Thread: Stephen LaBerge: There is no time dilation within dreams?

Hey all,

Long time no post. I have written my senior thesis on morality within dreaming, with a specific interest into lucid dreaming. Along the way, I was trying to find a source for something interesting that a neuroscientist once told me.

In the summer I was visiting with a neuroscientist at BCM where I worked. The neuroscientist was Dr. David Eagleman, who is well-acknowledged and respected. We were talking about dreams and memory. He mentioned a very interesting study that Stephen LaBerge conducted. In case you are unfamiliar with the method that LaBerge used to prove the occurrence of lucid dreaming I will recount it for you (If you are aware then skip this next paragraph):

In 1990, Stephen LaBerge proved the existence of lucid dreaming. If you are aware of anything concerning dreams, you know that our most vivid dreams occur in REM sleep. In REM, our eyes move like crazy. It had been found earlier by a different group of scientists that these eye movements correspond with how our eyes are moving in our dreams. LaBerge took advantage of this. He had lucid dreamers memorize certain patterns of eye-movements. They were connected to polygraph machines to record their eye-movements. When the lucid dreamers became lucid during REM sleep, they conveyed this message of eye-movements, and it was confirmed that dreamers were, in fact, becoming conscious while asleep.

Now here's another study LaBerge conducted:
LaBerge wanted to see the correlation between real-time and dream-time. To get a baseline, each subject was asked to count to five while awake. Then, the subjects went to sleep. Once the dreamers became lucid, they conveyed their lucidity to the real world through a pattern of eye movements. They would signal once that they had begun counting, then they would signal again once they had counted to five within the dream.
The time it took the dreamers to count to five within the dream was the same as their time in real life. This leads to the conclusion that time in a dream passes as normally as in real life.

I have been trying to find where LaBerge published this experiment, but it looks unpublished. Maybe I have exclusive knowledge (that I'm now sharing with you guys)? If anyone knows the source, please share.
If this is true, then time dilation is a big misconception in the dreaming community. How do we respond when we have dreams that felt like hours when we know they only took place during a ~30 minute REM period if there is no time dilation?
If you would like to see how Dr. Eagleman and I theorized how it could be, open the spoiler.

Spoiler for Click:

I doubt anyone is familiar with Dr. Eagleman's research on time perception (I know it was once mentioned in a Cracked article), but you all should read this: Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?

Basically, time doesn't actually slow down when we trip or when something scary happens, we only remember it as being slow motion!

Knowing this, we can explain the length of our dreams along with the lack of time dilation by knowing that they may not have ever happened, they could just be very short dreams that we think had a lot of stuff happen in them.
Dr. Eagleman gave a great personal example. He said once he was on a long car ride and nodded off to sleep. He was asleep for less then a second, as he woke himself up when he jerked his head back up. But in that <1 second dream, he experienced a ton of emotions. He had done something bad, and was feeling very guilty about it. I don't remember exactly what he said he had done, but he had done something like failed to do something.
I know we all have had similar experiences. Short dreams that had a ton of context.

If all of this is true, then our dreams may only be seconds long, but have so much invented pretext that we are convinced that we experienced the pretext as well.

TL;DR: Has anyone else ever heard of Stephen LaBerge's experiment that disproved dream time dilation? Does anyone know the source?

I read it in his own books 'Lucid Dreaming' and 'Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming'. Those two are very much alike, only the second one is more a practical guidebook and has some additional information.

This is one of my interests involving lucid dreaming. The idea that one could spend 5 minutes asleep but feel like they spent a much longer time in the dream is mind-blowing to me. I would really like to see if I could make the timeline of a dream go across an entire day, giving me the satisfaction of a day well spent at the end of the dream when the dream was really only a few minutes long. I have read many other threads with people claiming that their dreams felt like they lasted a long time, and the general consensus seems to be that your mind remembers different events of the dream, or remembers that time passed even if you weren't aware of that time (and even if it didn't really happen.) I once heard someone compare this phenomenon to when you watch a movie that only lasts a few hours but takes place over years of time. Because your mind assumes the time has passed, you aren't questioning how the next scene could be happening much later.

To me, this experiment only shows that people can keep track of time in their dreams when they actively try. I don't see it proving that dream time and waking time are always synchronized.

