with the former, I think. Plus, our perspective can change, can't it?

The changes in time that you list only more clearly note its lack of substance: What other item in physics can change its very nature like that? Yes, particles in a black hole might be mightily compressed, but they are still particles (and should they stop being particles, I believe something cataclysmic happens, like a big bang -- so they can return to their "correct" state, perhaps). The same goes for the forces: gravity increases in a black hole, but it is still gravity, and that gravity still behaves in a uniform manner. Light seems to "bend" as it passes through gravity wells, though it is still going quite straight, and its particles are continuing to behave in a predictable, relatively unchanging manner. How is it that time actually gets bent, even though there is nothing to bend? Could it be that time must change in order to make the formulas work and enable us to somehow grasp events like change and motion? And doesn't it make sense that, as a tool rather than an object or force, time would be the part of the formulas to change? I does to me.

So, though your argument is clear, I think it might do more to describe time as an unreal tool than as an existent article of energy or matter. If all physicists now are sure that time is real, where are their experiments splitting time particles, or generating time waves? Shouldn't someone by now have bottled time?

Please note, Tranquility Trip, that I speak respectively and with no sarcasm. I think this subject is important, and innate human acceptance of time as a real "thing" might form a formidable obstacle that prevents us from making great new "outside the box" strides in consciousness development. Like, for instance, functional methods to change the tool and dilate time.

And yes, I would love to be proven wrong, because, if time did have presence as matter or force, that would make it a thing we could physically manipulate ... which would be very cool, because we're already very practiced at manipulating things physically, as opposed to consciously.

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It is unknown what time actually is. However, the most commonly held belief is that it is a dimensional plane. The fourth to be exact. In this way it may not even exist in the same way we usually think of something "existing". This means that time is not a physical object as much as it is a plane of existence. This dimensional plane (of time) is technically separate from our 3 spacial dimensions, however, they are both are wrapped around each other so that anything affecting one also affects the other.
So, to answer your question on what gravity is bending when I say it is "bending" time is the same answer I would give to the question about what gravity is bending when we say gravity bends space. It is bending the dimensional planes that make up our universe. This may also answer you question as to "what other item in physics can change it's very nature like that", in which case the answer is space itself.
Furthermore, it may also answer your question on why we haven't been able to isolate time particles/waves, it would be like asking why we haven't been able to isolate space particles/waves.
(This is all dependent on whether or not time is a dimensional plane, which so far our experiments suggest it is)
I'm going to completely avoid touching upon any form of quantum physics if only because I am even less qualified to speak upon it than normal physics and because quantum physics makes my head spin at times :cheeky:.

(P.S. I hope I'm not confusing too many people or making unclear and unsupported points. I'm only 16 and have been only studying basic physics on my free time for about 3 years now. So I am by no means an authority on this topic and as such should not be held with the same respect as a professional would/should be.)

^^ The easy response to your above post is that space also does not physically exist, for the exact same reasons that time doesn't exist, but that would just sound snarky, I think. A valid response, yes, but still snarky!

I've never heard of these successful experiments that suggest time is a dimensional plane; care to share a link? Also, wouldn't this dimensional plane of time need to coexist with our dimensions, or else we would not be able to experience it?

Otherwise I'm afraid I'm not convinced. Calling time a dimension does not call it a physical entity, I think, as dimensions usually tend to be more convenient mathematical devices than actual things or places, and in no way confirm physical properties. Also, if you're not into quantum mechanics yet, well, there is where time as an entity tends to break up, so there's really not much to talk about. To avoid a long discussion that wanders off-topic and succeeds at nothing, I suggest we leave it at that, with each of us still in our own camps.... it would still be nice to get that link, though!

Sorry for the digression, Tye...

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ The easy response to your above post is that space also does not physically exist, for the exact same reasons that time doesn't exist, but that would just sound snarky, I think. A valid response, yes, but still snarky!

I've never heard of these successful experiments that suggest time is a dimensional plane; care to share a link? Also, wouldn't this dimensional plane of time need to coexist with our dimensions, or else we would not be able to experience it?

Otherwise I'm afraid I'm not convinced. Calling time a dimension does not call it a physical entity, I think, as dimensions usually tend to be more convenient mathematical devices than actual things or places, and in no way confirm physical properties. Also, if you're not into quantum mechanics yet, well, there is where time as an entity tends to break up, so there's really not much to talk about. To avoid a long discussion that wanders off-topic and succeeds at nothing, I suggest we leave it at that, with each of us still in our own camps.... it would still be nice to get that link, though!

Sorry for the digression, Tye...

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hehe, yes I believe we both expressed our sides quite well and am glad it remained in the bounds of a respectable conversation and there would be no reason to continue this conversation of physics and philosophy on a lucid dreaming forum (lol). I will try my best to get you those links for you btw :).
To get us slightly more on topic however, I would like to ask you something. Have you ever personally believed you had dialated time in a dream by a rather great deal, such as making a 1 hours dream last 2 hours in dream time?
I'm sorry if you already answered this question earlier in this thread, but I looked and couldn't seem to find if you did or not.

We can talk about time dilation as a mental construct and not assume time itself is altered. I am sure that is in line with the OP. I have experienced what would seem to be an entire evening in LDs. The perceived time being perhaps 5 hours, while it is physically unlikely I could have maintained an LD much beyond 90 minutes.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Sorry for the digression, Tye...

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It's alright Sageous, I feel like having discussions about the existence of time is awesome, but we should talk about the existence or non existence of course, and how the existence or non existence would relates to dreams.

Also after thinking about this topic for a while, I think that there is no such thing as time also. I think that events happen and humans create a system in their mind on how they perceive events happening. This is also why I believe time travel into the past is impossible because events happen there is simply no backwards because there is no time. It is somewhat hard to think of the concept because we use time for everything. I think time exists in a way, but that it is just a classification system of everything that happens in the universe.

I think it can relate to dreams if you can alter your classification of time in dreams.

Pretty much everything that tranquility trip has said comes straight out of einstein's theory of relativity. We experience time as he's talking about everyday like with the gps clocks. As well as all 4 of the dimensions that he has mentioned as they are all bound together. Im not sure how to link you to something supporting this but its not too difficult to find if you google the theory of relativity and time as the fourth dimension.

Hey doesnt it also say in his theory somewhere that if you could travel at the speed of light that time would stop for you or go backwards compared to others not moving at the speed of light?? This feels like its probably a dumb idea but maybe you could try using this idea somehow in a lucid dream...wait nevermind I guess this would only make it seem like time dilation would have happened. Nevertheless maybe a possible starting point perhaps?

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Originally Posted by rastro13

Pretty much everything that tranquility trip has said comes straight out of einstein's theory of relativity. We experience time as he's talking about everyday like with the gps clocks. As well as all 4 of the dimensions that he has mentioned as they are all bound together. Im not sure how to link you to something supporting this but its not too difficult to find if you google the theory of relativity and time as the fourth dimension.

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Yes, as I told Tranquility Toad already, all his examples were valid and familiar to me. I also told him that they tended to illustrate the "non-existence" of time by pointing out how time is uniquely changeable, thus lacking the inherent stability of all forms of matter and energy. I was looking for specific experiments proving time as fourth dimension; I'm sure that I can google explanations of it easily, because time has been known metaphorically as the fourth dimension at least since Newton, and there will be plenty of folks describing it as such. No, I was looking for the mentioned successful experiments proving that time exits as a separate and somehow connected physical fourth dimension, and that unfortunately is far beyond my feeble search skills.

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Hey doesnt it also say in his theory somewhere that if you could travel at the speed of light that time would stop for you or go backwards compared to others not moving at the speed of light?? This feels like its probably a dumb idea but maybe you could try using this idea somehow in a lucid dream...wait nevermind I guess this would only make it seem like time dilation would have happened. Nevertheless maybe a possible starting point perhaps?

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Not such a bad idea at all, I think! Yes, you'd need to set yourself as the observer of an object exceeding the speed of light -- as if you're waiting for it to come home -- and attempt to experience its passage through your time, if that makes any sense. But that part might not matter, since the expectations woven into such a concept might be enough to separate yourself from the constraints of your internal clock. Might be worth a shot!

If time dilation is possible in a dream then shouldn't a skilled practitioner be able to dilate his perception of time in real life too, or at least in a light meditative state.

The concept still makes absolutely no sense to me, and honestly I don't see how you could "trick" your mind into dilating time but that's something I'll leave since no one here can really have the answer. As sageous has pointed out, the nature of time is pretty much unknown and we just don't know enough about it to make usable assumptions on how it works. For now I will try it for myself and wait for others to prove scientifically of their abilities.

Has anyone here ever successfully dilated time in waking life?

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Originally Posted by dutchraptor

If time dilation is possible in a dream then shouldn't a skilled practitioner be able to dilate his perception of time in real life too, or at least in a light meditative state.

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Absolutely! To me the real attraction of time dilation -- or more specifically adjusting your perception and use of time -- in LD's is that, once we can learn to "erase" time where it should be easy to do so (in a LD), then it might be possible to do so in waking life.

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Originally Posted by dutchraptor

If time dilation is possible in a dream then shouldn't a skilled practitioner be able to dilate his perception of time in real life too, or at least in a light meditative state.

The concept still makes absolutely no sense to me, and honestly I don't see how you could "trick" your mind into dilating time but that's something I'll leave since no one here can really have the answer. As sageous has pointed out, the nature of time is pretty much unknown and we just don't know enough about it to make usable assumptions on how it works. For now I will try it for myself and wait for others to prove scientifically of their abilities.

Has anyone here ever successfully dilated time in waking life?

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Yes. If we again accept time dilation as nothing more than an issue of time appearing to alter.

I learned in martial arts how to do that trick Neo does where everything appears to move slower, giving me an advantage in any physical conflict. I used it one time simply because my I-phone was falling towards a concrete floor. I did not keep it from hitting, but it allowed me to hook it with a foot, and make three attempts to get my hands on it. I slowed the phone enough it landed gently. This is not something sustainable and lasts perhaps less than 10 seconds. However, in a fight having 10 seconds stretch out like 30 gives a huge advantage.

In meditation I can remove time as an easily perceived factor. It just involves passing time while meditation without thinking much. In one class the instructor said I had been in deep meditation over 15 minutes before be disturbed me, but I guessed my time at under 5 minutes.

Like I already said here I once experienced the opposite of time dilation where 2 hours meditating felt like 5 minutes or so, it was an isolated event and not intentional.

I don't recall ever experiencing any significant time dilation in my dreams though and I would love to see the people advanced enough in "skill" and opportunity aiming for this and reporting what they find overtime, I mean seriously this has to be a pinnacle to dreaming consciously.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Here's the thing, as I see it, about time dilation.

There is no such thing as time. There is no thing made of mass or energy that can be called "time." There is no time wave or time particle (sorry Star Trek fans). Time is simply the tool for measurement that we use to understand actual physical events like change, movement, velocity or acceleration. Unfortunately (for these purposes), that tool has been so completely embedded into our psyches that we are hard-pressed to experience reality without time on hand to help us wrap our heads around what we see. Indeed, our invention of time the tool was so complete that it has followed us into our dreams -- a dream, especially a LD, will pass in about the same amount of time as whatever time is passing in waking life. Under the rules we've created for observing reality, even dream reality, there seems no way to experience reality without using time to measure it, and apparently that yardstick of time is ruled immutably.

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Sageous, let me say first that I have respect for you and mostly agree with what you're saying, but I find your presentation of it to be rather frustrating. I don't think you're doing this on purpose, like I don't think that you're perceiving it this way, but trying to look at this from an objective standpoint it sounds very contradictory. The first thing you do is claim that time doesn't exist, and then you go on to describe how it does. I get what you're trying to say when you say that time doesn't exist, but I think you're going to mislead people more than help them by saying it that way. Just because something is a measurement tool doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it doesn't have very real boundaries.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

So, you cannot dilate time because it doesn't exist, and how can you change the dimensions of a concept that has no dimension? Also, you can't dilate time because its "length" has been perfectly fused into our psyches, giving us a nearly indomitable "sense" of time that can only be slightly effected by things like boredom or excitement. Seems a pretty tough nut to crack.

But what if, in dreams, you can possibly eliminate the nut itself? As the OP suggests, since you can do anything in the reality that is your dreams, instead of dilating time -- which might be impossible for the reasons I just said above -- why not simply ignore it? Why not just remove it from the process of how you observe and participate in the reality of your dreams?

This would be extremely difficult, because the programming is so perfectly imbedded in us to use time, but it seems that, with enough effort, you ought to be able to produce a dream that does not include time. Here's the irony in successfully doing so, though:

Erase time from your dream and suddenly your existence in the dream is eternal. You might be in your dream world "forever," but you won't know it, because eternity is no more than an endless here & now, with no time passing.

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This is where we really start to differ though. Certain experiences and drugs have been shown to consistently alter our perception of the passage of time. I believe what you're trying to say is that because time does not exist as a physical external object it must be illusory. I can't agree with this, because I believe that our perception of time exists as a physical internal object, one that is rigidly defined by our neurochemistry. Of course, when it comes to how each neurochemical state is personally experienced there will always be some subjectivity involved, but I do believe that there are hardwired methods of either lengthening or shortening it which as far as we're concerned would amount to the same thing as changing the external time object, at least in situations like this. I also don't believe that this system can simply be ignored, no matter what you do.

Do you get what I mean?

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Originally Posted by dutchraptor

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 :P). 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. \

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The brain verifiably works this way as well. A very easy example of this would be in the way that very strong adrenaline rushes, which cause strong time dilation, can cause things like temporary colorblindness. Your body works this way in other purposes as well, such as shutting down vital organs in a near death situation in order to divert all power to keeping the brain alive. Both of these examples are ways that your body tries to maximize your chances of survival by cutting out everything but what is absolutely necessary for you to continue to make decisions to survive, and because of this combined with stimulation to the parts of your brain involved in perception and decision-making, that time dilation can occur.

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Originally Posted by Alyzarin

Sageous, let me say first that I have respect for you and mostly agree with what you're saying, but I find your presentation of it to be rather frustrating. I don't think you're doing this on purpose, like I don't think that you're perceiving it this way, but trying to look at this from an objective standpoint it sounds very contradictory. The first thing you do is claim that time doesn't exist, and then you go on to describe how it does. I get what you're trying to say when you say that time doesn't exist, but I think you're going to mislead people more than help them by saying it that way. Just because something is a measurement tool doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it doesn't have very real boundaries.

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Interesting point (maybe that's why I have so much trouble explaining myself? ;)), but I don't think I'm being contradictory at all, because the map is not the territory.

Any more than I feel that a hammer is a nail, or the word "tree" is a tree, I don't feel that our perception of time is time, no matter how hardwired that perception may be in our brains and genetic memory. In other words, sure, the neural activity requisite to perceive time is real, and I suppose the conscious energy we expend using time to perceive reality also exists to some degree, but neither of those things actually are time, they're just very well established maps of what we've decided to have represent our invented concept of time. I hope that made some sense; if not, it's all I got!

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This is where we really start to differ though. Certain experiences and drugs have been shown to consistently alter our perception of the passage of time. I believe what you're trying to say is that because time does not exist as a physical external object it must be illusory. I can't agree with this, because I believe that our perception of time exists as a physical internal object, one that is rigidly defined by our neurochemistry. Of course, when it comes to how each neurochemical state is personally experienced there will always be some subjectivity involved, but I do believe that there are hardwired methods of either lengthening or shortening it which as far as we're concerned would amount to the same thing as changing the external time object, at least in situations like this. I also don't believe that this system can simply be ignored, no matter what you do.

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Not so much differing, I think! Believe it or not I am in general agreement with that statement, and have repeatedly agreed with it; hell, I even said it myself a couple of times on this and other threads. Of course we can all slightly alter our perception of "time;" anyone who's been bored or in the midst of an adrenalin rush knows this quite well. But, as I said in the last paragraph, just because there is actual neurochemical activity going on to aid our perception of changes in reality, does that mean time itself is real? I don't think so. Sure, something is real, but it ain't time. So, yes, we all slightly dilate our perception of "time" regularly, but we are only changing the stuff inside our heads, not time itself. Indeed, I think you're confirming once again that time itself is an illusion; now it is just manufactured by our nuerochemistry as well as by our consciousness!

Also, I'm not sure these slight adjustments in perceived time are what Tye means when he discusses time dilation. I believe he (and others on these forums) are looking to dilate time in LD's much more dramatically, to the tune of hours, days, even years in one dream. I don't think neurochemistry would be able to keep up with those kind of changes.

...So maybe we don't differ so much at all? Maybe we're just talking about two different things?

As usual, please be assured that I am speaking respectfully and without sarcasm -- if you detect the opposite, just ignore it...

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Interesting point (maybe that's why I have so much trouble explaining myself? ;)), but I don't think I'm being contradictory at all, because the map is not the territory.

Any more than I feel that a hammer is a nail, or the word "tree" is a tree, I don't feel that our perception of time is time, no matter how hardwired that perception may be in our brains and genetic memory. In other words, sure, the neural activity requisite to perceive time is real, and I suppose the conscious energy we expend using time to perceive reality also exists to some degree, but neither of those things actually are time, they're just very well established maps of what we've decided to have represent our invented concept of time. I hope that made some sense; if not, it's all I got!

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Alright, I understand what you're saying here, but then this is the next thought that comes to mind for me.

As you said, time is what we use to comprehend changes in physical space. But what I have to ask is, how could these changes possibly occur with any form of reliability or consistency to create the world we live in without moving through a medium such as time? In other words, could it not be that "time" is not the measurement system we created but the one that we evolved to understand? I can't help but compare this concept to things like the laws of physics which, while not in exactly the same category, are nonphysical and yet must exist for our stable universe to.

Of course, this wouldn't change the fact that it's our perception of time, and not time itself, which would play a role in "time dilation". However, I do think it could matter in the sense that in this way our perception of time could be limited by the actual passage of time, as it would be based around that and not something that exists completely on its own. That is to say, the speed by which our brain records our perception of time would still have to comply with the rules of actual time. And I believe this has been the central point of some of the arguments here which attempt to invalidate things like completely abandoning time.

