Topics about time and actions in dreams pop up regularly throughout the forum and have been appearing for probably as long as the forum existed, though I cannot speak for any time before I joined.

There have been plenty of discussions on the matter of time in dreams. People tend to think that dream events are of the same plain as events happening in the waking state. That is, the physical plain. Or at least relatively alike in concept and properties. Due to this it's easy to see how plenty of people adhere to time in dreams as a currently flowing stream of events like actions in the waking state. However, this is faulty seeing how dreams happen within our minds and thus belong in the mental plain alone.

As I've stated plenty of times in the above mentioned threads, a dream can "last" pretty much any amount of time from 5 seconds to 10 years or even an entire life time, technically speaking. How can such a dream occur during just one night or even within the bounds of one dream? Simple:

Events in dreams do not happen linearly and at any given moment like actions in the waking state. The mind's ultimate form of thought is conceptual thought. It is the thought the subconscious uses on an ultimate level and the type of thinking we do when really concentrating on something and contemplating it. At such moments we forget speech in any language and forget conscious thought patterns. Our mind takes over with conceptual thought and we think through something far swifter and with great detail - that detail being concepts, not words. The same, if not even more precise, thought type is what our dreams are built of.

Upon dreaming of an entire day at school, of walking through hallways, sitting in classrooms, listening to lectures and talking with others, these events do not actually happen physically as they would in waking life. The conceptual thought form of all these events, pretty much identical to memories, is placed into the dreamer's mind. Thus, even an entire day at school can play through in a dream at anywhere from a few seconds to one dream period, which lasts, of course, far less than an entire day.

So, all together, conceptual thought is like its name states - thought through concepts. And seeing how it's really not a complicated concept, I suppose there's not much more to say about it so I'll end it at this and hope that this "article" of sorts was comprehensive enough.