Lucid dreams can seem like they last a long time. I have had dreams that seemed to last hours, days, years, lifetimes. It is obviously an illusion, but our perception of time is an illusion. We don't have a constant or reliable perception of time in waking life, so it only makes sense that dreams would no better. I can count off seconds sitting at my desk at work, and the day would seem to go by horribly slowly. If I got myself involved in an interesting project, hours would fly by without my noticing.

Originally Posted by Robot_Butler

To me, this experiment only shows that people can keep track of time in their dreams when they actively try. I don't see it proving that dream time and waking time are always synchronized.

Exactly. The brain perceives everything differently in a dream environment. Who's to say it can't make you feel like you've been dreaming for ages even when it's been less than half an hour?

Disproved!? lol why does everyone read the experiment wrong? For one, it is on ETWOLD, so don't worry about source-sharing.
Second, in his experiment he tells the dreamers to move their eyes as a second passes and gets them to practice this in waking first. At no point does he tell them to try and dilate/warp time/perception, just to count like normal using the eye-movement so his experimen isn't involved in time dilation.
Lets say, he tells you to jump in waking and move your eyes up and down while doing so, then you replicate this in a dream. Of course this will be very similar to jumping in a dream. But it changes if say, you are asked to jump in waking then you are asked to do the same task in a dream at super-speed or slow-motion.
So unless you tell the test subject to move the eyes every second while trying to use time dilation, it proves nothing other than people being able to replicate with accuracy waking tasks.

Originally Posted by Hukif

Disproved!? lol why does everyone read the experiment wrong? For one, it is on ETWOLD, so don't worry about source-sharing.
Second, in his experiment he tells the dreamers to move their eyes as a second passes and gets them to practice this in waking first. At no point does he tell them to try and dilate/warp time/perception, just to count like normal using the eye-movement so his experimen isn't involved in time dilation.
Lets say, he tells you to jump in waking and move your eyes up and down while doing so, then you replicate this in a dream. Of course this will be very similar to jumping in a dream. But it changes if say, you are asked to jump in waking then you are asked to do the same task in a dream at super-speed or slow-motion.
So unless you tell the test subject to move the eyes every second while trying to use time dilation, it proves nothing other than people being able to replicate with accuracy waking tasks.

While Dr. LaBerge did not tell them to actively try to dilate/warp time perception, the experiment is still valid in providing evidence for a lack of OVERALL time dilation. Most people believe (and did believe even before Inception came out) that time is dilated while in a dream. We all are lead to believe this when we have dreams that felt like hours when we know they only took place within a half an hour of sleep time. This is what this experiment questions.
I'm not misreading the experiment, you're not seeing what I'm saying

Originally Posted by OrionStyles

I disagree with this, because I have what appears to be time dilation effects coming out of my dreams.

Mainly and on occasion, when I have background noise (like a fan) and I am approaching the hypnapompic state, I will hear the rotation of the fan at a very decreased interval (imagine how a big industrial fan sound, where each 'whoosh' is seconds apart) and I am unable to recognize this as "the fan". As I approach wakefulness, the speed increases incrementally, and eventually I am able to recognize this sound as "the fan" and have a clear memory of the transitional sound.

You should read the link that I posted in the spoiler. This could explain what you experience. You may not be actively perceiving the fan as being slowed down; it may just be that you remember it as so since you were in a different state of mind in which you took in information differently.

I'm not sure if I could take your experience as being evidence for dream time dilation, since, after all, you were still awake while this happened.

Originally Posted by Zelgius

While Dr. LaBerge did not tell them to actively try to dilate/warp time perception, the experiment is still valid in providing evidence for a lack of OVERALL time dilation. Most people believe (and did believe even before Inception came out) that time is dilated while in a dream. We all are lead to believe this when we have dreams that felt like hours when we know they only took place within a half an hour of sleep time. This is what this experiment questions.
I'm not misreading the experiment, you're not seeing what I'm saying

Uh, I thought it was obvious in my post that it was about conciously dilating time.
It is not that I didn't see what you were saying, however I was never feed the "time in dreams is different from real time" stuff. So the big misconception you mentioned to my eyes was more of a "lucid dreamers can't have events of time dilation" than it being popular, guess the pop dream talk is different over there than here?
In fact, this is the first time I hear this of time being dilated in dreams as a popular thing <.<
Oh well now the experiment makes more sense, when I first read it was like "Uh, what does this have to do with dilating time?" now the relation is obvious.

