Thread: Recalling long dreams using 90 minute technique

I recalled two dreams this morning (after waking up after six hours of sleep) but was too tired / and / or didn't want to write them down. Also the second dreams felt like it was twenty five to thirty minutes in length.

Should I try to recall dreams upon natural awakening or after 4 1/2, 6 or 7 hours of sleep?

Thanks.

Originally Posted by FryingMan

We all have to find what works for us.

Hear, hear. I don't think it's a good idea to try to be too prescriptive when advising other people. Some people only feel rested if they get a night of sustained sleep, others (I'm one of them) wake up frequently and naturally during the night, and are well-acclimated to this. On the rare occasions that I zonk out and wake up eight hours later, I wake up feeling cranky and disoriented.

I've learned the hard way that the only WBTBs likely to work for me are really long ones--anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours--in which I need to wake up completely and actively engage my mind (usually by reading or writing) before going back to sleep, and even then I won't have much of a shot at lucidity unless I perform practices that engage my attention and prevent me from falling back asleep too quickly. This can eat up lots of time during the night! And if I do get lucid, I lose even more time in the morning writing my report. However, the satisfaction of a successful attempt more than outweighs any sacrifice of sleep, which can be easily made up later.

However, the only reason extra-long WBTBs are the right strategy for me is because I usually fall asleep very easily--too easily. If you're someone who has a hard time falling back to sleep once woken in the middle of the night, then short WBTBs are the way to go! But everyone is different, so there's no "one-size-fits-all" solution, even for such a widespread technique as WBTB.

Originally Posted by Verre

Hear, hear. I don't think it's a good idea to try to be too prescriptive when advising other people. Some people only feel rested if they get a night of sustained sleep, others (I'm one of them) wake up frequently and naturally during the night, and are well-acclimated to this. On the rare occasions that I zonk out and wake up eight hours later, I wake up feeling cranky and disoriented.

I've learned the hard way that the only WBTBs likely to work for me are really long ones--anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours--in which I need to wake up completely and actively engage my mind (usually by reading or writing) before going back to sleep, and even then I won't have much of a shot at lucidity unless I perform practices that engage my attention and prevent me from falling back asleep too quickly. This can eat up lots of time during the night! And if I do get lucid, I lose even more time in the morning writing my report. However, the satisfaction of a successful attempt more than outweighs any sacrifice of sleep, which can be easily made up later.

However, the only reason extra-long WBTBs are the right strategy for me is because I usually fall asleep very easily--too easily. If you're someone who has a hard time falling back to sleep once woken in the middle of the night, then short WBTBs are the way to go! But everyone is different, so there's no "one-size-fits-all" solution, even for such a widespread technique as WBTB.

Great comment, Verre--something for all of us to remember.

Luffy, you may find that after giving yourself intentions to awake during the night (or drinking lots of water before bed) that you begin to awake naturally before it is time to get up for the day. But like Verre said, if you feel you are disoriented and cannot remember any dreams after awaking after four hours, you may need six or seven before you are primed to have a lucid dream.

Just work on it and see what fits you best

Originally Posted by ThreeCat

Luffy, you may find that after giving yourself intentions to awake during the night (or drinking lots of water before bed) that you begin to awake naturally before it is time to get up for the day.

Drinking lots of water beats any alarm clock! Plus, you get extra hydrated.

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

The reason to wake after your sleep cycles isn't so much about quantity of recall as quality - dreams are most vivid if you wake directly from them and then record them. Developing the ability to be concscious of waking from your dreams also opens opportunity for DEILD.

Well it's both to me: I lost the earlier dreams today which I had only mentally journaled upon recalling the last waking's dreams, darn. I guess killing the "dragon" (which looked just like a person) by repeatedly hitting its head with an axe was disturbing enough to chase that other recall away...

Originally Posted by Ctharlhie

The reason to wake after your sleep cycles isn't so much about quantity of recall as quality - dreams are most vivid if you wake directly from them and then record them. Developing the ability to be concscious of waking from your dreams also opens opportunity for DEILD.