What this would all amount would be that our perception of time is not the measurement of change, but the measurement of the measurement of change. Which seems perfectly logical to me, but I would be happy to hear other views as well.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Not so much differing, I think! Believe it or not I am in general agreement with that statement, and have repeatedly agreed with it; hell, I even said it myself a couple of times on this and other threads. Of course we can all slightly alter our perception of "time;" anyone who's been bored or in the midst of an adrenalin rush knows this quite well. But, as I said in the last paragraph, just because there is actual neurochemical activity going on to aid our perception of changes in reality, does that mean time itself is real? I don't think so. Sure, something is real, but it ain't time. So, yes, we all slightly dilate our perception of "time" regularly, but we are only changing the stuff inside our heads, not time itself. Indeed, I think you're confirming once again that time itself is an illusion; now it is just manufactured by our nuerochemistry as well as by our consciousness!

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Well yes, we are in agreement about this, except for that bit at the end which I proposed a different idea to above. :P In that way the only thing I still can't agree with is that time can be completely dropped, or at least that if it was, it would result in zero perception rather than infinite. In other words, unconsciousness. But I certainly don't mean to suggest that anything we can change in our perception will effect actual time.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Also, I'm not sure these slight adjustments in perceived time are what Tye means when he discusses time dilation. I believe he (and others on these forums) are looking to dilate time in LD's much more dramatically, to the tune of hours, days, even years in one dream. I don't think neurochemistry would be able to keep up with those kind of changes.

...So maybe we don't differ so much at all? Maybe we're just talking about two different things?

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Well, I personally believe that neurochemical changes in the perception can be much more than slight, but that's something I'm still trying to narrow down my own opinion on. I do think that the ability of our minds to extend time to vast lengths in an entirely internally-generated world such as a dream is much greater than it's ability to do so in the waking world. However, the extent to which it is possible, and to which it must involve both changes in the speed of perception and less preferable variables such as delirium, I can't yet say. But I do believe that it is possible to feel what seems like a lucid experience of incredible time dilation when both of these variables are combined and pushed to their limit, such as with a powerful psychedelic experience. But as was said before, I don't know if that would be the ideal goal in a lucid dream.

Anyway, I have some more to say on this, but I'm about to go for a swim, so perhaps later.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

As usual, please be assured that I am speaking respectfully and without sarcasm -- if you detect the opposite, just ignore it...

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No aggression detected, just opinions. :)

I will explain a little about the stuff I have experienced.

1) 5 hour dream in just 90 minutes? It is simply the illusion of passing time, created by an abridged story line. For instance, during the seeming 5 hours, no time was spent waiting for anything, no time was spent in the rest room and 'long conversations' probably were only exchanges of 20 or fewer sentences that felt much much longer. When walking down a street that in waking life may contain 30 properties, the brain abridges it to more like 5 to 9 properties, creating an illusion that you have been on a very long walk.

2) The Neo time dilation effect only seems to work in the presence of need. It is not supposed to be useful over and over throughout a normal day. It works well in a fight, or an accident. If you ask me that suggests that while a learned skill, it requires a surge of adrenaline. Others have commented on adrenaline here. When my I-phone fell and I was able to do the slowed time Neo effect, keep in mind the phone is very expensive, so I probably did have an adrenaline rush seeing it plummet towards concrete.

3) The meditation thing is probably just a matter of controlling the rate of thought. If we gage time by change then we kind of use the rate of thought as a marker. Seriously decrease the rate of the internal voice, and you get the appearance of time going away.

However, if we want to talk about the fantasy of spending an actual life within a dream, well, that seems like a matter of how much processing power. It may be possible for a brain to process so keenly and fast that a lot of experience could fit into a short time, while dreaming. This is basically running the brain on overdrive. I assume experiencing twice the actual time may be possible, but you would have to run out of processing power at some point. Perhaps a few hours experienced in 45 minutes might be realistic (maybe?) but not actual experience of days worth of input. That is all in the realm of sci-fi at some point.

Ok tell me if this might give time dialtion any more of a chance to happen. What if instead of your brain having to make all new memories for the dream to last for say a day dream time vs an hour real time, it was able to take memories that were already there inside your head from the past and just slightly change them to make them feel more real and of their own. Seems like your processing speed or time wouldnt make as much of a difference if this was possible. I just googled what a memory physically looks like and I found that your memories actually do change as you make new ones and learn new things. Does this make any sense or am I on the wrong track here completely?

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Originally Posted by rastro13

Ok tell me if this might give time dialtion any more of a chance to happen. What if instead of your brain having to make all new memories for the dream to last for say a day dream time vs an hour real time, it was able to take memories that were already there inside your head from the past and just slightly change them to make them feel more real and of their own. Seems like your processing speed or time wouldnt make as much of a difference if this was possible. I just googled what a memory physically looks like and I found that your memories actually do change as you make new ones and learn new things. Does this make any sense or am I on the wrong track here completely?

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Sounds like a reasonable thought. You may be able to reduce the need for processing speed if the data is already in place.

I think the reason I keep insisting/reminding that time doesn't exist is that I'm not sure that our physical brains, powerful as they may be, are wired to handle the accelerated processing you guys are talking about. Simply thinking faster just won't cut it, I think, even if you are working with pre-existing memory only and not creating anything new. There is simply too much involved in creating and experiencing a reality in a dream whose "time-span" dramatically exceeds the waking-life timespan of the dream. As many very smart people have already observed, extreme time-dilation may lie beyond our physical capabilities.

So, for that extreme time-dilation to work, a dreamer would need to step very far out of the box of physical reality as we know it. Something commensurately extreme must be done, like, for instance, eliminating or redefining time itself as a part of your dream.

Of course I could be wrong, but it makes sense to me...

That's it, my brain just said "I got your 'powerful as they may be' right here, buddy," and shut off.

I'm going to throw out a theory here not sure if it has already been mentioned or not. Why not simply create many memories in your lucid dream and let your mind fill in the details when you wake up. I've personally had dreams that have lasted days in dreamtime, but don't seem that long. If my conscious awake brain comes up with things to fill the gaps which it has before, then dreams that feel like 30 minutes seem like they lasted longer after I woke up.

This isn't really time dilation for say, but rather is like tricking your mind into thinking you had longer dreams. Sadly this doesn't help if you want a really long lucid dream, but can be very useful for non-lucid dreams.

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Originally Posted by rastro13

Ok tell me if this might give time dialtion any more of a chance to happen. What if instead of your brain having to make all new memories for the dream to last for say a day dream time vs an hour real time, it was able to take memories that were already there inside your head from the past and just slightly change them to make them feel more real and of their own. Seems like your processing speed or time wouldnt make as much of a difference if this was possible. I just googled what a memory physically looks like and I found that your memories actually do change as you make new ones and learn new things. Does this make any sense or am I on the wrong track here completely?

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No, to alter a memory still requires you to live through it, the same processing power would be needed to make it fit into the storyline. Secondly our dreams are largely created from memory anyways, what you are saying is how many dreams form anyways.

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Originally Posted by Tye

I'm going to throw out a theory here not sure if it has already been mentioned or not. Why not simply create many memories in your lucid dream and let your mind fill in the details when you wake up. I've personally had dreams that have lasted days in dreamtime, but don't seem that long. If my conscious awake brain comes up with things to fill the gaps which it has before, then dreams that feel like 30 minutes seem like they lasted longer after I woke up.

This isn't really time dilation for say, but rather is like tricking your mind into thinking you had longer dreams. Sadly this doesn't help if you want a really long lucid dream, but can be very useful for non-lucid dreams.

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Yes and it's fun to do. But it also is completely distinct from true time dilation, it won't help you get more work done or live a life within a dream.

Alright, I've been thinking about this, like, all of yesterday afternoon and this morning, and here's what I could come up with lol. Not set in stone by any means yet but this is probably going to be my most solid theory for now. First I'm going to explain why I believe that relatively intense time dilation is possible. I'll be doing this using the experiences that I believe are the ones that can the most consistently provide sensations of significant time dilation, which would be those of hallucinogenic drugs. Then, when I've gotten my point across about that, I'll relate it to dreams. Before I get started though, I do need to cover my views on what consciousness is so that this can make sense.

I personally believe that what we are experiencing at any moment, the point of view that allows us to see the world, is a result of our encoded sensory perceptions being written into memory. This, I feel, is supported pretty well by the fact that it is possible to experience "blackouts", such as on alcohol, benzodiazepines, anticholinergics, and etc., wherein our bodies are able to continue functioning with at least some level of normalcy despite the fact that we won't even experience it. I want to highlight that fact: it's not that you recall experiencing it but just can't remember it, it's literally like it didn't even happen. If you've ever had way too much to drink and hit that point, or taken too high of a dose of alprazolam or something similar at once, you'll know what I mean. It's like you're there having a good time, and then suddenly you're just waking up the next day, despite all the stuff your friends tell you you continued to do after that point. I believe that this simply reflects the fact that these drugs effect the memory systems of the brain more potently than things like motor actions, so even though those things are inhibited, they're still able to function even when things like memory and therefore consciousness fail. I also believe that this idea is supported very well by the fact that the parts of the brain involved in memory are also those involved in hallucinations. When that process of memory recording is significantly altered, it will show through as our minds start to record incorrect information and we see the results as hallucinations. This also ties into the fact that dreams happen when those memory systems are running at very high capacity, so that the reason we experience dreams is because our brain is being stimulated to the point that it's recording memories even in an absence of external information. To me, these things pretty much all but prove it, but I'd also be willing to give more examples if anyone wanted any.

Now, on to the time dilation. I believe that the first major player in this is the speed with which memories are recorded. As I see it, the easiest way to enhance this is to increase the amount of information that your mind is recording all at once, and nowhere does this stand out better than with a psychedelic experience, especially one like DMT. DMT is well-known because a trip from smoking it can easily seem to last hours for many people despite the fact that in reality the trip only lasts about five to ten minutes. This can sound absurd, but I believe that when you piece it together it's entirely logical. Psychedelics work mainly through the 5-HT2A receptor in the brain to create their effects, which I will detail here. First, there's the fact that these receptors in the prefrontal cortex have a facilitatory control over dopamine release from the ventral tegmental area, which is the source of dopamine neurons involved in perception. This means that when they're activated, things that would normally release a set amount of dopamine will release more than normal. Sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, imagination, learning... anything that normally involves dopamine will be enhanced, which means it will take up more of your focus at once. In addition to this, the dopamine release to the nucleus accumbens, and possibly other parts of the brain as well, will lower your latent inhibition. This is our basic ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli, and it is disrupted in conditions like schizophrenia. What it basically comes down to is that not only will all of your sensations be enhanced, but you'll pick up more of them; things that you normally wouldn't notice, background sounds like white noise or distant sounds, the specific textures of objects in your peripheral vision, smells that you've gotten used to, etc., will all reach the forefront of your perception as if you were paying close attention to them, in addition to the things that actually are right in front of you anyway.

This is how psychedelics enhance the regular sensory data you're already getting, but there's so much more than that going on too. In addition to all of that, 5-HT2A receptors exist on their own pretty densely in several sensory areas of the brain, and this is why psychedelics can cause hallucinatory sensory perceptions to overlap the regular ones. The most easily noticeable of these is there effect on the visual cortex, which is responsible for things like tracers, light and color distortions and intensifications, visual feedback errors, fractal patterns, wave-like distortions in the integrity of 3D space, and, in higher doses, total loss of normal visual function stretching into the perceptions of objects twisting, bending, morphing, and self-perpetuating at impossible angles and dimensions. These are by far the easiest changes to comprehend (and that's really saying something), but keep in mind that these kinds of chaotic alterations will be happening to your other senses as well, though I would say usually a little less intensely than with the visuals, but it's still some pretty heavy stuff. Now, what you have to remember, is that these changes are happening in the raw sensory areas. As far as your brain is concerned, there is no difference between these drug-induced signals and ones that would come from actually seeing these things in the external world, which is why they seem as real as actual perceptions at the time. However, where that is significant is that the brain will also be releasing dopamine from these senses in addition to the regular ones. That means that everything I said before, about your regular senses becoming intensified from facilitating the ventral tegmental area will apply to these as well. But it doesn't stop there. 5-HT2A receptors also exist in the parts of the brain that are significant the the proper integration of sensory information as it travels from its raw format to be used to create the world we before us. Because of this, not only is the information further altered, but sensations such as synesthesia can begin to occur, or senses blending together. This means that not only are all these heavy, heavy sensory signals being used to construct their own sense, but your other senses well.

On top of everything else, psychedelics also stimulate the areas of the brain involved in focus and memory. Because of this they are also directly hallucinogenic, and in high enough doses can cause out-of-body experiences and full dream sequences. These areas of the brain actually cause complex visions by working together with areas of the brain involved in higher visual processing functions, not those specifically for just receiving raw information, but for recognizing things like faces, bodies, letters and words, numbers, familiar environments, and etc. Normally, when we dream, these areas are being activated by these memory centers and nothing else, since areas such as the visual cortex are silent, which allows for recreating relatively normal scenes. However, since these sensory areas are actually even more active than when we're sober and awake when we're on psychedelics, both the input from them and from those centers will be blended together. And just to add insult to injury, 5-HT2A receptors exist in those areas of the brain as well, which means there will be a third, totally unique set of information coming into them that will unite with the other two to form the massively chaotic worlds that psychedelics can bring us to. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in a DMT breakthrough, which is basically like being in an incomprehensible alien landscape that seems even more "real" than the real world.

So like I said, my main idea for how to cause time dilation is to increase the amount of information you're taking in at once. This reflects my aforementioned view that our perception of time is the measurement of the measurement of change; the amount of these measurements that we are writing into memory all at once makes time slow down the higher it gets simply because we are perceiving a larger amount of information in a shorter amount of time, but to us we must still understand this information at what feels like a normal pace, which makes the rest of time seem slower by comparison. So if you've been paying attention, you can probably tell where this is going. There's never going to be any other time in your life when your brain is handling such an absurd amount of sensory information as it is in a psychedelic experience. Given all this, if my theory about how our perception of time works is correct, it seems considerably more plausible to me that an experience which only lasts a few minutes could feel like a few hours. However, that is putting it on the very light side of things, and many people claim experiences that last much longer. However, a DMT breakthrough is simply like an intense psychedelic dream, which I believe is only scratching the surface. All psychedelics, DMT included, can take it a step further than that to what many people refer to as a divine unification with the universal unconsciousness, the Godhead, ego death, or whatever you want to call it. For what it's worth, I've heard of this happening in dreams both lucid and non-lucid before as well, but it wouldn't be on top of all of this sensory information. What's significant about it is that at this point people begin to describe feeling as though they take up infinite space, or are processing an infinite amount of information, and coupled with delusions of grandeur and reference could reasonably be why there are perceptions of speaking to or becoming God. As far as I'm concerned here, these "infinite" perceptions may be simply more along the lines of... for example, trying to imagine having a quantity of an item represented by a number with a hundred thousand digits. It's something that is definitely finite, but is so large as to be completely incomprehensible by any human mind no matter what they do. Given that amount of stimulation that all of these different areas of the brain involved in perception are receiving at the same time, I could definitely see it being the same kind of thing. But of course, where it matters is that fact that the amount of information being processed can seem infinite. If that process is intimately tied to our perception of time, then couldn't that logically seem infinite too in the same scenario?

Before I move on to the next thing, I'd like to make one last point about something. This is a concept which I'd like to call "retrograde" time dilation. On psychedelics, and other drugs, there is an effect where altered or disrupted memory storage makes it seem like a much longer time has passed since the last thing you remember than actually has. I personally believe that this mostly occurs because memories seem more fleeting. On a high dose of a psychedelic, this can become so intense that things that happened moments ago can seem almost like a different lifetime. I would wager that this also plays a pretty important role in the perception of how long these experiences feel.

So, at this point I feel safe in thinking that it's possible for the brain to reach these "infinite" experiences. However, this is obviously not an option when it comes to dreams, because there's no way you could have that unbelievable sensory overload while in a regular dream. So the next thing I have to ask myself is, how exactly is the brain convincing itself of these things downstream, and can this process be activated in the absence of all that sensory data? To make clearer what I mean, take this for example. When glutamate is released and activates metabotropic glutamate 1 receptors in the hippocampus, it induces the synthesis and release of endocannabinoids which then activate CB1 receptors and cause downstream cannabinoid effects. That means that those effects are a direct result of glutamatergic activity. However, if you actually directly activate CB1 receptors through some other method, the easiest to explain being through a drug like THC, then the levels of glutamate drops and glutamatergic activity lowers. But this doesn't stop that CB1 activity from being activated anyway, so in some ways your mind can think that the same kind of thing is happening that would from activation of those glutamate receptors, even though it isn't. By this logic, I ask myself if it's possible for the brain to be pushed to the same amount of processing power through some other method.

The first thing I had to consider was the way that adrenaline rushes cause time dilation. They do increase your focus on your surroundings, but they also begin to cut out subjectively unnecessary data such as color. While following that train of thought, I arrived at dissociatives. See, people throw the word infinite around a lot with psychedelics, but whenever I hear it generally what I take it to mean is just that it felt too long for them to measure. But when I hear someone say something like "I was tripping for a thousand years.", then I know they mean business. This is the kind of thing I hear with dissociatives, like salvia and DXM, and many people claim that dissociatives are much more intense than psychedelics. The way they work though is more often than not the exact opposite. Psychedelics enhance your sensory perceptions, whereas dissociatives dull them. I've often heard people relate the experiences by saying that psychedelics show you what it's like to be everything, while dissociatives show you what it's like to be nothing. But despite this, it's a nothingness in the form of an infinite void. So if a seemingly infinite amount of space is perceived, could it not be somehow related to the space that psychedelics bring you to, regardless of what else is going on at the same time? The connection with the adrenaline rush would be that in both of these cases, the amount of processing power given to our surroundings is increased while the actual amount of data used to construct them slowly decreases. An adrenaline rush is not going to take you so far as to become redundant, since it does require you to still be able to interact with at least some of your environment, but drugs are not limited in the same way. Furthermore, dissociatives do cause hallucinations, which means that they must be altering the same memory and perception centers of the brain as psychedelics in some way. However, because on a dissociatives concept such as identity and sources such as external information shrink to nothing, the amount of energy that would be required to record the experiences should logically decrease by quite a bit.

