Thread: How to Dilate Time

I can't answer your question but your sig gave me an idea for a movie.
What if your dream characters really do have self awareness?
If so, their entire world would be constructed by you and they'd have
no idea. Until you told them

"I'm about to wake up now and you folks will no longer exist. Sorry"

then .. POOF. That would make a great movie - a movie about people who live in a virtual world and only exist for a moment in other people's lucid dreams.

Now I return you to your original question .. which I don't know the foggiest answer to.

Originally Posted by Lucid Lobster

I can't answer your question but your sig gave me an idea for a movie.
What if your dream characters really do have self awareness?
If so, their entire world would be constructed by you and they'd have
no idea. Until you told them

"I'm about to wake up now and you folks will no longer exist. Sorry"

then .. POOF. That would make a great movie - a movie about people who live in a virtual world and only exist for a moment in other people's lucid dreams.

Now I return you to your original question .. which I don't know the foggiest answer to.

Its called Vanilla Sky.

When you say time dilation, do you mean making a minute feel like an hour?

Originally Posted by Inside This Fantasy

When you say time dilation, do you mean making a minute feel like an hour?

yeah thats what hes on about. my opinion - its just a chain of dreams that go on throughout the night. that leads to another thing, have you ever noticed that you don't usually get out of the car, or walk to your nextdoor neighbours house? think about it

I have had it happen to me, but I'd guess using and controling it is a completely different thing. it is probably nearly impossible to intentionally induce for the purpose of prolonging a dream. you would have to be a yogalucid god

Actually, research has found that in most cases time in a lucid dream corresponds to actual time, and non-lucid dreams usually have no connection to actual time. So what seems like 15 minutes in a lucid dream is usually about 15 minutes. However, there is evidence that sometimes lucid dreams have alternate times, just like non-lucid dreams. So time dilation is probably possible.

Originally Posted by Inside This Fantasy

When you say time dilation, do you mean making a minute feel like an hour?

It's like this morning when I had a non-lucid dream. I was only asleep for about 20 minutes or something, but I had a dream that felt like it lasted for hours. It's a great feeling! haha. If there was only a way to control it? Maybe create a time dilation machine?

its only happened to me in vivid but no necessarily lucid dreams. and from what I gather, its really a matter of perception

the last time I tried to extend my dream, while lucid, I simply stayed in the dream longer in real time. in other words, I woke up 30 minutes late for work

I has done it in 2 different ways, putting extreme attention on time passing and just willing it to slow down or making matter around me move faster and my perception slower without heat, that makes time slower for me, doesn't work that well... but at least it works for me <.<

And I know, my ideas sound silly.

Conscious time dilation could only be accomplished through the use of doublethink. (ie. holding the mutually contradictory knowledge that you are slowing down time and the belief that time is flowing as normal)

If you realize you are using time dilation while you are using it, it doesn't work. If you are aware of what real time is, (and your body has a pretty good approximation of it) then you stick to it.

Using doublethink requires the use of doublethink. Have fun with that ;P

Originally Posted by arby

Conscious time dilation could only be accomplished through the use of doublethink. (ie. holding the mutually contradictory knowledge that you are slowing down time and the belief that time is flowing as normal)

If you realize you are using time dilation while you are using it, it doesn't work. If you are aware of what real time is, (and your body has a pretty good approximation of it) then you stick to it.

Using doublethink requires the use of doublethink. Have fun with that ;P

Haha, woah, I think my brain just fell apart. I see what you're saying, but wouldn't slowing down time for yourself alone escape this predicament? You'd then be stuck trying to interact with things that are moving at say a tenth of the speed, though! Time is a nasty subject.

Originally Posted by Richnfg

Haha, woah, I think my brain just fell apart. I see what you're saying, but wouldn't slowing down time for yourself alone escape this predicament? You'd then be stuck trying to interact with things that are moving at say a tenth of the speed, though! Time is a nasty subject.