Quantity is definitely part of the picture, however. For me, the act of writing alone activates certain dream memories and sometimes entire scenes that otherwise would have been lost. This may be an idiosyncrasy of mine, but even bullet points do not entirely do the trick, as these tend to only hit what is immediate in the memory. Once I've written out the narrative in present tense, however, I begin to remember how one scene connected to another, and where those scenes originated from, and so forth. And I (like many) find the best time to write this narrative is directly after awakening from a dream.

I did the second technique I mentioned. I didn't awake at four hours because I stayed up too late. But I awoke after six and seven and a half hours and consciously recorded three dreams. I've been up since the six o'clock hour this morning.

I also wanted to ask is this possible once I know the ropes of lucid dreaming:

Lars' Lucid Dreaming FAQ

It's 2.25 of the above link / faq.

Thanks.

I just want to chime in with my observation that even when I have had days with little to no sleep inbetween days where I can recall dreams, I still find my dream recall noticably improving in detail and length. For me, the improvement so far is definately more quality than quantity. In the past week, I have only had a single night where I recalled more than one dream and none of them were particularly lengthy or vivid. Hopefully, things will get better now that my sleep is improving.

Originally Posted by luffy28

I did the second technique I mentioned. I didn't awake at four hours because I stayed up too late. But I awoke after six and seven and a half hours and consciously recorded three dreams. I've been up since the six o'clock hour this morning.

I also wanted to ask is this possible once I know the ropes of lucid dreaming:

Lars' Lucid Dreaming FAQ

It's 2.25 of the above link / faq.

Thanks.

I am super skeptical of that item, but admit that I have never attempted such a thing, and so would not know whether it would be possible. Also, although people may mention time dilation and what not, I am skeptical if that as well (but only because I have never experienced it myself).

Originally Posted by ThreeCat

I am super skeptical of that item, but admit that I have never attempted such a thing, and so would not know whether it would be possible. Also, although people may mention time dilation and what not, I am skeptical if that as well (but only because I have never experienced it myself).

In my opinion I think it would work because I visualized / talked to myself about a model I saw in a video a couple of years ago right before or before I went to sleep. One of the dreams featured / was about the model.

This could've been my subconscious. Also in one of the dreams I asked a dream character a price for a pack of blue ray discs and this character said around $25 and I found some blank blu ray discs for an almost similar price. It was probably my subconscious.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by ThreeCat

I am super skeptical of that item, but admit that I have never attempted such a thing, and so would not know whether it would be possible. Also, although people may mention time dilation and what not, I am skeptical if that as well (but only because I have never experienced it myself).

I'll be sure to invite you to my time-dilation chamber, once I find it. The second time, though...the first time is reserved for "The Year of Love"

Originally Posted by luffy28

In my opinion I think it would work because I visualized / talked to myself about a model I saw in a video a couple of years ago right before or before I went to sleep. One of the dreams featured / was about the model.

This could've been my subconscious. Also in one of the dreams I asked a dream character a price for a pack of blue ray discs and this character said around $25 and I found some blank blu ray discs for an almost similar price. It was probably my subconscious.

Thanks.

Item 2.25 was read 1million words per minute, I believe? If not, apologies
EDIT: oh, I see now. Still going Super-Skeptic on this one.

Funny, FryingMan, I had a dilated time experience yesterday. Wonder if I incubated that?

Originally Posted by luffy28

I also wanted to ask is this possible once I know the ropes of lucid dreaming:

Lars' Lucid Dreaming FAQ

It's 2.25 of the above link / faq.

Thanks.

This sounds like science fiction--that is to say, it sounds like something that someone is speculating might be possible, based on particular notions (about which I am very dubious) about how the mind works, but they offer no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, that they have actually accomplished this. The human mind is not analogous to a computer in the way it stores and retrieves information. Moreover, when dreaming, our minds seem to work even less like computers than they do during waking life--i.e., they are much more unpredictable. So information recall of any kind appears (at least in my experience) very unreliable in the dream state. This is an area that merits much more exploration and experimentation, both by individuals and in formal studies.

I once heard a song in a lucid dream that was so compelling that I did my best to finish the song afterwards when awake. Then I had the idea to memorize the song, sing it to a DC in another dream, and see how they would react. The only problem was... every dream in which I remembered to perform this task, DCs were unusually hard to find. The one time I did find a DC and tried to sing the song, guess what happened? I couldn't remember it. After I woke up again, I could remember it again just fine.