The thing I think I can most easily relate this to is being bored. They say time flies when you're having fun, right? But when you're bored, it just drags on all day. I personally feel that this could be because you're not significantly changing the amount of processing power the brain uses there, but you are changing the amount of information it needs to store. Because of that the memories can be written quickly and more efficiently, which I believe means that your perception of time will lengthen. So in that way, you could apply the same logic to psychedelics and dissociatives. They both take you up to an "infinite" space, but one of them requires an incredibly higher amount of information to write in all at once, so the brain does still have to cut back a little bit on how quickly it can work it all in. But without all that extra junk data to pay attention to, it's able to divert even more power to that memory system. Another thing about dissociatives too is that they disrupt memory storage even more strongly than psychedelics, so that retrograde time dilation I mentioned could be even more significant here.

So, now we arrive at dreams. During a dream, particularly a lucid dream, the mind tries to recreate a relatively normal perception of self-identity. The brain does shut out external sensory perceptions while dreaming too, but not completely and it still invokes more normal sensory processing methods than would be used on a dissociative. Obviously, the ideal goal is to try to construct a realistic simulation of reality. Because of these things, the normal dream state sort of lies in between the psychedelic and dissociative experiences, not necessarily too much or too little sensory information or rational thought processing. Focus is also normally lowered in dreams as we all know, it takes becoming lucid even just to bring it up to normal levels. These things conspire to make time flow much more normal compared to waking life than a hallucinogenic experience would be. However, I do think there are some things to consider. First of all, as anyone who's ever had to wake up every day at the same time knows, the brain is pretty damn good at keeping time. For this reason I find studies such as the one by LaBerge which measure dream time to mean very little in terms of concrete information. Could it not simply be that dream time flows differently until we divert enough attention to accurately measuring it? This relates to what Sageous said about just ignoring it, but I am taking it in a different direction. My next thought is that even though things are more normal in a dream than in a trip, they're still not completely there. Activity of the memory areas are still high, and no matter how much you think you're perceiving in a dream, it's not nearly as much as you would be while awake. Signals from your physical body will be absent, as will many things in your environment that you're not directly paying attention to. Your brain can use shortcuts to create these things, whereas while awake it would need to pay much closer attention to what was going on. Because of things like this I don't think it's entirely absurd to suggest that the dreaming brain is writing memories more easily than the waking one would be.

As I said before, I feel that the ability to dilate time in an internally-generated world would be much higher than in the waking world. This is because no matter how quickly you're registering what's going on while awake, your body and the things happening around you are occurring at the same speed, which causes things like slow motion. This need not necessarily be true in the brain, as it's quite possibly that in addition to encoding experiences faster it may be creating them faster as well, as I do think that the two are intimately connected. If that was the case, you could genuinely be experiencing things at a normal pace despite the fact that they're happening faster than normal. Furthermore, I have to ask myself, if that is the case, how easily these factors can be changed both by default in a dream and by methods like dream control. For instance, if it was possible to normalize time by paying attention it, then would it be possible to shift it in the other direction as well? I remember reading a time dilation dream control method once, here on DV I believe, that involved sitting in a white void and watching a clock tick seconds by and imagining them happening slower than normal. If it did work that way, wouldn't that seem like an entirely logical way of changing it? Especially since the void would cut out even more detail, allowing your mind to focus more heavily on that. And if it's possible as a method of dream control then surely it can happen without it too, even if it wasn't likely to happen often. And of course, lastly there is the fact that memory storage is inhibited in dreams compared to normal, which could account for a retrograde effect in dreams as well.

Anyway, this post has already gotten incredibly long and I'm afraid that because I've typed so much I may have missed some of my points, or that I would if I continued to type more, so I'm going to stop now. But this is pretty much what I'm working with as far as time dilation goes right now.

Thanks for taking the time to write that all down, I read every word. So, it seems logical that dreams should take far less processing power than waking life. That would help create the feeling that more had been experienced. There is no need to process nearly as much raw data as compared to waking life.

Amazing post, well done. I think I need a while to let that sink in :)
If your theory on perception of time is right then it certainly does seem like there is a possibility for time dilation to an extent. I'm quite inspired now to give it a try.

What all this allows is a framework for how it may be possable. We know that dreams take less processing of data, as most detail is left out. We know that in some states (drugged) a few moments can appear to stretch on forever. We know the brain can create an illusion of time by 'abridging' the detail.

The question becomes, given a reduced need for detail, and so on, just how much time could be squeezed into say 30 minutes? I assume that the more time (preceived) compressed the less detail available. We could blur the edge of our vision and not render anything unless we look directly at it. That can increase processing speed, but how about intellectual detail? We would (IMHO) hit a wall fairly soon on how much story content can fit within the time frame. The sense that a year passed may be attainable, and by 'abridging' the details we may be able to experience more, but how much highly processed thought can fit in there? My guess is that not much more than a single preceived day could fit into a dream, but I am basing that on total speculation.

:shock: awesome post alyzarin! I have been pretty bored with this thread, but your idea has stimulated my energy for reading about it. I believe that there is time dilation (we all have felt it, whether purposeful or not) and that it must be something attained through a scientific way. If you look at it that way, then do you think that everyone might go through time at different speeds? Things like ADHD could just be people moving on different time frames. Crazy geniuses that can compute mathematical problems in less than a second might just be moving on an extremely slow time frame, not proccessing the world around them, and just processing whatever they want in their mind. Just a thought. I do not know how this would fit into your theory. :P I have not thought about it nearly as much as you (obviously).

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Originally Posted by sivason

What all this allows is a framework for how it may be possable. We know that dreams take less processing of data, as most detail is left out. We know that in some states (drugged) a few moments can appear to stretch on forever. We know the brain can create an illusion of time by 'abridging' the detail.

The question becomes, given a reduced need for detail, and so on, just how much time could be squeezed into say 30 minutes? I assume that the more time (preceived) compressed the less detail available. We could blur the edge of our vision and not render anything unless we look directly at it. That can increase processing speed, but how about intellectual detail? We would (IMHO) hit a wall fairly soon on how much story content can fit within the time frame. The sense that a year passed may be attainable, and by 'abridging' the details we may be able to experience more, but how much highly processed thought can fit in there? My guess is that not much more than a single preceived day could fit into a dream, but I am basing that on total speculation.

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Ya that is still my main problem with it too. In the end our brain isn't just a single processing machine that can divert all its power to anything it's doing, it is modeled. I definitely imagine there is a fairly low limit as to how much proper thought you can fit into a dilated experience.

Great post, Alyzarin, I read it with interest... much more thorough, I must say, than some clown suggesting to just forget about time! ;)

Of course, I still can't get to seeing substantial dilation happening this way, given the physical limitations of our brains. But, if you do achieve success with your well-laid plans I hope you'll share... this is one "time" I'd love to be proven wrong!

Thank you for that amazing post alyzarin I loved it if you think of anything or want to add more to the discussion please do. I am beyond impressed with the amount of depth and research you did on the subject. I can't wait to see what else you find.

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Originally Posted by sivason

Thanks for taking the time to write that all down, I read every word. So, it seems logical that dreams should take far less processing power than waking life. That would help create the feeling that more had been experienced. There is no need to process nearly as much raw data as compared to waking life.

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I'm glad you found it captivating. :) And yep, that's pretty much how I'm thinking at this point!

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Originally Posted by dutchraptor

Amazing post, well done. I think I need a while to let that sink in :)
If your theory on perception of time is right then it certainly does seem like there is a possibility for time dilation to an extent. I'm quite inspired now to give it a try.

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Thank you. :content: If you do try it out, definitely make sure you report back either way! :D It would definitely help to have some subjective input on the matter. And that is part of the somewhat forgotten point of the thread anyway, haha.

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Originally Posted by sivason

What all this allows is a framework for how it may be possable. We know that dreams take less processing of data, as most detail is left out. We know that in some states (drugged) a few moments can appear to stretch on forever. We know the brain can create an illusion of time by 'abridging' the detail.

The question becomes, given a reduced need for detail, and so on, just how much time could be squeezed into say 30 minutes? I assume that the more time (preceived) compressed the less detail available. We could blur the edge of our vision and not render anything unless we look directly at it. That can increase processing speed, but how about intellectual detail? We would (IMHO) hit a wall fairly soon on how much story content can fit within the time frame. The sense that a year passed may be attainable, and by 'abridging' the details we may be able to experience more, but how much highly processed thought can fit in there? My guess is that not much more than a single preceived day could fit into a dream, but I am basing that on total speculation.

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This ^^ is the important thing to remember. Unfortunately it's hard to say very much about this without getting pretty far into speculation, but it's cool to think about. For instance, I wonder how much effort the mind exactly puts toward rending whatever it is you're focusing on versus whatever else is going on? I've seen studies that suggest that the brain is not truly capable of multi-tasking, only switching tasks quickly, so I don't think it would be too crazy to suggest that whatever it is specifically you're thinking about in the dream could be the only thing truly rendered while anything else you may "see" could be something closer to a background image. That alone seems like it could cut out a good amount of required power, and I'm sure there are other things like that going on as well.

Something I'd especially like to draw attention to though is the fact that these drug experiences are the only things we can say for sure are able to produce these kinds of experiences consistently. That's not to discount the experiences of anyone who claims to have experienced incredible time dilation in dreams, but since these drug experiences can be induced at will and we know how they work, they're going to form the basis for scientific theory here. That being said, these states that hallucinogens provide are as far as we currently know inseparable from considerable psychological alterations. You may be significantly more "aware" than you would be in a non-lucid dream, but you won't be exactly what we would call lucid by any means. Just because it's possible for these extreme states to be experienced doesn't mean that they're necessarily possible while remaining in a normal state of mind, at least through this particular medium.

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Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

:shock: awesome post alyzarin! I have been pretty bored with this thread, but your idea has stimulated my energy for reading about it. I believe that there is time dilation (we all have felt it, whether purposeful or not) and that it must be something attained through a scientific way. If you look at it that way, then do you think that everyone might go through time at different speeds? Things like ADHD could just be people moving on different time frames. Crazy geniuses that can compute mathematical problems in less than a second might just be moving on an extremely slow time frame, not proccessing the world around them, and just processing whatever they want in their mind. Just a thought. I do not know how this would fit into your theory. :P I have not thought about it nearly as much as you (obviously).

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I do think that, though there is one detail about what you said that I would switch! They say that there's a fine line between crazy and genius, and I don't just mean people in general say that. Researchers studying latent inhibition have suggested that that inability to filter out irrelevant information is, as I've said, what leads to conditions like schizophrenia in individuals with low IQ, but to highly creative minds in those with high IQ. It would make enough sense, right?

And thanks! :)

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Great post, Alyzarin, I read it with interest... much more thorough, I must say, than some clown suggesting to just forget about time! ;)

Of course, I still can't get to seeing substantial dilation happening, given the physical limitations of our brains. But, if you do achieve success with your well-laid plans I hope you'll share... this is one "time" I'd love to be proven wrong!

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Thank you very much! And I certainly will! :) I've been considering all the different possible angles of this still since my last post just to see if I could maximize all the right variables to push it to the limit, and obviously I won't really be able to prove anything but I've been chasing some new ideas which I think are taking me down some interesting paths, even with their implications outside of this particular subject. I intend to post about them soon!

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Originally Posted by Tye

Thank you for that amazing post alyzarin I loved it if you think of anything or want to add more to the discussion please do. I am beyond impressed with the amount of depth and research you did on the subject. I can't wait to see what else you find.

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You're very welcome, and thank you too! I'll certainly chime in with any more thoughts as they come. :content:

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I actually do have more to post about, but I've been meaning to get these responses done for a while and keep becoming busy or getting distracted by things and as far as I know that may continue to happen, so I'll end this post here and put those thoughts in a new one!

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Originally Posted by Mzzkc

Hukif's approach involves some weird combination of focused counting and abstraction that I don't quite get.

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Ooh damn, I love me some mysticism. It gives me this feel of libraries filled with dusty grimoires and symbolism known only to the maker. Also old people in hooded robes.

So, like I said, I've been trying to consider all of the different ways that the brain could maximize its ability to record memories. The first thing that comes to mind for this is disinhibition, or inhibiting the basic inhibitory mechanisms which are always running to some degree in our brain. The easiest way I can describe this is that each part of our brain is wired to be able to work at an extremely high level of activity, but because of the way they all interact with and inhibit each other they're normally operating at a much lower capacity than this. This is a very good thing, because having all of your brain be completely active at once would be called having a massive seizure. However, because of this it is possible for different areas of the brain to work at a much higher than normal capacity, such as the limbic areas involved in memory during dreams.

The major inhibitory neurotransmitter throughout the brain is GABA. This is the chemical that alcohol and benzodiazepines work around, among other drugs. However, alcohol has several non-GABA effects as well and it wouldn't be entirely right to use it to relate to in this particular situation, so for now I'm going to stick to the benzodiazepines. Most people who know much about basic drugs don't think of GABA as anything more than something that lowers activity, and the benzos are largely to blame. Under normal conditions in the adult brain, GABA inhibits memory storage, and a very significant site of action for this is the hippocampus. The thing is though that because GABA does normally exist to some degree throughout the day, what would be considered inhibition from the standpoint of versus no GABA at all could to us just be called a "normal" amount of memory encoding, until those functions are pushed even further than what they're normally at. This is why some drugs, such as ginkgo biloba, are able to enhance memory by blocking some of the activity of GABA, but I'll get to that shortly. The way benzos work is different from most drugs used either medicinally or recreationally, in that they don't actually alter levels of the neurotransmitter they focus on, GABA, but increase its ability to bind to GABA(A) receptors in various areas of the brain. They do this by binding to a range of different GABA(A) subunits, which are differentially distributed in the brain. For example, the subunit alpha-1 is thought to play a particularly important role in GABA's effects on memory, and therefore under normal conditions an alpha-1 subunit agonist such as many benzos will enhance the memory loss induced by GABA without necessarily changing the intensity of its other effects. Bilobalide, one of the chemicals in ginkgo biloba, does the opposite of this. It is an alpha-1 antagonist, lowering GABA's amnesiac effects, and it's thought that this is largely how the plant enhances memory.

So that's all well and good, but what a lot of people don't realize is that GABA's effects are actually much more flexible than just inhibitory action, and GABA(A) receptors can cause excitatory effects as well. I mentioned this recently in another thread, as part of a different theory, which I now could expand a bit further on because I know even more about it. The way it works revolves around the fact that GABA receptors' activity depends on the local concentration of chloride ions, with low levels causing inhibitory effects and high levels causing excitatory effects. When the brain is still young, GABA actually normally functions as an excitatory neurotransmitter, and this is mostly due to different levels of chloride transporters that occur colocalized with GABA receptors in the developing compared to the mature brain. The transporters are known as KCC2 and NKCC1, the former of which lowers chloride ion levels and the latter of which raises them, so the brain starts out with low levels of KCC2 and high levels of NKCC1 and these reverse as it grows. However, these aren't the only factors involved here. Another big one seems to be the activity of the carbonic anhydrase CAVII, which is an enzyme that catalyzes carbon dioxide. This enzyme significantly increases in numbers shortly after the developmental switch of GABA from excitatory to inhibitory, and because of downstream activity it causes due to altering the levels and activity respectively of bicarbonate and potassium, it can result in the same kind of changes as having a low KCC2 / high NKCC1 setup. The difference is that this activity doesn't become significant until it is either activated by an outside mechanism or by heavy stimulation of GABA receptors themselves. Knowing this, it adds a whole new layer to how this system must be considered.

I've actually known for a long time that certain GABAergic drugs can cause so-called "paradoxical" effects, such as stimulation and hallucinations, as opposed to the sedation and lowering of psychotomimetic activity that would normally be expected. This is a very rare effect for some people in certain benzodiazepines, and is a more common occurrence particularly in a class of drugs known as non-benzodiazepines which work on these same subunits. Furthermore, it is well known that muscimol, a drug which works by directly activating the core GABA(A) receptors, can cause hallucinations and an overall blend of psychedelic and dissociative effects, though still unique as well. In fact, many people compare the hallucinations caused by GABAergic drugs to a waking lucid dream state, though there still are some disruptions in normal conscious function do to widespread activity throughout the brain. With muscimol this is easy enough to understand, since taking it in a large amount would logically heavily stimulate those receptors in the same way as GABA itself and could cause the switch back from inhibitory to excitatory effects. I think the effects of the drugs working on the subunits can be explained in a similar way, but with some clear differences. Since the way they change GABA activity varies quite a bit from one place to the next, it makes sense that only those drugs which significantly effected the receptors specifically involved in enhancing the activity of CAVII would be able to recreate this effect, and this could account for why most GABAergics tend to only cause inhibitory effects by focusing on the other properties of GABA, but also why some of them are able to slip through the cracks every now and then.

Where this lands us next is at something called theta rhythm. This is a brainwave pattern that, in the hippocampus, is associated with motor behavior, alertness, spatial learning, and REM sleep. That last one should have caught your attention! It is known that acetylcholine receptors, specifically muscarinic ones, are able to promote the generation of theta waves, but it's thought that because of how they work there must be a central mechanism which they are mainly promoting rather than being the main source of activity themselves. And what's really cool is that this source of activity seems to lie with GABA receptors. What I'm super psyched about right now is that I read a study earlier today that claimed that this generation of theta waves from cholinergic receptors could be reversed by a GABA(A) antagonist, and it went on to suggest methods by which acetylcholine release could facilitate the activity of CAVII and cause the inhibitory to excitatory GABA switch. The most convincing of these seems to be by causing an increase in the cellular levels of calcium, which is known to enhance spatial learning, among other things. In fact, both acetylcholine and glutamate receptors which are known to increase dream clarity and vividness raise levels of calcium. But what really matters to me is just the fact that acetylcholine was shown to be involved, and that those muscarinic receptors can cause these effects.