Yeah, the problem with being aware that you cannot get time to be different and seem normal at the same time.You can slow down time or you can make it so that all you are doing is perceiving everything as going faster then it should be. You will notice everything happening more quickly and you will not be able to absorb it. It's like hitting a fast forward button.

Time dilation really is tricky. If I were you, I'd just drop it altogether. People more accomplished then me have tried to tackle it (I failed when I tried, and it was a concentrated, informed effort) and as far as I've heard, they never succeeded. save your lucids for better things.

Originally Posted by arby

Yeah, the problem with being aware that you cannot get time to be different and seem normal at the same time.You can slow down time or you can make it so that all you are doing is perceiving everything as going faster then it should be. You will notice everything happening more quickly and you will not be able to absorb it. It's like hitting a fast forward button.

Time dilation really is tricky. If I were you, I'd just drop it altogether. People more accomplished then me have tried to tackle it (I failed when I tried, and it was a concentrated, informed effort) and as far as I've heard, they never succeeded. save your lucids for better things.

I only have one thing to say. Einstein's theory of relativity, guys!

I would seriously like to see this looked at a little closer. Einstein says that under certain conditions, time is modified. Maybe this will work on the dreaming plane? Have fun .

I once managed to dilate time slightly by meditating in a dream. I was only asleep for about 30 seconds before I woke up, but it felt like at least a minute.

Originally Posted by detroitLions1970

I only have one thing to say. Einstein's theory of relativity, guys!

I would seriously like to see this looked at a little closer. Einstein says that under certain conditions, time is modified. Maybe this will work on the dreaming plane? Have fun .

Time is relative...hence relativity, but unfortunately, our brain cannot create either condition required for true time dilation to exist (dramatic increase in velocity or gravity). Even if we could experience true time dilation (by, perhaps, riding on a spacecraft that could travel at a significant percentage of C), time would still seem to pass normally for us. That is, our dreams will still only last an hour or so (at max). Why? Because, despite the fact that time would have seemed to have slowed down (or, more appropriately, time for everybody else would have seemed to have sped up), our frame of reference wouldn't have changed. An hour is still an hour for us, despite the fact that one of our hours might correspond to one hundred hours for a stationary observer. Put more practically, if you were to live on a spaceship (that was traveling at a significant percentage of C) for a year, you would still only be a year older, while the rest of the universe could be thousands of years older than when you boarded the space ship.

Originally Posted by Desert Claw

have you ever noticed that you don't usually get out of the car, or walk to your nextdoor neighbours house? think about it

This is an incredibly important point.
If you can grasp the meaning it will be clear how much BS the "time dilation"
idea really is.

Originally Posted by moonshine

This is an incredibly important point.
If you can grasp the meaning it will be clear how much BS the "time dilation"
idea really is.

I read a similar analogy that LD's are like movies- they skip over the boring parts. If a person in a movie goes to sleep at night and a few seconds later we see the scene change to a sunrise and a morning landscape we "assume" that 6-7 hours went by while we just saw it happen in several seconds on the screen.

time dilation in the mind sence has nothing to do with reletivity as we would be in the time frame that is slowing down on the out side causing no effect so throw that idea out please

right perseption of time can be changed wile awake , asleep , well that covers it realy

i have experience in changing the perseption of time whilst awake and find it easy to go into it asleep throw whatever you want at that comment im not realy bothered

now the perseption of time is changed by the brains speed in prossesing information , the speed is increased dramitcaly causing you to think everything else is moving slowly (a car doing 70 over taking a car doing 40 in the perspective of the 70mph car the 40 one is reeeeealy slow)

increasing brain speed while asleep may wake you up or devaluate the purpose of being asleep (to rest)

so just imagine a slow-mo routine this wont lengthen the dream time because things will just be hapening slower (watch a film at half speed , if normaly ita an hour long youl only get half way through if watched for the same amount of time)

hope this clears any problems up

Thanks for all the input, guys.

From all this, I gather that time dilation wouldn't work if you do it on purpose, for that would require you to be thinking in two timeframes at once... which is impossible.