I only offer this anecdote to point to the fact that memory, even of things we know by heart on a conscious level, can be severely impaired in the dream state. (Also to observe that the dreamstate seems to delight in dicking us around, unless that's just a flaw of my own mind.) So if conscious memory is iffy at best, is subconscious memory likely to be that much more accessible and reliable? It's always possible, but far from plausible without hard evidence.

2.25 sounds like a load of nonsense. To me, it just betrays ignorance of how the mind even processes words on a page. Unless if you have a very small page, you cannot read a page on a book without shifting your eyes and that's assuming that all that is required for your brain to process text is the visuals. Most of our peripheral "vision" is basically conjured up by our brain as a prediction of how our surroundings should look like based on the previous visual update. Our vision is loads of little captured patches which are then pieced together by our brain into the apparant unified picture we consciously percieved and why you cannot see your blind spot. For you to speed read in this fashion even if the page was within your focal point, your brain would somehow have to predict with accuracy what the words actually are based on the context provided by a very small patch in the middle.
I hope I don't have to explain to any of you how ridiculous that sounds.

Time dilation (or time incubation lest any disgruntled astrophysicists lynch me) is a really cool effect I've noticed more in my regular dreams than the lucids I had in the past.
The standard explaination for the psychological effect is that our mind synthesises memories of events that you didn't even experience in the dream to give the apparant perception of more time passing. However, if this is true, what does this imply about the power of our memory mechanisms?

I present my own theory of time incubation which will probably turn out to be unoriginal:

Dreams introduce the possibility of flexible time perception due to a combination of reduced latency and freedom from physical cues.

1. Reduced latency: We know that during dreams, our brain sends signals to our limbs as if we are waking and it is only due to the absence of the monoamines that make muscular contractions possible. However, despite this paralysis, in our dreams, we are able to move and feel our limbs so that means, they are being simulated in our brain. This causes a marked reduction in signal latency which could theoretically increase the subjective time experienced per second.

2. Freedom from physical cues: In meatspace, our attention and perception of time is influenced to an extent by rhythms in our body, such as our breath and heart rate. It is not surprising that whenever we are focusing on a task, we catch ourselves catching our breath as if extending a breath cycle extends the attention we are giving to something. In dreams, many anatomical features are simulated such as heart beats and breathing which is often disjointed from real life. A common experience is to hear an insanely fast heart beat when wilding even though after breaking from the attempt and checking our own pulse, you find it normal. This combined with the reduced latency of signaling should allow somone to shift into a faster attention cycle and hence more time subjectively experienced.

Perhaps a good test might be if you sleep with a ticking sound playing in the background and if you can percieve the sound in our lucid dream, concentrate on extending the period at which it ticks until you cannot make it any longer then go about in your dream filtering out the sound, occasionally topping up by focusing on the ticking sound and elongating it's tick period again.

P.S. I'm aware that there is a danger of the sound being conjured up by your head but if you have well trained perception, you should be able to distinguish the illusory tick from the real.

There's another form of time dilation we can experience in dreams that is probably modeled on our familiarity with the structure of films and other forms of narrative storytelling. Consider how it works in the movies: you watch a film that lasts a couple hours, but it is narrating a story that can span across days, months, or years. This is accomplished through scene changes. When well-plotted and edited, these temporal jumps don't leave us wondering "omg what just happened?" but instead advance the story in a smooth and comprehensible way by skipping over events that are not essential to the narrative.

In the dreams I've experienced whose stories appear to stretch across vast lengths of time, there have always been scene shifts and jump cuts like this, where the passage of time is implied but not experienced in tedious detail.

Yeah, I suspect most time stretching is like that. I wish that Rem periods could last longer than 90 minutes though. Then we could have a Lord of the Rings of a movie without any of the dubious time recalibration in my speculative theory. We would just need the naturally talented directer and editor that is our brain.