I'll try to keep this part brief, but to explain how I feel about the next point I think I should explain what I think imagination is. The part of the brain known as the amygdala is critically involved in motivation and thought, and it is located right next to the hippocampus. Stimulation of the amygdala is known to stimulate the hippocampus as well, and in fact has been linked to generation of out-of-body experiences and dreams. I personally believe that this is because the hippocampus contains a mental map of our environment, and that would be how our perceptions are created by our memories being written in, as it is all encoded into place by the data contained in the hippocampus. As an extension of this, I believe that our imagination is actually just a lower form of dreaming, and that our ability to visualize things while awake is the result of "map" data being written into the hippocampus from the amygdala at a level that doesn't cause those internally-generated sensations to replace the ones we have pulled in externally, but it does allow us to "see", "hear", "feel", or what have you sort of in the background of our mind. Therefore, a dream environment would be the result of having those external perceptions removed and replaced by internal ones pumped up to the level of what we would normally use to encode the waking world. This corresponds to the fact that the amygdala, like the hippocampus, is hyperactive during dreams. It also goes great lengths to explain why, when we're in our right (lucid) minds during a dream, we have essentially total control over what happens to us, because it's just like controlling your imagination. And I don't think I really need to convince anyone here that our imaginations and dream environments are intimately linked.

Now, something that is very-well known is that acetylcholine has a positive effect on visualization and dreams. Supplements that raise levels of it, such as galantamine, have the ability to enhance both. I've always thought that this must somehow relate to a potentiation of dopamine activity, which I feel is at the core of hallucinations, but I could never really say how for sure. I've had different theories, but none of them have gotten me as excited (hahahaha... yeah, nerdy joke) as this one. The inhibition that GABA produces at normal resting states lowers the activity of dopaminergic neurons, which means things that release them will do less so (compared to lower than normal GABA levels). However, when the GABA activity switches from inhibitory to excitatory, it will actually cause that dopamine to be released more efficiently. So what that basically means is that if acetylcholine causes this GABA switch, it should directly facilitate dopaminergic activity and increase the stability of hallucinations, visualizations, and dreams, just as it does. What really ties this all together though is that REM sleep is associated with the highest levels of acetylcholine in the hippocampus you'll ever normally have. This means that this GABA switch should also be running at its strongest at this point. Given that the amygdala is also hyperactive, it would mean that your motivation to move and explore would also be very high, and I believe that this lies at the core of dreaming. If you become lucid and decide to just sit down and do nothing then the dream will end, right? Given that, could it not be that it's this incredibly high amount of stimulation/motivation that is beginning this entire process which leads to higher acetylcholine, enhanced CAVII, excitatory GABA, theta waves, and facilitated dopamine? And therefore, would it not make sense that once you consciously decided to stop actively participating, this process would be inhibited just as it would if you returned to a resting state while awake and the GABA would return to normal, therefore plummeting dopamine levels and causing the dream to fall apart? In other words, if this was all true, couldn't GABA logically be at the heart of the dream world?

I feel that this is supported by the way GABAergic hallucinogens are described, but I think it goes even further than that. The psychedelic 5-HT2A receptors actually induce the release of acetylcholine, GABA, and dopamine in the hippocampus as well, and psychedelics are said to cause REM sleep-like patterns of activity in the brain. So if they can cause this same kind of effect to happen, it would make sense to me that it could contribute to the massive amount of processing power involved in powerful psychedelic experiences. On the other hand, dissociatives cause GABA and acetylcholine levels to lower. But, while still causing a release in dopamine. This means that even though they don't cause excitatory behavior from GABA, they still significantly inhibit its regular inhibitory behavior and facilitate dopaminergic effects. And when you consider that the amount of sensory stimulation between the psychedelic and dissociative experiences differs so much like I mentioned before, I would imagine that this could pick up a good amount of the slack. But what it really makes me think about is the question: if psychedelics actually cause more potential for expansion of power than dissociatives but are somewhat hindered by the massive amount of information they need to store, then what does that imply for dreams? If dreams do work the way I speculated here, then that would put their GABA effects in line with psychedelics rather than dissociatives. But as I mentioned before too, the amount of information that needs to be stored in a dream would be closer to between waking world and dissociative levels of stimulation than that of psychedelics, so would that mean that the memory encoding powers of dreams are a bit further increased beyond what I already postulated before?

So basically, what it would come down to is that our brains would be in a constant state of active learning and memory encoding in dreams that actually resulted from not only a form of disinhibition but one taken all the way to excitation, and to an extreme, and that could cause some time dilation as well if what I said before is true. I honestly think this is an awesome thought for many reasons stretching beyond time dilation too, but that is what got me here, and I've been trying to figure this sort of stuff out for a while now so I'm pretty happy to have arrived here just because I happened to be working on this issue as well!

I apologize for typing up such an incredibly long post again, but I really did just want to get my whole thought process out there. And like before, I've covered so much that I worry I might have missed some stuff... so that's it for now. :)

So, when does Gabamine come on the market? Or should we call it Alyzarine, which does have a ring to it? ;)

Seriously, though: this is a very impressive theory, and is no doubt based on extensive knowledge and research, but I'm still stuck on a niggling and slightly metaphysical question:

Let's say you do manage to stimulate the brain in a manner that encourages optimum activity all at once without blowing up the works; how then do you get all that activity to do what you want it to do, and not run wild (as is the general result in the hallucinogen-caused events and mental disorders you cite -- very well -- as examples of this heightened activity)?

We puny humans have enough trouble getting the currently allotted portions of our brains to do what we want them to do; how would we manage such control over the entire brain? Will there be a pill for that too, or will we need to do some work? Perhaps some new form of global meditation? Sivason, you might have some work to do if Alyzarine comes into use!

Also, could it be that those mental disorders are a result of the extreme activity, so perhaps there's a reason a healthy brain doesn't go there?

Finally, it seems to me that Alyzarine might do more for enhancing dreams, learning, and memory recall than time dilation; which of course would not be a bad thing at all...

Thanks again for the extensive posts, Alyzarin, it's all quite interesting and encouraging!

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Originally Posted by Sageous

So, when does Gabamine come on the market? Or should we call it Alyzarine, which does have a ring to it? ;)

Seriously, though: this is a very impressive theory, and is no doubt based on extensive knowledge and research, but I'm still stuck on a niggling and slightly metaphysical question:

Let's say you do manage to stimulate the brain in a manner that encourages optimum activity all at once without blowing up the works; how then do you get all that activity to do what you want it to do, and not run wild (as is the general result in the hallucinogen-caused events and mental disorders you cite -- very well -- as examples of this heightened activity)?

We puny humans have enough trouble getting the currently allotted portions of our brains to do what we want them to do; how would we manage such control over the entire brain? Will there be a pill for that too, or will we need to do some work? Perhaps some new form of global meditation? Sivason, you might have some work to do if Alyzarine comes into use!

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Ah yes, that is the question, isn't it? :D I believe to answer that we must first be able to answer this: "How do we control our dreams?" It's simply a matter of gaining the fortitude to remain aware and a true understanding, not only through the concept but through firsthand experience, that there is nothing separating ours minds from the dream world around us, no? Once this is achieved, literally anything is possible. However, in a fully excited brain state such as this, it's possible that even the part of us which is working normally in a lucid dream to allow us the rational train of thought to direct our experiences will be attempting to work far beyond our control. In this case, I feel I can only relate one piece of advice which will always withstand the test of time: "Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream."

This is something I can only speak from personal experience on, but I believe it very much. Regardless of whether or not you are retaining your perceived conscious control, your mind is still your mind. The things that you think about and desire at any given moment reflect the way you feel at the time, right? For example, if you're simply relaxing and in a daydreaming mood, your mind will start to unfold pleasant fantasies for you. Whether your are pushing your mind toward these fantasies or your mind is pushing itself, they will still become activated through the same kinds of inputs, and therefore will reflect your state of mind in the same way. With this in mind, might it not be best to simply put yourself in your ideal state of mind for achieving your desired results and let your brain do the work for you?

I faced these questions many times when I was actively using hallucinogens. At first I was always trying to direct my trips in one way or another by imposing my will upon them, when what I should have been doing from the start was simply sitting back and enjoying myself. My mind knows what it wants, it uses the same neural pathways regardless of how it becomes active, and I eventually learned to respect that. No better do I feel was this exemplified than when I took 20 hits of LSD. I simply released myself into the experience, and my hallucinations were exactly what I would have chosen them to be if I had kept lucid control, and it essentially felt like I did. I have since applied this concept to many lucid dreams and been able to influence entire scenes without even trying, by simply assuming that what I wanted was already going to happen because I knew that I was in good hands, my own. What it really just comes down to is, you have to trust your mind, because all it is is you. If one can do this, I feel they'll take a giant step towards using the power of their brain to its full potential.

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Also, could it be that those mental disorders are a result of the extreme activity, so perhaps there's a reason a healthy brain doesn't go there?

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This would be the idea with lowered latent inhibition. While some disorders do exist due to genuinely disrupted chemistry, it would not surprise me at all if others merely came around because people were unable to cope with the level of activity their brain regularly runs at. This goes back to what I was saying about the line between crazy and genius; it takes a gifted mind to handle these incredible inputs, but if you can do it, then more power to you! They say that many of the great thinkers and inventors throughout history were thought to have very low latent inhibition. Can you imagine what it must be like to deal with a stream of information on the level that would drive the average person insane and be able to organize it into logical and creative structures? No wonder they can achieve so much!

However, given that, it's clear that most people don't need to have their brains running at this capacity all the time, at least not without seriously dedicating themselves toward practices such as meditation and awareness, as you suggested above, or methods such as the one I related. That doesn't mean it's not nice to kick it up just for fun every now and then, though. :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by Sageous

Finally, it seems to me that Alyzarine might do more for enhancing dreams, learning, and memory recall than time dilation; which of course would not be a bad thing at all...

Thanks again for the extensive posts, Alyzarin, it's all quite interesting and encouraging!

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I would agree with this, as these things I believe are all inseparably bonded and we have become accustomed to alerting ourselves more to tiny changes with the first three than with the last. But also as you say, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. :)

And you're very welcome, I'm just happy that you're able to get something out of it!

Also, I'm completely flattered that you've turned my username into a drug, I can't deny that it does roll off the tongue quite well! :smitten:

^^ That all makes sense, and gives me something to think about, thank you!

Clearly you've given all this some lengthy attention; is there a book in the works?

Any time, I'm always glad to discuss these topics! I don't think I would be nearly as far with these thoughts otherwise, it's great to have everything you've worked through up to a point laid out in front of you for proper review. :)

I'm not currently writing anything, though my dad has been nagging me to start for a while. :chuckle: At the moment this is just my hobby, it's what I think about in my free time. Would you read a book if there was one? I could sure use some cash. :teeth: Hahaha.

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Originally Posted by Alyzarin

Would you read a book if there was one?

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Absolutely! Though from experience I can promise it would be a very small audience... at first, anyway; if you've something truly seminal to offer, well, who knows?

Well thank you, I really appreciate that! :content: I'll certainly keep that in mind for the future. :)

I totally just realized another possible GABA connection that I didn't even think of before. This just makes me even more convinced that this theory could hold up.

The four main psychedelics that any random person would most often be likely to recognize by name are LSD, psilocin/psilocybin (magic mushrooms), mescaline (peyote), and DMT (ayahuasca). The first three are the ones that are especially well-known, and have come to sort of set the foundation for what the different "categories" of psychedelic chemicals are, namely lysergamides, tryptamines, and phenethylamines, respectively. DMT is also a tryptamine, being almost identical in structure to psilocin. All of these four drugs are known to cause the typical psychedelic hallucinogenic effects, up to and including immersion in well-structured hallucinations. However, their are some differences between them. The one that really matters to me in this particular situation is that mescaline is known to be the more clear-headed by far for the level of hallucinations it generates. It's also the one known to cause nausea the most easily by a wide margin; the rest can sometimes cause it if you have a weak stomach or are easily overwhelmed by sensory or physical stimulation or anxiety, but mescaline is one that can reliably cause it in a dose-dependent manner in anyone. Being classical psychedelics, all of these work through 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, and at least a few other serotonin receptors. Both of those two are known to increase GABA release in the hippocampus, and so if my theory so far is correct that could be how they eventually cause dream-like hallucinations in higher doses. However, what is known is that LSD, psilocin, and DMT don't seem to activate 5-HT3 in any appreciable amount, at least not at the recreationally-used doses. While I haven't been able to find direct scientific evidence that mescaline does activate 5-HT3, I do know from anecdotal evidence that the nausea it causes seems to be readily reversible by 5-HT3 antagonists. That alone isn't complete proof, but I'm going to tie it into something bigger here.

There's another lesser-known natural psychedelic tryptamine called bufotenin that is somewhat popular among certain groups of, usually heavy, psychedelic users. It had a chance to go more mainstream, but it was left behind due to the relatively high incidence of side effects, particularly intense nausea. But the tests that were done on it used methods of administration that would cause it to pass through much of the body first, where it would easily stimulate receptors that induce emetic responses. People who use it recreationally tend to stick to either sublingual administration or inhalation (smoking) to avoid this. What those users have discovered is a psychedelic which is immensely powerful in its sensory effect, creating hallucinations that many people claim are even more massively intricate and incomprehensible than those provoked by DMT. But most interestingly, despite this bufotenin is sometimes described as having some of the lightest mental alterations of any psychedelic, which until now I've found fascinating but baffling. Activation of the 5-HT2A receptor and the 5-HT2C receptor to a lesser extent, both of which are activated by bufotenin, don't seem to be separable from considerable psychological effects, so how could this be the case? In fact, based on the reports I've read about bufotenin use (I've unfortunately never had the opportunity to use it myself), it seems almost like a lucid psychedelic in the sense that the hallucinations it causes are extremely vivid and lifelike and yet the trip doesn't necessarily sweep you away, you stay level-headed. But today as I was thinking more about this time dilation subject and what I've discussed so far, something suddenly struck me and I did a little more bufotenin research. And guess what? As could be expected from the side effects, it strongly activates 5-HT3 receptors.

Of course, given the nausea-inducing effects, 5-HT3 activity is generally not something you want unless you can make it bypass the chemoreceptor trigger zone like with smoking to avoid that, at least mostly. Aside from this though, the 5-HT3 receptor is usually overlooked. Activation of it alone does seem to produce some mental effects, but none really powerful enough to shine through at any dose that would be safe to consider testing out with random drugs. There aren't really many drugs it's been testable with though and as a result our knowledge of it is pretty limited, but despite this, 5-HT3 antagonists have been shown to be useful in reducing the incidence of visual hallucinations and some mental side effects in Parkinson's disease patients who are being treated with L-DOPA therapy. So you may be wondering at this point, what caused me to suddenly look into bufotenin again? Well, when I was looking into ways that GABA release is increased in the hippocampus yesterday, I found a study that claims that its release is actually induced by activation of 5-HT3 receptors! So the connection to before would be, if increased GABA in the hippocampus is responsible for creating the hallucinogenic structure of the dream world itself, and if it's possible to remain lucid, or consciously aware, during these hallucinations (as we all know it is), and considering the way that GABAergic hallucinations are sometimes described as a waking lucid dream state, then is it possible that causing a significantly high release of GABA there with a lower ratio of that to other effects on consciousness, could it be genuinely possible to recreate an entire dream world while awake and stay lucid? Given that bufotenin is really the ONLY psychedelic I know of to significantly activate 5-HT3 at recreational doses, most likely because it's almost identical to serotonin in structure (in fact, it is to serotonin what DMT is to tryptamine itself), would it not make sense that it could be creating this extremely vivid yet remarkably clear hallucinogenic state by a heavy combined activation of 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, and 5-HT3, allowing for a significantly larger release in hippocampal GABA than other psychedelics? Furthermore, it would bypass the activation of GABA(A) receptors in other parts of the brain which are responsible for some of the mental inhibitions of GABAergic hallucinations, and instead stimulate your mind like a regular psychedelic. And lastly, given that mescaline also causes some nausea which is 5-HT3 antagonist-sensitive and is known to be a very clear-headed psychedelic with vivid hallucinations, is it not possible that this would somewhat apply to it as well?

This idea makes me incredibly excited because it would suggest that not only could GABA feasibly recreate the proper conditions that would be responsible to generate the dream world, but it would support that idea that it does this while maintaining the ability to remain lucid while in its hallucinogenic state, something that as far as I'm aware no other chemical theory as of yet has been able to keep up with. Isn't that an awesome thought? :content:

Very interesting posts Alyzarin, in my past I have had experience with time dilation during psychedelics, most notably so with 4-HO-MPT (my friend an analogue clock on his wall, it seemed like it was 4 or 5 seconds, I remember counting 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi etc. while waiting for it to tick) although I am not sure of it's method of action, I can say without a doubt that during my experience I had the most clear mind that I have had in my entire life, outside of a lucid dream, coming with was the ability to alter reality at will (look at a metal pole, expect it to bend and it does), which is a stark contrast to other psychedelics where you seem to be "along for the ride." It was almost like having a lucid dream while awake.

On the role of GABA, my first intentional lucid was after I took a 100mg pill of GABA before a WBTB attempt, I am aware that GABA does not cross the blood-brain barrier when taken orally, but it definitely does something, if taken before bed I have extremely vivid and intense dreams, sometimes becoming lucid without reality checks.

Your perception of time is based on how fast your brain is processes your surroundings, while time passes continually at a finite rate, your perception of it is completely variable, the trouble is, usually, your perception is locked into 1 second = 1 second because your brain is taking in stimuli that support the notion that it is true. But while you are lucid dreaming, you are creating all the stimuli, if you think 1 second = 5 seconds you can drop a rock into water and watch the splash and ripples move out in super slow mo. Obviously, your brain has a maximum processing power, but while you are dreaming you have complete control of how the processing power is allocated, I think it would be completely possible to have a 1 hour of dream time while being asleep for half an hour.

Plan for tonight, set an alarm to go off every 30 minutes, turn it off and try to WBTB/DEILD, see if i can count any time period longer than 30 minutes while lucid.