Increasing the speed of the brain is the only logical option, but like zezu said, it would probably rob the brain of restful sleep.

So really, I guess it's not really learnable after all...

I've always thought that time dilation has to do with how much one is stimulating their mind. Two personal experiences: my first day of working at a coffee shop. I had no idea what I was doing and was put in front of customers after about 10 minutes of half-assed training. That shift felt about twice as long as it actually was. After working there for two weeks however, everything was pretty much down to a science. All those tasks that were difficult on my first day became unconscious habit. Shifts felt half as long as they actually were.

Also, the first few weeks I spent at University were the longest of my life. Finding classes, living in a dorm, all drastically new experiences. Once I started to make sense of it all the weeks started to go by like days. Everything became routine not too dissimilar from my summer job.

The way I see it there's two interrelated ways you can make it happen. One is to create novel experiences, something like my examples that forces the mind to be stimulated. The other is to train awareness in waking life through mindfulness techniques, to remove that unconscious routine that dominates us throughout the average day. If you can get that control over awareness in waking life, you can probably push it much farther in a sleep state, as your mind is working at a much higher potential, and regular rules of time don't necessarily exist in that reality.

But this is all speculation, I don't have enough experience with dreams yet to know if this is true. Someday...

Originally Posted by Speesh

I've always thought that time dilation has to do with how much one is stimulating their mind. Two personal experiences: my first day of working at a coffee shop. I had no idea what I was doing and was put in front of customers after about 10 minutes of half-assed training. That shift felt about twice as long as it actually was. After working there for two weeks however, everything was pretty much down to a science. All those tasks that were difficult on my first day became unconscious habit. Shifts felt half as long as they actually were.

Also, the first few weeks I spent at University were the longest of my life. Finding classes, living in a dorm, all drastically new experiences. Once I started to make sense of it all the weeks started to go by like days. Everything became routine not too dissimilar from my summer job.

The way I see it there's two interrelated ways you can make it happen. One is to create novel experiences, something like my examples that forces the mind to be stimulated. The other is to train awareness in waking life through mindfulness techniques, to remove that unconscious routine that dominates us throughout the average day. If you can get that control over awareness in waking life, you can probably push it much farther in a sleep state, as your mind is working at a much higher potential, and regular rules of time don't necessarily exist in that reality.

But this is all speculation, I don't have enough experience with dreams yet to know if this is true. Someday...

Thats interesting.
Its theorised that the reason the days during childhood seemed to last forever was because every moment brought new experiences and your brain worked over time to file them away.

As an adult, most of your memory engrams are "burned" already.
So experiences seem to go faster.

Originally Posted by detroitLions1970

I would seriously like to see this looked at a little closer. Einstein says that under certain conditions, time is modified. Maybe this will work on the dreaming plane? Have fun .

Theres no such thing as the dreaming plane...if your trying to infer another level of existence.

"Maybe this will work in the dreaming brain" is much more accurate.

I have not wilfully succeeded in dilating time to any great extent, though have experienced a few overly long dreams for time periods that do not match even remotely (some quite recently).

I agree with the importance that many non-significant actions are skipped in dreams, though my personal experiences have been different enough in lengths of feeling that when realising, it has always been a great surprise.

I've had quite a few dreams now that seem to carry on for periods that feel much longer than when I find out how long it has been. The greatest one (and most recent) I remember felt as if it lasted a few hours, and was relatively high in clarity -- remembering the array of events with the senses I could recall, clearly didn't fit with the apparent <20 minute time slot.

The feeling of time changes constantly for everyone (I assume), and when it does to this extent I think the entirely subjective nature of perception becomes apparent.

The brain is very much capable of creating hallucinations and other illusions, so why wouldn't it be possible that the brain might be able to create the illusion that a lucid dream is longer than it really is?
Who knows, maybe the brain can speed up a dream, but put the mind/consciousness so that we experience the dream as going at normal speed (in 1 real-life minute we experience 1 dream-hour/1 hour of lucid dreaming, for example).