I agree with Robot_Butler and Hukif, I think this just shows that the counting timing for very small measures of time is the same as waking which in itself is fairly interesting because it seems to synch up with the real world, but isn't showing much on time dilation. I would like to see another study where the dreamer signals after it feels like one minute / 5 minutes / 10 Minutes / an hour / a day or more?, just to see how closely those correlate to real times, and compare them with the same times the person seems to sense while awake (without a clock of course).

Once I get better I may even try this experiment myself

Interesting commentaries.

Well Hukif, maybe that's not the objective of the experiment but if you make another discovery it's great anyways. Let's say that's real what Zelgius say, that there is no difference between dream and reality time perception. Why could it happen? Because when we enter a non-lucid dream we already enter into a scene. We already know what's going on and what happened there. It's like if we were there from the beginning but actually we weren't, we came into the middle of it. And in dreams we can jump from scenes to different scenes and in everyone it will happen the same. You won't wonder "WTF happened? I was there and now i´m here!" because your mind creates a new story for this new dream scene, of course instantly.

Basically what I said is that in each scene we skip the introduction part of our dreams and we go straight to the action, so we know what was going on without being there before. We can jump to scenes instantly and in each of them it will happen the same. That's how you can be in many different places in a short period of time.

Btw I am only talking about non-lucid dreams. I don't know if this also happens in lucid dreams.

I don't think it matters if you imagine stuff that happened before you got to that scene. It's still time in the dream.
It is all perception.

Well, what you described is not true for both my non-lucids and my lucids unless I actively try to create the scene (And in turn, what Zelgius and his teacher did).

An example would be, if I am in a market during a dream there will be no set "past" scene. But if I start questioning why I am there will quickly remember false information.
And that only started to happen after my first dream death, when I lost the FAs I once had. Would wake up in bed in all of my dreams, so yeah pretty much, no room for made up past.

"This leads to the conclusion that time in a dream passes as normally as in real life."
Indeed, it seems difficult to argue otherwise. I would say there is strong evidence for this. Brilliant idea, really!

I've never heard of these experiments but thank you for sharing, they are exceedingly interesting. Sadly, I believe the idea of dream time being longer than waking time will be forever endowed in the public's mind by the movie Inception.

I disagree with this, because I have what appears to be time dilation effects coming out of my dreams.

Mainly and on occasion, when I have background noise (like a fan) and I am approaching the hypnapompic state, I will hear the rotation of the fan at a very decreased interval (imagine how a big industrial fan sound, where each 'whoosh' is seconds apart) and I am unable to recognize this as "the fan". As I approach wakefulness, the speed increases incrementally, and eventually I am able to recognize this sound as "the fan" and have a clear memory of the transitional sound.

I think that there are limited occasions where the time effect synchs up, but they are likely rare.

I would bet that it happens for me when I have a soundtrack to my dream, and the music is playing note-for-note and the timing feels correct. I wake up from those dreams and the music is still playing in my head.

Other times, like when I'm chasing something or the scene in my dream shifts radically from one location or time point to another, I am more likely experiencing a lot of dream sensations in a short period of actual time. Those can feel confusing, and are harder to retain all the details upon waking.

An acquaintance of mine held this neurotechnology forum conference back in the 90s. Stephen Laberge spoke there and showed charts from this study and others. He's recently released some of these talks, including Stephen's, on video onto youtube. It's a fascinating series of videos which catch Stephen is his prime.

In his books Laberge mentions that dreams produce the illusion of time dilation in much the same way that movies do, by cutting out parts of the plot or continuum that aren't relevant to the narrative/dream experience. As an example, in the dream you say to a friend you're going to go clean up for a party and all of a sudden you're at the party all cleaned up, or perhaps you're home cleaning up, but didn't experience the car ride there. In this way we create the illusion of greater lengths of time passing. IMO the Inception style time dilation stuff is simply not true.

Videos:

I'm a new member so I can't post links. Go to YouTube and search "Stephen Laberge NTF", it's a series of 5 videos.

I've had a LD that lasted 10 hours, and it took place in less than a hour. I know time dilation is possible... perhaps in LeBerge's experiment he didn't take into account that perhaps by counting in the dream you sync the time? Or maybe early on in the LD time is synced, and then that sync is gone? All I know is I experience time dilation every time I LD.