Ok, so I have been lazy typing up my dreams lately. Hopefully, I can get them all typed up today. I had a dream last night where I tried a much more subtle approach. Upon becoming lucid, I looked around at, what was an incredibly stable dream and thought, "Oh my, this dream is going to last a long time." That was the last I thought about it and proceeded to experience the dream without trying to keep the dream running, like I usually do. I, generally, use several techniques throughout my dreams to keep them going and keep the dream stable, but I didn't in this one. It lasted a good 6 hours (dream time), I'd guess. It was my longest LD in a while. I'll be sure to try and recreate this quick process the next time out and see if it helps prolong the dream again. Once I get both this dream and the previous one I mentioned typed up, I'll link them in here in case someone wants to check them out.

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Originally Posted by Ksero

Very interesting posts Alyzarin, in my past I have had experience with time dilation during psychedelics, most notably so with 4-HO-MPT (my friend an analogue clock on his wall, it seemed like it was 4 or 5 seconds, I remember counting 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi etc. while waiting for it to tick) although I am not sure of it's method of action, I can say without a doubt that during my experience I had the most clear mind that I have had in my entire life, outside of a lucid dream, coming with was the ability to alter reality at will (look at a metal pole, expect it to bend and it does), which is a stark contrast to other psychedelics where you seem to be "along for the ride." It was almost like having a lucid dream while awake.

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This is what I LOVE to hear. :armflap: Of course it doesn't prove anything pharmacologically, but it sure links to two concepts I've put forward already! The most time dilation, the most lucid control, and a tryptamine? :D Thank you for this, Ksero!

After I made that last post I went on a receptor research binge. It would seem that there are quite a few serotonin receptors that are directly involved in the control of GABA release in the hippocampus. 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, 5-HT3, 5-HT6, and 5-HT7 all seem to increase its release, and 5-HT4 has also been shown to indirectly modulate it with increases in low doses and decreases in high doses when activated alone, but its effect is more variable. With these in mind I start to form an image of psychedelics where the strength of their hallucinations, which seemingly must be activated through 5-HT2A, are dependent on the overall amount of GABA release that the drug causes in the hippocampus, whereas the level of lucidity depends on something else, quite possible the ratio of 5-HT2A receptor affinity and efficacy compared to the other serotonin receptors. I haven't thought quite too deeply in that aspect yet, but I think it could be supported by the fact the bufotenin and psilocin, which are both extremely similar to serotonin in structure, each cause powerful and vivid hallucinations despite the fact that bufotenin is incredibly clearheaded while psilocin is a total mind warp. Bufotenin doesn't seem to display much selectivity between 5-HT2 or 5-HT4, and shows slight selectivity over those for 5-HT3, whereas psilocin seems to be the most selective for 5-HT2 receptors. This same kind of logic seems to hold up well enough when compared to the affinities of other psychedelic compounds for serotonin receptors too, at least as far as I can tell right now.

About the GABA release, I tried to investigate that too. Tryptamines would be the best to look into this for by far both because there's a little more research about them and because they're so similar in structure to serotonin. It's frustratingly difficult to find information about psilocin, but like I said, it seems to be relatively selective for 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C and to a lesser extent 5-HT1A. It could activate other serotonin receptors at higher doses too, but I'm not sure about that, but it's definitely a powerful hallucinogen. However, bufotenin really takes the cake as far as I can tell. In addition to the affinities I mentioned above, it seems to activate 5-HT6 and 5-HT7 as well, but I'm not quite sure to what extent. But what it basically comes down to is that it hits every serotonin receptor that increases GABA levels, that we know of anyway. DMT comes closer to this, but lacks activity is 5-HT3, and a little less importantly, at 5-HT4. LSD is the same but it loses the affinity for 5-HT7 theoretically unless very large doses are taken. I'm not sure if mescaline activates 5-HT6 or 5-HT7 but I would wager it doesn't, but if it does activate 5-HT3 like I speculated before then that would put it on relatively the same level as LSD. All of this would, it seems to me, fit in with the relatively well-accepted idea of bufotenin > DMT > LSD ≈ mescaline > psilocin as far as the structural integrity of their hallucinations go. It also supports the idea that tryptamines will be the most likely to cause lucid dream-like experiences due to the much more variable and widespread activation of serotonin receptors, which is why I was especially happy to hear that your experience involved a tryptamine. However, there are some other factors to consider as well.

Particularly with LSD and mescaline, dopamine receptors may be playing a significant role. Phenethylamines especially are mainly psychedelic due to their similarity to dopamine, rather than serotonin. This involves a favorite neurochemical subject of mine. Mainstream research articles and simplified naming conventions would have you believe that the big three monoamine neurotransmitters, namely serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine, have their set of receptors they work through by the same names (except for "adrenergic" receptors for norepinephrine, and epinephrine) that work solely for them, at least within their set of three. But this is not the case. One of my favorite parts of researching is when I come across this particular kind of ligand-receptor overlap in articles, because it's so incredibly rare that you see anyone talking about it. An example of this which I think could be very relevant to scientific research is that the so-called "dopamine" D4 receptor also binds norepinephrine and epinephrine as ligands at nearly the same potency. Evidence here and here, and that first article even says that norepinephrine and epinephrine bind to D2 receptors as well, though at significantly higher and possibly normally irrelevant concentrations. D4 has actually been implicated in the positive symptoms of schizophrenia, like delusions and hallucinations, and I have to wonder if this is the reason that stimulants, which work almost entirely through increasing levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, cause schizophrenic-like symptoms to emerge so well in high doses. Considering all this, if you ask me, D4 at least should actually be considered both a dopamine receptor and an adrenergic receptor. I'm not totally sure on the implications of this one yet either, but while we're discussing dopamine-norepinephrine crossovers, this article here suggests that dopamine itself may also be activating beta-adrenergic receptors.

The interactions that interest me the most though are those between dopamine and serotonin. I'm not sure if serotonin and norepinephrine connect yet... but there's definitely some cool stuff here. For one, dopamine itself is a partial agonist at 5-HT2A receptors (as is serotonin), as stated here. Even more interesting is the fact that its ability to internalize the receptor increases after sensitization with serotonin, but it still can do it by itself. When I originally found that article a long time ago I came across one that said it binds to 5-HT2C as well, but I wasn't as interested in that at the time and unfortunately lost track of it. However, yesterday when I was trying to dig it up again, I came across something even better! Another study that not only includes information about it binding to 5-HT2C, but to 5-HT1A and 5-HT3 as well, located here. This adds a cool extra kick for me too, because I was already going to highlight dopamine's partial agonist effects at 5-HT3 covered here and here. I think these last two articles contribute to what I'm trying to say too, as they talk about how full agonists and partial agonists effect 5-HT3 differently, which means serotonin and dopamine will act differently at it. What it would basically come down to is the idea that all of these receptors at least, 5-HT1A, 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, and 5-HT3, could be considered to be both serotonin and dopamine receptors that play distinct roles in the effects of each. This is first of all, I think, pretty important when you're considering the implications for states of mind which involve very high levels of dopamine and very low levels of serotonin, such as REM sleep dreams, or certain anxious or psychotic states. You also have to wonder how exactly these receptor affinities stack when both serotonin and dopamine are high, especially when it comes to how serotonin primes the 5-HT2A receptor for dopamine.

But what I'm really trying to bring this back to is the relevance for psychedelics. People often think that mescaline, for example, is psychedelic because it's similar to dopamine and dopamine is similar to serotonin, but with this I could suggest that it gets its psychedelic properties solely from dopamine similarities, as the serotonin receptors it's known to bind to bind dopamine as well. In fact, with this in mind, I would say that it's quite possible that mescaline is the closest natural chemical, at least that we know of, in both pharmacology and structure to dopamine, and may create its entire spectrum of effects even more fully than a drug which binds only to the D1 through D5 receptors. In this way I feel that you could almost even separate these two categories of psychedelics into totally different categories, one as serotonergic psychedelics and the other as dopaminergic psychedelics, and that could account for such large differences between tryptamines and phenethylamines, and lysergamides which are actually sort of a combination of the two. But I feel that this also calls for other theories for the clarity of mind than what I mentioned before, which is of course how I got to this point in the first place. When we take these drugs, these "false" neurotransmitters, what we're doing is changing the natural ratio of receptor activity in our brain. Those different ratios that account for different hallucinogen effects have a natural state as set up by our natural neurotransmitters, and the more of a false one we take the more we shift our neural activity in that direction. Given this, and given that bufotenin is the most similar to serotonin in structure and function while mescaline is the most similar to dopamine, is it not entirely possible that they each get their clearheaded mindsets due to the fact that they're the most similar to the states that our brains are used to maintaining for normal functioning of consciousness? That doesn't necessarily rule out what I said before either, but it does make it harder to suggest that GABA release may be one of the only significant factors here. It doesn't deter me, though.

Since my last post I've been trying to tie this all into my last big theory about serotonin, which revolves around causing the hallucinogenic side of near-death experiences. The idea would be both just to try to get a grip on that and to explain why drugs such as DMT are so well-known for creating those kinds of trips. And now that I have this GABA-based dream theory, I think I can begin to pull it all together nicely. Normally, it's bad to raise serotonin too much, as evidenced from things like serotonin syndrome following a MDMA overdose. However, it is known to cause hallucinations despite not causing the normal psychedelic sensory syndrome, and if enough GABA was released then this could logically happen at high enough concentrations anyway, as it would stimulate those GABA(A) receptors enough to cause the dopamine facilitation I mentioned before. You don't normally ever have your serotonin levels this high, except for one situation which would raise them in the brain but not body and ignore these physical hazards: during states of high carbon dioxide detection. To monitor if you need to take a breath (to survive), your body actually keeps track of how much carbon dioxide you have in you rather than how much oxygen you have in you, and these receptors that detect carbon dioxide are called chemoreceptors, or chemosensors if your prefer. Serotonin neurons specifically in the raphe nucleus in the brain, and receptors in some other areas as well, act as carbon dioxide chemoreceptors, and the raphe nucleus is the major source of serotonin neurons in the same way that the ventral tegmental area is the major source of dopamine neurons. Because of this, when carbon dioxide detection is very high serotonin will begin to fire all over the brain, including the hippocampus. This is of course what would happen when you stopped breathing, whether or not you died by suffocation. Interestingly, there's also a quasi-psychedelic mixture known as carbogen which had been used in psychiatric settings to test peoples' reactions to psychedelic states of mind before letting them try LSD, back when it was still spreading to people like Timothy Leary. This is a mixture that contains 30% carbon dioxide and 70% oxygen, which means it gives you more than enough to survive perfectly well, but it also makes your brain think you're suffocating and it begins the same chemical cascade that reasonably could be behind a near-death experience. Accordingly, it is known to cause dissociation which feels sort of similar to nitrous oxide in the way it's administered and begins with an out-of-body experience, but it much more colorful and psychedelic with spiritual and reflective themes and vivid scenes.

I love bringing this all together for my theory because it allows me to categorize each chemical nicely. Dopamine is at the source, more of an imagination-generator than anything. GABA would be the chemical which enhances that imagination circuit to the point of creating the dream world. And serotonin is the chemical which activates that dream world circuit in a way designed specifically to create near-death experiences, while carbon dioxide releases it to start off that whole chain. I think there logically must be another path that eventually leads to GABA for regular dreams too, but that's another issue.... Interestingly, serotonin should also then directly modify the way imagination works at the source through activating some of the same receptors as dopamine, and this could logically play into the different kind of experience. This also fits well with the way you can divide up the different hallucinogens. The dopaminergic psychedelics are more abstract, pure euphoric fantasy, and just chaotic. On the next level up, muscimol, which is really the only natural GABAergic hallucinogen we know of, creates dream-like experiences. Then, you have the serotonergic psychedelics which recreate near-death experiences in high doses. What all of these would come down to is that they activate these same processes in the brain, only with some differences, and that's why they can get so bizarre, but still create experiences which are so similar on various levels. Following this logic, I have to ask myself if it's possible for a serotonergic psychedelic to have the exact right structure to shift the simulated near-death experience to a more lucid level of thought than even serotonin itself, by just having the exact right ratio of receptor activity but taken even a step further than how serotonin achieves it? If this was possible, and if it did so particularly by releasing GABA as I mentioned before, then I think it could reasonably account for an experience that was both spiritual and intense like the near-death experience should be, but had an even more powerful and vivid dreamscape with more of a potential for lucid awareness and control than the natural experience should have. As far as I'm concerned, following this path of activity would be the first step towards creating some of the most incredible states of mind we're possible of reaching and further understanding the intricacies of our minds.

And that's why I'm so excited about tryptamines. Bufotenin seems like it could logically do this to me, but it would be foolish to rule out any tryptamine because you never know when they might have just the right structure to make it happen. So again, thank you so much for the anecdote about 4-HO-MPT! It is very much appreciated! :biggrin:

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Originally Posted by Ksero

On the role of GABA, my first intentional lucid was after I took a 100mg pill of GABA before a WBTB attempt, I am aware that GABA does not cross the blood-brain barrier when taken orally, but it definitely does something, if taken before bed I have extremely vivid and intense dreams, sometimes becoming lucid without reality checks.

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This has played into my suspicions as well, it's definitely something to consider. Thanks for that too, you've been very helpful! :)

^^ Here's a practical thought that just occurred to me, Alyzarin: Are any of these drugs/chemicals legal in the doses you might envision (especially if GABA, for instance, needs to be taken some way other than orally)? Will they need prescriptions to be acquired?

These sorts of questions may seem silly or premature when you're still in the academic phase of considering the drugs, but if they represent classes of chemicals that are pretty much out of your average LD'er's reach, perhaps that should be noted? Or is it too soon?

Of course, if these things are available OTC or online, never mind!

Well, I can only really say for sure about the US since the laws are going to be different everywhere, but LSD, psilocin, mescaline, DMT, and bufotenin are not legal to possess in any amount, though the last three are easily quasi-legally obtainable if you know what you're doing, and psilocin grows in mushrooms all over the place. But of course, directly taking psychedelics would be a pretty bad idea for lucid dreaming, as they work in several areas of the brain not involved in hallucinations as well and usually involve a strong physical component which can keep you wired and awake even for hours after the trip ends. Muscimol, on the other hand, has sedative properties due to working through GABA receptors, and is perfectly legal. If taken in incredibly large doses it may be hard to sleep through too, but in more reasonable (and less hallucination-chasing) doses, it has actually been known to be used as a dream supplement. Some even describe going to sleep shortly after dosing and before the trip kicks in, as it often results in a state of lucid and incredibly bizarre dreams. It is the principle chemical component of the mushroom Amanita muscaria, the big red one with white dots which was a model for the Mario mushrooms, supposedly for Alice in Wonderland, and some other stuff, and is essentially responsible for all of its effects. This practice doesn't seem to be incredibly common anymore, at least not in the mainstream lucid dreaming communities, but it is still valid and sometimes explored by the druggier side of the scene, or by those wishing to expand beyond the normal supplement database. I personally have quite a lot of interest in it, since I don't really trip anymore but I would still like to use these hallucinogens to my advantage for these things.

As for the chemicals they effect, those are reasonably already being used. GABA of course is sometimes used directly, as mentioned before, but it's not thought of as the best method. I haven't tried it much with it, but picamilon is easily obtainable and legal, and it's basically a fusion of GABA and niacin (vitamin B3) which allows for stronger blood-brain barrier penetration for GABA. Dopamine is also being used by way of L-phenylalanine, L-tyrosine, and L-DOPA, which are all precursors for it. The same can be said of serotonin with L-tryptophan and 5-HTP. However, there is something to consider here particularly with the latter two, but possibly with the first as well. No matter what drugs we take, they're not going to be as selective in action as those released specifically at their site of effect in the brain. For instance, cannabinoids (CB1 receptor agonists) injected directly into the hippocampus generate REM sleep, but taking them exogenously, such as when smoking weed, inhibits REM sleep. This is because it's only those CB1 receptors in the hippocampus which are favorable, while those in other parts of the brain lead to chemical reactions which will ultimately impair our ability to properly generate dreams and those brainwaves. In a regular dream this doesn't matter because the brain might only be releasing endocannabinoids in the hippocampus and nowhere else, but currently it is incredibly difficult for us to get this type of specificity with drug administration. This could be said of the dopamine and serotonin precursors as well, which, while they may be enhancing dreams to some smaller extent due to increased neurotransmitter availability, are actually known to inhibit REM and therefore get their most potent effects as those neurotransmitters are metabolized and removed from use, allowing for REM rebound.

Arguably, the best way to go about increasing these neurotransmitters that we know of right now would be to increase their biosynthesis cofactors, allowing the brain to make them more efficiently and direct them to only the correct places for use. This is the end of result of taking, for example, vitamins. Several B vitamins, particularly B6, and vitamin C are all involved in the synthesis of dopamine and serotonin. Some minerals such as zinc, iron, and magnesium also play a role. B6 is also used as a cofactor for GABA synthesis, so it's not hard to imagine why it could be such a useful supplement.

Aside from that, this information is mostly for the goal of understanding at the moment, or for experimenting with hallucinogenic states which would be induced exogenously rather than something endogenous like a dream, as those are really the only ones that we have the ability to control scientifically at the moment. However, that doesn't mean that the proper theories couldn't help us get to that point some day!

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Here's a practical thought that just occurred to me, Alyzarin: Are any of these drugs/chemicals legal in the doses you might envision (especially if GABA, for instance, needs to be taken some way other than orally)? Will they need prescriptions to be acquired?

These sorts of questions may seem silly or premature when you're still in the academic phase of considering the drugs, but if they represent classes of chemicals that are pretty much out of your average LD'er's reach, perhaps that should be noted? Or is it too soon?

Of course, if these things are available OTC or online, never mind!

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The legality of these vary by country, and while I know it is possible to get 4-HO-MPT (as well as many other tryptamines and phenaltheylines) online in Canada, I'm pretty sure it is covered under the Federal Analogue Act in the USA, being very similar in chemical structure to illegal drugs. I believe this is because they are just for recreational use at this point, if it was medically relevant or had some positive therapeutic effects it may be reclassified.

You can get straight GABA pills at pretty much any health foods store in Canada, there are also a bunch of online retailers who you can get pure powder from (which is way cheaper), but you would then have to weigh out specific doses and put them into pills your self.