I'm holding out for real subjective time dilation. The mind is an amazing thing, who's to say we can't experience something at "super speed" on the waking time scale, while the experience to us subjectively in the dream is at "normal" speed? That's what I'm going to be working on

The problem is that our brain does have known limitations. Neurons with the highest clock speeds found only operate at 1000 Hz and most neurons being below 50 Hz. Also, even with myelin sheaths coating them, the transmission speeds of synapses are measured in 10's of metres per second and since most the neurons in our brain are not sheathed in myelin, the actual transmission speeds are far slower. The power of our brain comes from it's massively parallel nature and it's informational colour (a single synapse with it's rich broth of neurotransmitters is far more communicative then the solitary computer bit), not it's speed. Computer have already had our brains beat in that area, a long time ago.

Who says our thoughts are limited to physical frequencies? I can't even guess how it's possible, maybe the experiences are all there in parallel in time dilation and our mind somehow serializes it....or maybe the mind is freed from the physical. Etc. Like I said, this is something I'll be working on

Believe you're limited, and you'll be limited...

Sorry for the late reply (for some reason, I did not spot an update on this thread).

Who says our thoughts are limited to physical frequencies?

Well not to be too blunt about it but all available evidence accumulated for the past two hundred years of psychological and neurological research does.

I can't even guess how it's possible

Then take that as a hint. If parapsychologists who's entire careers rest on the investigation of these fields cannot come up with a workable theory or indeed any evidence that can withstand scrutiny, what hope can you reasonably expect of yourself? Yes our "laws" are not set in stone and are almost certainly wrong but the way scientific advancement happens is through a narrowing reticle of predicted outcomes. Newtonian mechanics withstood scrutiny for centuries and the theory that superseded it, General relativity did not predict values that diverged greatly from it except at speeds close to that of of light or near incredibly massive bodies. The discovery of non physical elements to the mind would completely break this pattern.
Ask yourself this: if you were to come up with a model of the world where the mind was not restricted to physical frequencies, how close would the model in your head resemble the reality you see?

Believe you're limited, and you'll be limited...

Look up how well people with that mindset fared when they decided to jump off cliffs or buildings because gravity is clearly illusory though then again, maybe Bill Hicks had it right when he said that you don't ever see ducks lining up in elevators to fly south.
If you are going to attempt that little experiment yourself, follow his advice and try it from the ground first.

^^ You're thinking needs to be a bit more deviant, methinks! Dreams and waking are different, and we're just barely beginning to understand what is possible in dreams...

Dare to dream!

What makes you think that my ideas are not already deviant enough? None of these ideas were intuitive to us and for most of human history, people were sympathetic to your more dualistic mindset that there was other elements of existence beyond the material.
It was only after scientists were slapped in the face with contrary evidence for centuries before they finally accepted that maybe that supernatural talk was a load of malarkey.

Dreams and waking are different, and we're just barely beginning to understand what is possible in dreams...

Yes dreams and waking are different, not sure where you got the idea that I was stating the contrary. However, they are more similar then you think. Both are in fact virtual realities constructed by our brains, the only difference between them is that one is mediated by our senses and an active neocortex whereas the other is not.

Yes there is definitely much more to discover concerning dreams but already we know of limitations within them from past and current research. Reading text is difficult in dreams (and tends to only be doable from prolific lucid dreamers), your waking and dreaming eyes are in sync with one another, the dream world is constructed from elements with their stability directly contingent on your attention.
Possibly the most relevant fact we know about dreams is that they incorporate any sensory information received during sleep which further bolsters the position that the only major difference between a dream and "reality" is that of the senses.

Dare to dream!

Dreaming alone never achieves anything. People dreamed for millennia of flight but it was not until a couple of bicycle designers decided to actually build a wind tunnel and investigate how wings of different designs responded to moving air that we got the airplane.

Rather then waste your time dreaming of faculties that we have no good reason of suspecting that we currently possess, why not put your time and effort into studying ways of making your dream of subjective time dilation a reality? Our brains are far from being the fastest possible run time possible within even currently known physics.

You could take our brain in it's current shape and size and theoretically speed it up by a million times. That would mean in one second of our current time, that brain would experience 11 and a half days of subjective experience. One year would equate to the total number of subjective years that our human race has ever experienced times ten!

That is what science points towards: future vistas that in fact exceeds our dreams, our very limited imaginations!

Hi again DT, you're welcome to tell me I'm wasting my time on the non-dream parts of the forums, where classical materialism reigns. Of course don't expect a reply, because I don't waste my time on those boards...cheers!