Alyzarin there are a few more experiences I would like to let you know about, the first was with 2-CI which is a synthetic analogue of mescaline, It was extremely clear headed, and filled with geometric type hallucinations, very cool, also had that kind of trip control that I had with 4-HO-MPT, I would have been comfortable going about doing my normal daily tasks, like going out to the store while under the influence. Unfortunately, it seems to be classified as a Schedule I drug now in the US, so that might make obtaining difficult/a bad idea.

The other is diphenhydramine, available in OTC gravol/benadryl, when taken in high doses it has this weird effect where you will fall into a sleep like state without noticing it, while a hallucination takes over as your primary sense of reality. for example you could be sitting at your computer writing a post a dreamviews, finish it, hit the post button, then go to your room, get undressed and tuck yourself in to go to sleep, blink, and you are back sitting at your computer, you haven't actually done anything, but the hallucination was 100% convincing, very similar to schizophrenia. A friend of mine thought he was in his best freinds basement while he was walking around our residence in my 1st year of university. It's a real mind****, the downside is it has an extremely heavy body load at these dosages, including lowered heart rate and difficulty breathing, as well as you look completely retarded to anyone on the outside. Would not recommend this to anyone, but I would be interested to know how it achieves this effect.

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Originally Posted by Ksero

Alyzarin there are a few more experiences I would like to let you know about, the first was with 2-CI which is a synthetic analogue of mescaline, It was extremely clear headed, and filled with geometric type hallucinations, very cool, also had that kind of trip control that I had with 4-HO-MPT, I would have been comfortable going about doing my normal daily tasks, like going out to the store while under the influence. Unfortunately, it seems to be classified as a Schedule I drug now in the US, so that might make obtaining difficult/a bad idea.

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Thanks again for the input. :) 2C-I is something I happen to have experience with as well, and it is indeed, through relation to mescaline, quite similar in structure to dopamine. It is remarkably clearheaded too, and I can say at least from personal experience that this remains relatively true even at doses as high as 90 mg. Most phenethylamines seem to be pretty clear compared to most tryptamines, and I would wager that if what I theorized before is true then this could be explainable by the fact phenethylamines would be more on the level of effecting imagination and euphoria at the center without much need for emotional changes, whereas tryptamines would be recreating an entire transcendental experience which would of course take you a little further away from normal consciousness.

For the record, I wouldn't recommend taking 90 mg of 2C-I since we know so little about the safety of research chemicals, I'm kind of reckless lol. But the experience was quite intense, the body feeling was like an orgasm times a thousand, and I even saw entities. There were these ghostly blue girls in trippy outfits who were constantly phasing through me and moaning as they did, and as they moved through me I felt their touch within me just as if I had actually been touched, which would cause every atom in my being to rupture with incredible euphoria, which would also cause shockwaves that would then do the same to every other atom in the immediate vicinity, and so on and so forth.... I was completely 100% aware of what was going on at the time, no significant mental inhibitions at all. I feel that my experience, yours, and others' collectively support my theory pretty well.

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Originally Posted by Ksero

The other is diphenhydramine, available in OTC gravol/benadryl, when taken in high doses it has this weird effect where you will fall into a sleep like state without noticing it, while a hallucination takes over as your primary sense of reality. for example you could be sitting at your computer writing a post a dreamviews, finish it, hit the post button, then go to your room, get undressed and tuck yourself in to go to sleep, blink, and you are back sitting at your computer, you haven't actually done anything, but the hallucination was 100% convincing, very similar to schizophrenia. A friend of mine thought he was in his best freinds basement while he was walking around our residence in my 1st year of university. It's a real mind****, the downside is it has an extremely heavy body load at these dosages, including lowered heart rate and difficulty breathing, as well as you look completely retarded to anyone on the outside. Would not recommend this to anyone, but I would be interested to know how it achieves this effect.

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First, I would like to reiterate the last point here for anyone else reading. Do not use diphenhydramine to hallucinate. (Heck, I wouldn't even recommend using it for it's intended medicinal purpose.) Diphenhydramine is part of a hallucinogenic spectrum I have not yet mentioned here, the third major category which is generally placed next to psychedelics and dissociatives, known as deliriants. While there are some who consider these drugs useful for reasons such as astral travel, generally only in the most severe and reckless groups of psychonauts, most drug users will actively warn you against deliriants even while recommending wholeheartedly everything else because they are well-known for their potential to create incredibly long-lasting deficits in memory, motor control, and visual systems (up to and including lingering hallucinations), and often for negatively effecting vital organs, which increases with every use. Diphenhydramine in particular has been shown to have detrimental effects on heart function, which could go from only happening during the trip to something more permanent if it's used too frequently.

That being said, deliriants are something that interest me greatly. They are directly anticholinergic in nature, they work by blocking the activity of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, usually (but not always) relatively non-selectively. It's because of this that they cause severe disruptions in the way memories are encoded, understood, and recalled, which greatly contributes to the state of frank delirium from which these drugs get their name, a state in which blackouts, confusion, amnesia, and an overall mindset similar to non-lucidity occur. I actually did touch on this briefly I believe in my first post, when I mentioned that anticholinergics were one of the drugs which could cause your consciousness to blackout without making your body totally shut down. These drugs also don't cause even slightest amount of euphoria, in fact they pretty much make you feel like shit, unless you take so much that you have absolutely no idea what's going on anymore. They've even been used as poisons throughout history because they're so effectively disabling and toxic, through mechanisms unrelated to their psychological effects. There's not really much desirable about these drugs at all, other than that they do cause very vivid and realistic hallucinations. But that alone is enough to bring people who have an insatiable hunger for experimenting to try them out, people like me.

The highest dose of diphenhydramine I ever took was 1000 mg, which amounts to 40 of the basic strength Benadryl pills they sell here. I also took it on several occasions in doses between 300 and 700 mg, usually not very close together (thankfully). The hallucinations are extremely realistic and often completely indistinguishable from reality, at least until you've tripped on it enough to recognize the subtle differences and learn how to combat the delirium. They also work remarkably similar to dreams, including various things such as people walking into the room and talking to you, scenes randomly changing, and a similar feeling to "freedom" from the normal constraints of reality which I relate very much to just observing things in a lucid dream. There is also a distinct similarity in the kinds of hallucinations produced by deliriants versus psychedelics, minus all of the raw sensory stuff, though it can be difficult to understand without actually experiencing them both. However, what really interests me here is the way that people often say that muscimol also has a deliriant aspect, and that anticholinergics are really the only thing it can be related to in that regard. I haven't personally taken a large dose of muscimol, but I have taken enough to experience some of these deliriant-like effects, and I must say they are quite similar in many ways.

The anticholinergic that you see in research articles will almost universally be scopolamine, the most hallucinogenic chemical in most plants that contain tropane deliriants, such as datura, belladonna, brugmansia, henbane, mandrake, and etc. Diphenhydramine sometimes appears, but mostly just for antihistamine research. Scopolamine is much more selective in its action, and has been used safely in very low doses (relative to hallucinogenic effects) for things such as motion sickness, insomnia, anesthesia, and occasionally in small quantities of datura seeds as a dream enhancer. What's interesting though is that scopolamine, and by extension you can assume other anticholinergics, directly enhance the release of GABA in the hippocampus. It's possible that it does this by disrupting a system that acetylcholine has in place which works as sort of a flood control for GABA. When acetylcholine levels are very high then GABA levels can be lowered, unless they're also being directly increased by something else even more strongly, which would be the case with something like psychedelics, or dreams and near-death experiences if my theories are correct. This likely plays some role in regulating resting levels of consciousness, among other things. But because of this, when the receptors that cause this control, certain muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, are blocked, they facilitate more GABA release than is normally occurring, which could allow for heavy GABA(A) stimulation and all of the same things I've been talking about up to this point. Given the dream-like hallucinations and the comparisons to muscimol, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is how they get their hallucinogenic effects.

So yes, anticholinergic deliriants actually could be another good example of this that would support what I'm saying. However, they should definitely not be considered for recreational use like the rest of these drugs might be. It is possible, though, that some of the dream-enhancing effects of scopolamine come from this increased GABA release, but any drug that blocks muscarinic acetylcholine receptors would be quite counterintuitive as far as becoming lucid goes.

I am not sure it is true that you can do everything in your dream because then you would be able to time dilate.

I had a fantastic dream this morning, and for the first time ever it told me how long it lasted (not sure if accurate or not but still cool). I was at my first day of work at an amazing restaurant in California. I for some reason thought in my dream this would be really hard to keep. After what felt like a long time in the dream I got fired and my boss told me I lasted 2.3 hours which actually seems accurate in what I did in the dream. Pretty cool, maybe there is a way to tell your brain the amount of time you want to spend in the dream.

Time Dilation is possible, you can whether ask your subconscious to stretch time.

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.

A few more thoughts, I'll try to keep this one shorter so I don't keep torturing you guys....

I looked a little more into the way natural REM generation works during sleep. I've known for a while that it's mainly activated by a cluster of different areas in the brainstem, which is also involved in REM atonia (sleep paralysis). It seems that areas known as pre-locus coeruleus and medial parabrachial nucleus, which are located in the same area as the pons which is usually studied for REM sleep, project to the medial septal nucleus. This last one and the hippocampus actually have reciprocal GABA and acetylcholine connections, and so activation of the medial septal nucleus like this causes theta wave activity to begin during REM sleep due to these projections, and is involved in it during waking states as well. The neurons which begin this process in the brainstem areas seem to be glutamatergic in nature, and both glutamate and acetylcholine neurons in brainsteam have been known for a while to be REM-on switches, while serotonin neurons there are REM-off. This whole process would be I think so far the most likely explanation for how the brain could cause the excitatory GABA action during regular REM sleep dreams.

Aside from dreams, another thing that recently came to mind is sex. Hallucinations can sometimes occur during "regular" sex, but are much more likely during practices such as BDSM and activities to awaken kundalini, in which phenomena such as out-of-body experiences and psychedelic alterations in perception of self can occur. The last two of these both involve heavy focus on sensual pleasures to get the most you possibly can out of the experience, and this should cause releases in oxytocin and vasopressin. I actually found a study last night that suggests that these two together may cause a GABA switch from inhibitory to excitatory during hyperosmotic stress, but even without that, what I'm interested in is the fact that oxytocin releases GABA in both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. The latter could be responsible for some of the psychedelic identity distortions of sex, but the former would of course be significant for the out-of-body experiences. Oxytocin is released from physical touch as a pro-social hormone, and is involved in the feelings of trust, connection, and euphoria from sexual activity. It would make sense that in someone particularly sensitive to it it could have stronger effects potentially leading to hallucinations from regular sex, but as the BDSM and kundalini practices are actually focused on pushing it as far as possible, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they get their effects that way.

Lastly, I've been thinking more about the connection between anticholinergic deliriants and dreams. In certain psychonaut communities it's becoming more well-known of a practice to mix small amounts of tropane deliriants, like datura seeds, with plants that contain a chemical called scopoletin. This causes the hallucinations to come out at a much lower dose at relatively full strength, without any of the normally-associated delirium or toxic symptoms of use. Scopoletin is actually remarkably similar to galantamine in the way it works, the two have actually been compared in scientific literature before, and I can't help but relate this in mind to galantamine enhancing dreams. Most importantly for us here, it works as an acetylcholinesterase and either an agonist or a positive allosteric modulator of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. This always amazed me, because why in the world would a compound with raises acetylcholine, which is known to be used for anticholinergic overdose reversal, be able to enhance the hallucinations of an anticholinergic drug? But, I think I have a possible solution for it now. In the hippocampus, muscarinic M2 receptors serve as acetylcholine autoreceptors, which are that same kind of flood control working, too much acetylcholine begins to inhibit its own release. It's known that anticholinergic block this autoreceptor, because they actually cause a release of acetylcholine this way. However, those presynaptic M2 receptors are also known to be the most direct method of acetylcholine's GABA flood control as well. My main thought here would be that scopoletin causes reactivation of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors, but if the dose of a deliriant is small enough to only significantly block those presynaptic M2 receptors without yet hitting the postsynaptic ones, it may shift this activity both so that acetylcholine levels stay high and keep you lucid but the ratio of GABA to acetylcholine is higher than normal. And because those acetylcholine levels have gone up, it may be worth considering that the already-increased GABA will begin to shift even more toward excitatory due to the downstream inhibition of carbonic anhydrase I mentioned before, which could cause the hallucinations to become more likely without dosing high as to adversely effect cognition.

So that's what I've been thinking about since I last posted. I'm really hoping that if I can get a really solid framework for this down then I'll be able to get a lot more out it, hopefully in areas such as here with time dilation.

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Originally Posted by Lucidpotential

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.

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I've had this in mind, too.... However, I have to point out that it probably wasn't literally his whole life that flashed before his eyes, or anyone else's. I would bet that if you asked him deeper questions about it would mostly relate to important events in his life, which would obviously be on your mind at the time, and I think could relate to how I said that the hallucinations your brain makes will just depend on your state of mind as they would in regular levels of imagination. For instance, I'm sure he saw the things that mattered the most to him because he was worried about losing them, but I would bet money that he didn't relive every meal, shower, and bathroom break he ever experienced.

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Originally Posted by Lucidpotential

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.

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issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts. More and more healthy skeptical scientists are gravitating towards the filter hypothesis, where the brain reduces and filters consciousness, like a TV set picks up signals from satellites or ground cables and filters and displays them. If you smash the Tv, you didn't erase the signal. Whats crazy is this hypothesis explains a lot that the brain based hypothesis can't and explains what the brain based one can as well. We don't know what consciousness is. People who have NDE's report linear time not existing at all, where they see feel and live they're whole life at the same time, in a totally paradoxical way, and they feel what the people and beings felt when they harmed them in some way, as a way of learning, etc etc. True NDE's change peoples lives and are very intense

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Originally Posted by tofur

issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts.

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Which attempts are these, exactly?

trying to locate memories stored in the brain, the source of electrical activity in the brain (we can trace it to a certain point, but can't figure out what gives rise to the first bit of activity, it gets to a point where it seems to come out of nowhere and some unseen force outside the brain is creating it), etc. I don't pretend to be as intelligent as the people dedicating their lives to this kind of work, I just read what conclusions they have come to. The ones who aren't attached to the dogmatic materialist view on things are shying away from concluding the brain produces consciousness, as crazy as that sounds. True science doesn't care if it sounds crazy, it just follows the evidence. At the moment nothing is set in stone, we just dont know enough and we've been very held back by the rigid views of classical physics and peoples resistance to where the evidence is leading. Pretty standard response though, nothing new in humanities history.

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Originally Posted by tofur

trying to locate memories stored in the brain, the source of electrical activity in the brain (we can trace it to a certain point, but can't figure out what gives rise to the first bit of activity, it gets to a point where it seems to come out of nowhere and some unseen force outside the brain is creating it), etc.

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I'm not even sure what you mean by that.... Electricity in the brain is generated from the incredible amount of chemical reactions occurring simultaneously. Science is well aware of this. You're going to have to be more specific on that if I'm misunderstanding something.

As for where memories are recorded, I recommend you read this: Optogenetic stimulation of a hippocampal engram activates fear memory recall. This is a study which tests individual neuron clusters in mice as a theoretical basis of where memories are stored. They condition certain rats with fear memory and then label the brain cells in the hippocampus, long thought to be a major memory center, that were activated at the time of the conditioning. When they stimulated only these specific clusters later, the mice which were not conditioned showed no reaction but the mice which were began to react as if the fear-inducing event was happening again. When they later removed the neurons, the mice lost this reaction. The conclusion was that these neuron clusters seem highly probable as a place where memories (or memory fragments, as memories are known to not be stored as a whole regardless of where they are) are recorded, and as a focus of how memories could be theoretically removed. If you can find any theory or information which has more weight than this, I'm all ears.

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Originally Posted by tofur

I don't pretend to be as intelligent as the people dedicating their lives to this kind of work, I just read what conclusions they have come to. The ones who aren't attached to the dogmatic materialist view on things are shying away from concluding the brain produces consciousness, as crazy as that sounds. True science doesn't care if it sounds crazy, it just follows the evidence. At the moment nothing is set in stone, we just dont know enough and we've been very held back by the rigid views of classical physics and peoples resistance to where the evidence is leading. Pretty standard response though, nothing new in humanities history.

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Evidence supporting something and lack of evidence against something are not the same thing. Just because there has been, up until recently, some issues in discovering the location of memories in the brain doesn't mean even slightly that they must be stored somewhere else. The brain is unbelievably complex and so much of it is beyond our knowledge that the thought that we should have figured out everything about it by now is completely laughable.

You are right in saying that "true" science follows the evidence, no matter what. So where is the evidence that what you're saying is correct?

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Originally Posted by torfur

issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts. More and more healthy skeptical scientists are gravitating towards the filter hypothesis, where the brain reduces and filters consciousness, like a TV set picks up signals from satellites or ground cables and filters and displays them. If you smash the Tv, you didn't erase the signal. Whats crazy is this hypothesis explains a lot that the brain based hypothesis can't and explains what the brain based one can as well. We don't know what consciousness is. People who have NDE's report linear time not existing at all, where they see feel and live they're whole life at the same time, in a totally paradoxical way, and they feel what the people and beings felt when they harmed them in some way, as a way of learning, etc etc. True NDE's change peoples lives and are very intense

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The problem I see with the idea that the brain is merely the filter for, rather than the origin of, the mind, is that this idea is inconsistent with the fact that if you were to 'smash' only part of the brain, then that person loses or suffers impairments in whatever function that region of the brain was responsible for (i.e. those lacking a hippocampus lose the ability to create new explicit memories). Where if it were true that the brain is merely a 'filter', destroying part of it should let more of the signal through, but this does not appear to be the case.

I would agree with you that consciousness itself is rather mysterious, and it's plausible that science will never truly understand it, simply because it's so difficult to study. But what we can study rather well are the contents of consciousness (thoughts, memories, emotions), and I don't think it's premature at all to assert that those contents are coming to us straight from the brain.

Still...

Ever try to use a clogged filter? Maybe when you are "smashing" a portion of the brain, you're merely causing it to be unable to filter a certain portion of conscious activity into physical reality? In other words, consciousness is intact, but its connection to waking reality is frazzled.

Just a thought...

It would seem to me in that case, Sageous, that if the entire brain was destroyed, experiencing conscious states would become impossible because their connection to the real world would be permanently out of order. I can't say for sure, but I doubt this is what advocates of the brain as a filer/reciever hypothesis believe, as the whole point of their idea seems (at least to me) to be to present a reasonable non physical basis for consciousness, that isn't completely at odds with neuroscience and, most importantly, allows for experience after death, which doesn't follow if a functional brain is needed for the 'signal' to be experienced.

The filter hypothesis also seems to be inconsistent with the fact that we can induce certain conscious states quite reliably by stimulating certain brain areas. For instance, if we can see that the amygdala is active while someone is in a state of fear, and if we can induce a state of fear by activating the amygdala, then we have more than a mere correlation, but clear cause and effect. I don't see any room for an outside signal here, if you don't think that our activating the relevant brain region to induce fear is actually where the fear is coming from, then I guess you could claim that the outside fear signal is coming in at the exact same time that the activation is taking place, but this is obviously an unparsimonious explanation. All we need to explain the fear is the brain activation, you're adding an extra, unnecessary, dimension.

I agree with sageous on this. Think of the brain to the mind as the body parts to the brain. If you smash part of it, or you cut the nerve to a body part, it will stop working, weather the info is there or not, since the connection is lost. So you smash part of the brain and nothing can travel through it anymore. Hope I am making sense and understanding this concept. :P

Something else just occurred to me in relation to time dilation. This is probably going to get a bit more metaphysical than my previous posts on the subject, so be warned. I was thinking about deliriants more when I thought of this. I've mentioned my views on what perception is, in that what we are experiencing is simply our memories being recorded into existence. I also stated that I believe that our perception of time is the measurement of the measurement of change. I now feel that this is an incomplete view on my part. It's suddenly struck me that our awareness of the situation must be seriously considered as well, as this is in its own way a measurement of our perception. Which, yes, means that the way we experience time would actually be a measurement of a measurement of a measurement of change.

I actually owe this train of thought to the above discussion. Because of this, I'm going to attempt to briefly explain my views on what awareness is before moving on. In relation to the topic of whether or not the brain acts as some sort of instrument which either communicates with or creates some plane of existence which is beyond, but interwoven with, our physical perception, I feel that this is true in at least some way. I believe that the fact that we perceive at all is proof of this. I feel that this point may not be very clear, so let me try to explain with a metaphor. If you program a robot to be able to act relatively human, do you think it will actually have a subjective point of view like we do as living beings? Or is it simply a machine that's running as it's told to, with nothing actually being experienced by it? Similarly, the human body is simply a network of chemical reactions which is working how it's supposed to, and this relates to how I mentioned before that you can shut off perception with depressant drugs while the body remains in motion. However, memories will not be recorded, and that brings me to this point. Somewhere in the process that encodes memories, life is born. A subjective perspective emerges seemingly from nothing, and is locked into that one network. This process is incredibly important to our regular functioning as well, as it allows our brain to pick and choose in a sense which perceptions it pays attention to. But what conceivable process is the brain tapping into which allows for such an incredible occurrence? How does it manage to achieve something which has baffled humankind for so long? Now, I'm not going to say no one will ever know... but personally, I would not be surprised if it could be lumped into the same category as trying to figure out the beginning of all existence. We live in universe with rules, and those rules have to have been defined by something constant, but for that something constant to exist it must have been defined by rules as well, which must have been constant... ad infinitum. Infinity is something that the human will never be able to comprehend, because either we didn't require it to exist or because it simply isn't possible with what we were given. As far as I'm concerned, there's no reason that the same might not be happening with life, with awareness. Even if we one day come to understand the chemical reactions with bring it about, it doesn't mean we'll ever be able to directly measure it, or that we'll ever be able to understand what makes one subjective perspective different from another ("Why am I me and not you?"), and it may genuinely be impossible as the brain simply didn't need to learn how to integrate it into the world we see as a part of our evolution. And thus, subjectivity remains ever elusive to us.

Hopefully I made my point on that well enough... but feel free to ask questions if I didn't. So, back to deliriants. I was considering how I'd mentioned before that they increase the release of GABA in the hippocampus by blocking the activity of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors. Because of this, though they would feasibly cause enough GABA stimulation to make the inhibitory-to-excitatory switch, they still cause severe deficits in memory. But it is in addition to causing dream-like hallucinations, which suggests that they are still causing the same downstream effects as the other drugs and experiences I mentioned. This could imply based on what I'd said so far that deliriants should cause time dilation as well, but they often don't, despite being able to cause these same intense and removing experiences. In fact, they often cause time to pass by much more quickly. This relates to how memory is important in time dilation, as I mentioned before with the thought that brought me to research more about GABA in the first place, but it made me think a step further this time. Up until this point I've been thinking about this with awareness and the amount of information your brain is processing at once being tied together, but they're not. GABA may be able to inhibit or enhance memory based on how it's working, but just as how it works downstream through dopamine to effect hallucinations, so does it work downstream to effect memory. It's not at the core, and if that central core process is disrupted then it won't matter how much upstream memory stimulation you have. This would be why deliriants could constantly increase the amount of information needed to be processed but still drop awareness potentially down to nothing, because acetylcholine is closer to the core of memory. I carried this thought on to the idea that even if your brain's processing power and the amount of information it was recording were completely maximized, it would mean nothing if you had no subjective experience of it. Your perception of time would still be zero.

This leads me to a somewhat distressing thought, that our perceptions of time are directly linked to something we can't understand. Of course, it doesn't really surprise me, but from a scientific view it makes things tough. However, like I said at the beginning of this post, I am willing to reach into metaphysics as well. The first thing that occurs to me is that though I do believe that the chemical components required for generation of subjectivity exist within our brain in the physical planes we have come to understand, the outcome of those chemical reactions (our awareness) may not. This opens up the door for an immense amount of speculation, the most significant to me being that this field of perception that is what we are could be able to hold a much larger amount of information than would be expected by us based on the amount of data that our physical brains are able to "send" to it. I'm not going to pretend to have even the slightest idea of what more specific details this could entail, but just to give an example of what I'm talking about.... The brain picks up or puts together all these raw sensory signals, encodes them, picks important information out of them, and then sends them all to the mental map in the hippocampus to be written into memory, right? Well - and I'd like to very much reiterate that this is not even a theory, its just a THOUGHT that I don't think is entirely impossible, just the track my mind is following to keep itself entertained - what if those incoming signals are actually something of a seed which is then used to cause a reaction which is significantly greater than itself? I can relate this to forms in nature, such as mountain ranges and many plants, which make use of easily identifiable fractal geometry. The brain makes use of this as well, as is easily seen during a hallucinogenic experience, particularly of the psychedelic variety. Especially considering that, what if those signals were just the brain fine-tuning it's basic fractal equations which then are somehow used in the reaction which creates our awareness to generate the world we see? Now, in the waking world I could see some possible issues with this, depending on how you want to spin it. But what about in a totally internal environment, like a dream? Acetylcholine seemingly doesn't make you hallucinate when you're awake, but it does make hallucinations and the dream world more intense and complex. What if, in these internally-generated states, acetylcholine's control over this awareness creation changed so that each linear increase in cholinergic activity amounted to something more like an exponential growth in our subjective experience?

Of course, it's highly likely that an actual process, if one were to work like that, would require more than just acetylcholine to work, but I don't think that's entirely unsupported by what we do know either. For example, one thing to consider could be the idea that even that fractal reaction would be constrained by other factors in the brain such as the amount of processing power our minds are using. In a state such as one induced by a psychedelic or in my hypothetical near-death experience this could be avoided by the simultaneous increase in levels of acetylcholine, GABA, dopamine, and other things. But while dopamine and acetylcholine levels are also high in dreams, it's important to remember other things as well. Despite the higher cholinergic activity, memory is still disrupted by non-lucidity through some potentially even more direct mechanism. Given what I've said, it's possible that non-lucidity actually causes time to flow faster in this way despite what I've mentioned in previous posts so far. Becoming lucid may overcome this by raising acetylcholine levels even higher and making things more vivid, but this is not a psychedelic state. It's very possible that during a dream if acetylcholine levels go up then GABA levels will go down, because of the flood control thing I mentioned before. Normally it would also shift GABA more from inhibitory to excitatory which would make up for some of this, but if GABA is already running strongly in that sense during a dream, then would it matter? If that's the case, I could imagine that that may actually be involved in why random activities in the dream world, and the "bizarreness" of the dream, can drop once you achieve lucidity, because the amount of random information being pumped into it drops. This could also reasonably account for a bidirectional shift in the perception of time, which obviously wouldn't be favorable for our purposes here. It does make me wonder about methods to overcome this though, such as the previously mentioned combination of datura and scopoletin-containing plants which may increase acetylcholine at the same as blocking the GABA-lowering autoreceptor....

Anyway, if you take anything away from this, it should be that just because I'm saying all of this neurochemistry stuff doesn't necessarily mean that I don't believe that there's more going on too, or that these incredibly extreme experiences of time dilation aren't at least potentially possible through things we don't understand. I personally like to keep an open mind about it, so I don't want it to seem like I'm totally against views which express beliefs like that. It really just comes down to perception. I'd also like to point out that I may be hitting a ceiling soon as far as this subject goes.... As you can plainly see, I'm beginning to enter the realm of things that are difficult to narrow down.

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Originally Posted by Alyzarin

I've had this in mind, too.... However, I have to point out that it probably wasn't literally his whole life that flashed before his eyes, or anyone else's. I would bet that if you asked him deeper questions about it would mostly relate to important events in his life, which would obviously be on your mind at the time, and I think could relate to how I said that the hallucinations your brain makes will just depend on your state of mind as they would in regular levels of imagination. For instance, I'm sure he saw the things that mattered the most to him because he was worried about losing them, but I would bet money that he didn't relive every meal, shower, and bathroom break he ever experienced.

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Yes I agree, But ... Even if only some of his life flashed in a couple of seconds it seems to me that information is reaching his consciousness at a vastly accelerated rate. This guy who told me about his NDE in the plane crash took about an hour to tell me all the stuff he saw flash.

For sure, but I think it is telling in the sense that it would probably take me more than hour to describe my entire life lol. I'm not saying it's not possible though, in fact I've been trying to figure out how it might be.

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Originally Posted by tofur

issue here is your assuming its our brains responsible. Science hasn't confirmed that consciousness is created by the brain, despite many attempts. More and more healthy skeptical scientists are gravitating towards the filter hypothesis, where the brain reduces and filters consciousness, like a TV set picks up signals from satellites or ground cables and filters and displays them. If you smash the Tv, you didn't erase the signal. Whats crazy is this hypothesis explains a lot that the brain based hypothesis can't and explains what the brain based one can as well. We don't know what consciousness is. People who have NDE's report linear time not existing at all, where they see feel and live they're whole life at the same time, in a totally paradoxical way, and they feel what the people and beings felt when they harmed them in some way, as a way of learning, etc etc. True NDE's change peoples lives and are very intense

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Ya, I love the idea that our consciousness is triggering our brain NOT our brain triggering our consciousness. Good thoughts on this thread, you guys really have me thinking. But is it my brain that is thinking?

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Originally Posted by Alyzarin

I'm not even sure what you mean by that.... Electricity in the brain is generated from the incredible amount of chemical reactions occurring simultaneously. Science is well aware of this. You're going to have to be more specific on that if I'm misunderstanding something.

As for where memories are recorded, I recommend you read this: Optogenetic stimulation of a hippocampal engram activates fear memory recall. This is a study which tests individual neuron clusters in mice as a theoretical basis of where memories are stored. They condition certain rats with fear memory and then label the brain cells in the hippocampus, long thought to be a major memory center, that were activated at the time of the conditioning. When they stimulated only these specific clusters later, the mice which were not conditioned showed no reaction but the mice which were began to react as if the fear-inducing event was happening again. When they later removed the neurons, the mice lost this reaction. The conclusion was that these neuron clusters seem highly probable as a place where memories (or memory fragments, as memories are known to not be stored as a whole regardless of where they are) are recorded, and as a focus of how memories could be theoretically removed. If you can find any theory or information which has more weight than this, I'm all ears.



Evidence supporting something and lack of evidence against something are not the same thing. Just because there has been, up until recently, some issues in discovering the location of memories in the brain doesn't mean even slightly that they must be stored somewhere else. The brain is unbelievably complex and so much of it is beyond our knowledge that the thought that we should have figured out everything about it by now is completely laughable.

You are right in saying that "true" science follows the evidence, no matter what. So where is the evidence that what you're saying is correct?

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the evidence is spread through a bunch of books I've read. One I remember but don't know where I read it was a study with rats, where they would put a rat in a maze and time how long it took to get through it. The first time it was longest, and as the rat learned where to go it's times got better and then stabilized. They then would cut out part of the rats brain and send it back into the maze to see if that part of the brain was storing its memory of the route through the maze. But the rat did it in the stabilized time. They kept doing this to these poor rats and with different parts of the brain until they had cut out every part, and these rats didn't forget how to make it through. Wish I knew where I read it, I'll look for it.

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Originally Posted by Lucidpotential

Yes I agree, But ... Even if only some of his life flashed in a couple of seconds it seems to me that information is reaching his consciousness at a vastly accelerated rate. This guy who told me about his NDE in the plane crash took about an hour to tell me all the stuff he saw flash.

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I've done a lot of research on the NDE and from what I've seen, people re-live specific parts of their life. A lot of people say the whole point was to learn, and the times when they did something bad that hurt another being, they would re-live it and feel what the person/thing they wronged felt. Like one person shot a bird with a bb gun when he was young, and he re-lived that but felt the suffering of the birds babies as they starved to death. Another had said some really hurtful things to someone and felt what they felt in response, and saw how what they ahd said negatively affected that persons whole life. And positive parts where they helped others and did good were celebrated. Sounds cheesy but thats what people are saying happened.

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Originally Posted by PresentMoment

The problem I see with the idea that the brain is merely the filter for, rather than the origin of, the mind, is that this idea is inconsistent with the fact that if you were to 'smash' only part of the brain, then that person loses or suffers impairments in whatever function that region of the brain was responsible for (i.e. those lacking a hippocampus lose the ability to create new explicit memories). Where if it were true that the brain is merely a 'filter', destroying part of it should let more of the signal through, but this does not appear to be the case.

I would agree with you that consciousness itself is rather mysterious, and it's plausible that science will never truly understand it, simply because it's so difficult to study. But what we can study rather well are the contents of consciousness (thoughts, memories, emotions), and I don't think it's premature at all to assert that those contents are coming to us straight from the brain.

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As sageous said, when you smash a certain part of the filter you lose the ability to filter that aspect of consciousness. Filter may be a bad word, think fo the brain more as a medium for consciousness. Like if you smashed a certain part of a tv circuit board that controls the appearance of the color blue (just an example), the color blue wouldn't be able to be generated in the reality of the TV, even though its still part of the source. You wouldn't get an over abundance of blue in that case, its the opposite. So the filter theory still stands. Believe me, there are a lot of materialist oriented scientists who would dearly love to deal the death blow to the filter theory because it goes against what they believe, and many have tried, but it still stands at the moment. Some who try end up concluding that the filter theory makes more sense. I know I'm just spewing crap out here without references, I'll try and find where I've read this stuff.

Though Tofur's response said enough:

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Originally Posted by PresentMoment

It would seem to me in that case, Sageous, that if the entire brain was destroyed, experiencing conscious states would become impossible because their connection to the real world would be permanently out of order. I can't say for sure, but I doubt this is what advocates of the brain as a filer/reciever hypothesis believe, as the whole point of their idea seems (at least to me) to be to present a reasonable non physical basis for consciousness, that isn't completely at odds with neuroscience and, most importantly, allows for experience after death, which doesn't follow if a functional brain is needed for the 'signal' to be experienced.

The filter hypothesis also seems to be inconsistent with the fact that we can induce certain conscious states quite reliably by stimulating certain brain areas. For instance, if we can see that the amygdala is active while someone is in a state of fear, and if we can induce a state of fear by activating the amygdala, then we have more than a mere correlation, but clear cause and effect. I don't see any room for an outside signal here, if you don't think that our activating the relevant brain region to induce fear is actually where the fear is coming from, then I guess you could claim that the outside fear signal is coming in at the exact same time that the activation is taking place, but this is obviously an unparsimonious explanation. All we need to explain the fear is the brain activation, you're adding an extra, unnecessary, dimension.

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Like I said, it was just a thought... I didn't even realize you were referencing a "brain-as-filter" school of thought; I assumed you were presenting a metaphor.

That said:

Wouldn't experience after death follow, using this filter plan? After all, once we're dead, we're no longer connected with the physical world, right? That signal is only for experiencing the physical world, after all; there isn't much need for that after we've moved on. Also, just as unclogging certain bits of filters make them work better, there's no reason to assume that triggering specific circuits in the brain won't simulate physical-world related events (i.e., fear). In other words, the only fear you're explaining is the brain's mechanical process for "filtering" fear, when the actual event happens.

Again, I wasn't adding any dimensions; I was simply sharing a thought your post gave me; I've never heard of this brain-as-filter school, and though I'm certainly not a member, I have to admit that their logic, as you presented, seems fairly straightforward.

And, just for the sake of relevance, wouldn't a consciousness independent of the brain be helpful in dilating our perception of time? After all, since the circuitry of the brain might not be capable of handling the information necessary to dilate time, some other factor might be nice. Don't you think?

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Originally Posted by tofur

the evidence is spread through a bunch of books I've read. One I remember but don't know where I read it was a study with rats, where they would put a rat in a maze and time how long it took to get through it. The first time it was longest, and as the rat learned where to go it's times got better and then stabilized. They then would cut out part of the rats brain and send it back into the maze to see if that part of the brain was storing its memory of the route through the maze. But the rat did it in the stabilized time. They kept doing this to these poor rats and with different parts of the brain until they had cut out every part, and these rats didn't forget how to make it through. Wish I knew where I read it, I'll look for it.

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I believe this is the one you're referring to, I didn't type this up but it basically sums up what my response would be:

Lashley's Research | in Chapter 06: Memory | from Psychology: An Introduction by Russ Dewey

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If each part of the nervous system stores memories of its own role in neural activity, this may help explain a famous series of experiments that baffled psychologists in the 1930s and 1940s. Karl Lashley, one of the world's foremost brain researchers, tried to locate the area in the brain where engrams or memory traces were stored. He sliced or removed sections of rat brains after teaching the rats to run mazes. None of the brain injuries abolished the "maze-running habit," although Lashley tried removing tissue in almost every area that allowed the rat to remain alive. Lashley concluded that memories had to be spread all over the brain, throughout the tissue.

In retrospect, Lashley probably picked the worst possible laboratory task to study, if he was trying to find a specific location that stored a memory. Maze running involves many parts of the brain. At minimum it involves vision (remembering the sight of correct pathways), spatial sense (remembering the direction to turn), olfaction (smelling the cheese and moving toward the more powerful odor), and kinesthesis (the feeling of arms and legs running a certain direction). If one type of clue is eliminated, there are many others remaining, allowing the rat to guide itself to the end of the maze. So Lashley was half right: memory is widely distributed. He was also half wrong, because he assumed memory was unitary and there was one type of memory trace stored all over the brain.

Lashley's research was very influential and led to a persistent anti-localization bias among psychologists. For decades, psychologists were inclined to believe that complex mental functions would be spread all over the brain in equal measure, with one area of brain tissue being able to substitute for another after brain injury (how else to explain Lashley's results?).

Lashley's conclusions implied that a skill would never depend upon one tiny area of neurons. However, as it turned out, almost the exact opposite is true. Specialized circuits exist in every part of the brain. But so many locations are involved in a complex act like running a maze that eliminating one part of the brain is not enough to disrupt the entire act.

Posner (1993) noted the "popularly held belief in psychology that the cognitive functions of the brain are widely distributed among different brain areas." However, he concluded, "imaging studies reveal a startling degree of region-specific activity." In other words, most brain tissue is highly specialized. A typical cognitive act does indeed activate many places in the brain, but each area is doing something different from the others: something for which it is specialized.

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If you find the full study feel free to still post it though, I'd gladly give it a read. However, you're going to have to do better than that if you want to defend it. For instance, you're going to have to explain why they were able to delete a memory response in mice in the study I posted, which was conducted last year, as opposed to Lashley's that are now 80 years old and very far behind in understanding of the brain.

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Originally Posted by tofur

I've done a lot of research on the NDE and from what I've seen, people re-live specific parts of their life. A lot of people say the whole point was to learn, and the times when they did something bad that hurt another being, they would re-live it and feel what the person/thing they wronged felt. Like one person shot a bird with a bb gun when he was young, and he re-lived that but felt the suffering of the birds babies as they starved to death. Another had said some really hurtful things to someone and felt what they felt in response, and saw how what they ahd said negatively affected that persons whole life. And positive parts where they helped others and did good were celebrated. Sounds cheesy but thats what people are saying happened.

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Do you have any links to those reports? I'd love to read over them, those sound strikingly similar to ibogaine experiences.

yeah that prob. is the thing I read about. To be honest I read a lot and tend to take in information as a whole big picture, often not putting specific things to memory so its hard for me to pull up things to defend with. Not a big fan of defending hypothesis' anyway.


I don't know what ibogaine is, but the real question is why and how are these experiences happening when the body is clinically dead? We are still learning what clinical death means, but suffice to say these things are happening when theres no heart beat, no activity in the brain, and when their pupils are dilated (or whatever the term is for non responsive pupils). The rebuttal that they are happening when everything is coming back online doesn't stand up (brain still isn't capable of generating such a coherent, intense and hyper real reality at that point, and the common delusions and hallucinations of the brain coming back online are chaotic and not coherent). And how the experiences are so similar across all cultures and among people who never interact. They aren't random trips, theres distinct commonalities across humanity as a whole even though they all vary in how many of the common aspects are present and the depth of the experience.

here's a link to a ton of accounts:

edit: haven't been on this site in a long time, the second one down from the top is crazy!

http://iands.org/nde-stories/iands-nde-accounts.html

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Originally Posted by Sageous

And, just for the sake of relevance, wouldn't a consciousness independent of the brain be helpful in dilating our perception of time? After all, since the circuitry of the brain might not be capable of handling the information necessary to dilate time, some other factor might be nice. Don't you think?

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Well certainly if consciousness is independent of the brain and unconstrained by the laws of physics that would probably allow for limitless time dilation, but just wanting something to be true for the sake of making extreme time dilation possible gives no credence to claim. (I'm not saying this is what you believe, I don't presume to know your opinion on the relationship between brain and mind)

I stand by my earlier points about the filter/receiver/medium hypothesis being unparsimonious, in that it requires 3 components, the experiencer, the brain, and a signal being sent from some unclear source. Compared the 2 components of the neuroscientific view that the mind is what the brain does (which is the view that I subscribe to, and which has mountains of evidence in support of it). It should also go without saying (though I'll say it anyway) that the filter idea appears to be unfalsifiable, insofar as it would be impossible to disprove that your thoughts originated inside the sun, shot around the earth 3 times and then through your brain into your conscious awareness. Though I will concede that the idea can at least be presented in a seemingly coherent manner.


In regards to the main topic, I had been under the opinion, based mainly off of LaBerges work that time could only be dilated in dreams to the extent that it can be in waking life. Though I'm not closed to the idea that we're capable transient moments of extreme dilation, I know one of my friends had an experience during a heavy mushroom trip that he said felt like an eternity. So maybe it is possible that the right combination of brain activation can lead to a radically alterted experience of time. And I also have to say, Alyzarin, that while very intimidating in length, I found your posts quite interesting, you're impressively immersed in the relevant scientific literature.


Also on the topic of NDE's, the evidence of anyone having any type of experience with 'dead brain' is in short supply, though the claims for the contrary certainly are not. Here's a link to an article from just today refuting a very popular NDE that purported to provide evidence for life after death:

Well it appears that my account is not old enough to allow me to post links, but if you google 'the proof of heaven author has now been thoroughly debunked by science' you'll find it.

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Originally Posted by tofur

yeah that prob. is the thing I read about. To be honest I read a lot and tend to take in information as a whole big picture, often not putting specific things to memory so its hard for me to pull up things to defend with. Not a big fan of defending hypothesis' anyway.

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Uh-huh. Have fun trying to convince people like that.

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Originally Posted by tofur

I don't know what ibogaine is, but the real question is why and how are these experiences happening when the body is clinically dead? We are still learning what clinical death means, but suffice to say these things are happening when theres no heart beat, no activity in the brain, and when their pupils are dilated (or whatever the term is for non responsive pupils). The rebuttal that they are happening when everything is coming back online doesn't stand up (brain still isn't capable of generating such a coherent, intense and hyper real reality at that point, and the common delusions and hallucinations of the brain coming back online are chaotic and not coherent). And how the experiences are so similar across all cultures and among people who never interact. They aren't random trips, theres distinct commonalities across humanity as a whole even though they all vary in how many of the common aspects are present and the depth of the experience.

here's a link to a ton of accounts:

NDE Accounts

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Ibogaine is a chemical in a tree that some historians believe is the origin of the tree of knowledge story from the Garden of Eden. It's a hallucinogen that normally causes trips that are almost exactly like you described, in fact that's the only time I've ever heard anyone describe that kind of experience from anything else.

Clinical death is a medical term that means your heart and breathing have stopped. Your brain can still be perfectly alive for a short period afterward, but of course your body will not be properly functioning. Since your breathing is stopped, you will stop taking in oxygen and or putting out carbon dioxide and your levels of the latter will slowly rise. This then leads to the activation of chemoreceptors in the brain which respond specifically to carbon dioxide, causing a flood of at least serotonin, norepinephrine, and glutamate throughout the brain, and other neurotransmitters and hormones that are released as a direct result of that. This includes oxytocin and vasopressin, the love chemicals that causes the euphoria and feelings of peace and love felt during orgasm. Both of them cause a large release in endorphins and could easily account for the feelings of acceptance and joy that sufferers of near-death experiences feel. The serotonin could logically cause some of the hallucinations and loss of fear. Norepinephrine, in the absence of that fear, also causes feelings of stimulation and serenity. Glutamate has also been implicated in multiple hallucinogenic states, both from drugs and from psychological disorders.

A study was even performed which specifically tests the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels from blood samples that were taken immediately after cardiac arrest patients were admitted to a hospital. They found a significant correlation between the levels of carbon dioxide detected and the number near-death experiences reported. It's located here: The effect of carbon dioxide on near-death experiences in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survivors: a prospective observational study.

There have never been any verified cases of near-death experiences happening while someone was brain dead. Nothing short of recorded brain activity alongside proof of consciousness can say otherwise.

And the accounts are so similar across cultures because people are people. Regardless of which argument you use, whether it's real or whether it's a chemical reaction, obviously it's going to give a similar experience when it's the exact same thing happening. That doesn't really validate anything.

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Originally Posted by PresentMoment

In regards to the main topic, I had been under the opinion, based mainly off of LaBerges work that time could only be dilated in dreams to the extent that it can be in waking life. Though I'm not closed to the idea that we're capable transient moments of extreme dilation, I know one of my friends had an experience during a heavy mushroom trip that he said felt like an eternity. So maybe it is possible that the right combination of brain activation can lead to a radically alterted experience of time. And I also have to say, Alyzarin, that while very intimidating in length, I found your posts quite interesting, you're impressively immersed in the relevant scientific literature.

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I really do apologize for the length of my posts here, I've never typed so much in so little time in my life. I'm glad you enjoyed them, though. :) I think I may be about out of them for now lol.

And yeah, generally what I tell people is "Anyone who doesn't believe in time dilation has never eaten magic mushrooms." :chuckle:

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Originally Posted by tofur

yeah that prob. is the thing I read about. To be honest I read a lot and tend to take in information as a whole big picture, often not putting specific things to memory so its hard for me to pull up things to defend with. Not a big fan of defending hypothesis' anyway.


I don't know what ibogaine is, but the real question is why and how are these experiences happening when the body is clinically dead? We are still learning what clinical death means, but suffice to say these things are happening when theres no heart beat, no activity in the brain, and when their pupils are dilated (or whatever the term is for non responsive pupils). The rebuttal that they are happening when everything is coming back online doesn't stand up (brain still isn't capable of generating such a coherent, intense and hyper real reality at that point, and the common delusions and hallucinations of the brain coming back online are chaotic and not coherent). And how the experiences are so similar across all cultures and among people who never interact. They aren't random trips, theres distinct commonalities across humanity as a whole even though they all vary in how many of the common aspects are present and the depth of the experience.

here's a link to a ton of accounts:

edit: haven't been on this site in a long time, the second one down from the top is crazy!

NDE Accounts

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Seems like the nde hallucinations could happen before they were completely brain dead and then when revived or whatever they just were remembering those hallucinations from right before they went brain dead.

the issue with the endorphins being plausible for explaining the first aspect of the NDE is they're decay time. It takes hours for a person to "come down", and for the pain suppressing affects to wear off. NDE experiencers go from no pain at all to full out pain right as they're experience ends. Some feel that maybe enkaphalins, a neurotransmitter related to endorphins, are to blame. They're thought to have a much quicker offset, but it's still in the 5-10 minute range which is still too slow. As for all the other neurotransmitters, to say they are the cause is nothing more than speculation at this point and they still don't fit in with the timeline of the NDE as with endorphins.

studies have shown that as the brain becomes anoxic, it ceases to function. As oxygen supply diminishes people get disoriented and confused which is the opposite of what NDE experiencers report. As far as hypercarbia, the effects are pretty well known at this point. In the 50's, L.J Meduna studied the different effects of hypercarbia with the hope of it being a solution to some psychiatric disorders. What he found was when peoples carbon dioxide levels were pushed up they experienced some of the stuff found in NDE's, but they also consistently experienced stuff not found, like seeing brilliant geometric patterns, fantasized objects like musical notes floating by, and seeing double or triple. And extreme hypercarbia produces violent muscle spasms which aren't tied to the nde.

not to mention that catastrophic oxygen loss would accompany the carbon dioxide increase, which would render the brain incapable of creating the kinds of clear, coherent, highly structured and easily remembered experiences NDE people report. Also there is a case of a man who reported a deep NDE who had a blood sample taken during the cardiac arrest, and when it came back his carbon dioxide levels were lower than normal. More on that case can be found here: "Fenwick and Fenwick, The Truth in the Light, 308; Gilksman and Kellehear, "Near-Death Experiences and the Measurement of Blood Gases".

Just had a time dilation dream of sorts. I will give a link to it in my DJ,
http://www.dreamviews.com/blogs/siva...s-wheel-48166/
I do not think it sheds any light on the topic, but I figured someone may want to read it. It is kind of interesting, just in that to me it seemed to last perhaps 5 hours, but clearly did not.

^^ Oh yeah ... this is a time-dilation thread. I keep forgetting that!

Did your dream seem like 5 hours during the dream or after you woke up?

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Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Oh yeah ... this is a time-dilation thread. I keep forgetting that!

Did your dream seem like 5 hours during the dream or after you woke up?

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It honestly seemed many hours long while I was inside the dream. I even had a discussion with some DCs about how it was going on and on, and appeared to be many hours worth. However, now that I view it as a memory and read the parts I recalled enough to write, it could easily have fit into 90 minutes. I am not sure what made it feel like hours while inside the dream. I assume it was a case of the mental trickery I have already mentioned. What seemed like long conversations (say 5 minutes) were in fact maybe only a dozen or fewer actual sentences. The walk I took with my step mom seemed like an actual walk, but now is remembered as perhaps less than 2 minutes in total.

It felt like 5 hours, but in reflection, nothing mysterious seems to have happened, it really is more like a case of trick photography or cinematics, if that makes sense.

Or perhaps it is more a lack of exact recall than it is of accurate dream experience. Just an hypothesis of course.

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?

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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.

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^^ I think the whole NDE/life-flashing before your eyes route might not be the right direction to be heading in, when considering LD time dilation.

In both cases there is likely a whole lot of things going on that could never happen during a typical night's sleep which seem to be wrapped around the entire brain getting "lit up" with activity by the massive intensity of the moment, or perhaps sudden catastrophic change in brain chemistry/workload (NDE).

With all apologies to your daughter, Lucidpotential, what is remembered after experiences like these aren't necessarily what actually happened. If your daughter's brain was suddenly running at very high capacity and she was flooded with a massive volley of simultaneous imagery involving all layers of her memory and imagination, and primal consciousness -- everything firing at once, in other words, then the conversation she described might be how she tried to make sense of the event afterward.

Yes, she may have actually had that conversation, I won't and can't deny that, but the conversation might have only lasted a couple of seconds; it's just that it was so filled with information that in retrospect it became a very long memory only after your daughter put it all into a linear story she could understand and communicate to others.

This is an awesome thing, by the way, and shouldn't be downplayed, but being bombarded by many layers of simultaneous signals, be they memories, trips to the afterlife, or chats with The Big Man Himself, might not be easily comparable to time dilation in LD's. Doing so might take us all away from making it happen, or head us toward trying to do so through trauma, death, or dangerous chemicals, none of which seem a healthy idea.

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.

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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.

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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.

Wow. Very interesting idea zenwraith. This thread is the most interesting thread iv came across on dreamviews so far. Im pretty new here but still. Awesome thoughts everyone!

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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.

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Yes, I think the negative reaction also happens with a lot of people who have never had a "real" Lucid dream. They have no conception of what a Lucid dreamer is talking about and default to a skeptic septic attitude. But when you take the time to sit down with an open mind and listen to people who have had these kind of "out of the ordinary" experiences you really begin to wonder if there is not some truth hidden in there that can also bring a higher quality of life to ourselves.
I have had times when the person took like 5 minutes trying to explain to me how vivid the colors in the grass were. Every leaf a different shade of green, the shadows between the stems, straight and bent leafs all blending together to make the whole. This is not someone who just had a short flash of various events, they were in fact experiencing the events in fine detail.
Perhaps the term "Time Dilation" has already got a preconceived definition stuck to it and doesn't actually describe what we are talking about.

Well... this one guy from Korean LD forum tried out Skullyy dream dilation technique from here, DV (he's the one who claimed that he lived in dream for 2 years by practicing watching a clock in a white room) - he practiced the technique with his friend in dream for a month, and they really had success with it, by increasing 10 minutes to months. But they stopped spending more than months in LD because they started getting confused whether it's reality or not.

I've been reading this thread for whole time, and I really wanted to dilate time in dream too. But after this guy told me about his experience and practice, I believe that time dilation is real. So why not just try it out, I thought, and 2 days ago I had a LD and tried out my own time dilation technique. My previous LDs generally lasted for 10-20 minutes, but I had an hour long LD 2 days ago - it was my longest LD ever. It didn't 'feel' like an hour has passed by like watching a 3-hour movie but in the story a week was spent. There was no scene shifting in my LD at all. I just concluded that an hour went by in LD comparing to the sense of certain amount of time I had when I did ADA for 2 hours in reality.

I will keep trying it in the next LDs and update my progress here. :D

For those wondering:
http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...d-ability.html

I'm pretty new to the concept of lucid dreaming...I mean calling it lucid dreaming, but I have been lucid dreaming since forever.. all my dreams are basically lucid dreams and I've been controlling what I do in my dreams since I was 5.. I do find it hard to control everything though when there is someone I love in my dream that I have to protect... anyway, I don't really know how to control the time either.. I have spent a couple of "days" in my dreams before but I forgot how I did that... really depends on what you're dreaming about too..the pace of it..
Sometimes, when I've wanted to stay longer in a dream, I just sent myself into a deeper sort of sleep.. I was more.. I guess conscious in my dream, then.
Like I said, I'm pretty new to the whole lucid dreaming as a real concept and all it's properties... but I do know what I've experienced and all the things I can do.. From what I've read so far, I think I can do basically anything..