If I understand your post correctly this experiment was published in ETWOLD. He doesn't actually deny the possibility of time dialation exactly. If you look at the lucidity institute website you will find an article somewhere in there by Steven laberge saying he isn't 100% against time dialation. The sense is that time is kind of relative. Sometimes 20 minutes can seem more like an hour. Other times it can only feel like a few minutes. But dream time and real time are the same. Does this make sense?

LaBerge's claim is quite misinforming: the fact that his experiment demonstrated dream time correlating with real time, 1:1, does not imply that time dilation cannot occur. At best it implies that, 'in some situations', dream time = real time. The data cannot say any more....any further conclusions are assumptions.

And as I'm sure others have noted, there is a marked difference between objective measures of time and the subjective feeling of time. That is, when awake, the passing of 1 hour can erroneously be felt to be 30 minutes - lack of attention to duration-based/rhythmically changing stimuli will do this. I think activation of the sympathetic nervous system may alter the subjective feeling of time too, i.e. fear, anger, competitive behaviour (sports), sexual arousal, fights etc - my dreams are always action-based, and so I don't have time for time.

Just like when someone witnesses something horrific, or is involved in a car crash etc....everything appears to be in slower motion. Thank you sympathetic nervous system.

Though do take what I say with critical thought.

And altering it by telling the participants to consciously affect time using the same experiment would be incredibly unreliable: If I was a participant, I could then count 1 second for every 2 seconds, and the experimenter would erroneously believe dilation exists. Given his methodology, he had to do it as he did. Obviously, what his results show is debatable (as I've noted above).

i dont know but probably some areas of the brain associated with the relative or psychological perception of time are working in a different way in dreams ( une verité de la palice )

it seems a complex thing but its worth careful research. imagine the implications of being able to change time perception in wake/sleep life.

Originally Posted by VagalTone

i dont know but probably some areas of the brain associated with the relative or psychological perception of time are working in a different way in dreams ( une verité de la palice )

it seems a complex thing but its worth careful research. imagine the implications of being able to change time perception in wake/sleep life.

Research into the effects of more or less brain cycles would probably do the trick while test subjects perform WILDs and actively stay lucid.

eg: Brain cycles decrease while still being plugged into external senses could give the example of time dilation.

The real prize would be to develop a method to increase the number of brain cycles available for the duration of lucid dreaming.

My conjecture: More work available in the same time span = the appearance of slower time dilation. If you normally have 6000ish brain cycles for a typical lucid dream, and are suddenly able to have 12000 cycles in the same period, you would have twice as much dream in the same period of time, so time would be appear to be going by slower.

I did a project on LDing last spring. I would recommend checking out "Do REM (lucid) dreamed and executed actions share the same neural substrate?" It is a review article assessing neural patterns of activity, autonomic responses, and time perception in lucid dreams. It should lead you to some of the other articles you are interested in.

Here a paragraph that mentions some time dilation findings:

In a pilot study, LaBerge (1985) showed that time intervals for counting from one to ten in lucid dreams (by counting from onethousand-and-one to one-thousand-and-ten) are close to the time intervals for counting during wakefulness. In a study by Erlacher and Schredl (2004) the time intervals for two different activities (performing squats and counting) were compared between lucid dreams and wakefulness. The results for counting replicates the finding of LaBerge’s (1985), that time intervals for counting were quite similar in lucid dreams and in wakefulness but performing squats required 44.5 % more time in lucid dreams than in the waking state. The authors speculated that this disproportional effect was caused by the modality of the activity (cognitive vs. motor activity).

After a quick google, I think you can view/download the pdf here: Do REM (lucid) dreamed and executed actions share the same neural substrate? | Erlacher | International Journal of Dream Research

Good Luck!

Wouldn't motion seem to slow down or fast if time rate changes, is it not connected with motion? We measure time with motion. So measuring the motion of things in this world and the dream world to be the same, then their time is the same as well.

Originally Posted by elucid7

Wouldn't motion seem to slow down or fast if time rate changes, is it not connected with motion? We measure time with motion. So measuring the motion of things in this world and the dream world to be the same, then their time is the same as well.

Not exactly. Now we are getting into some Einstein stuff. Motion is dependent on time AND space. The motion of something can stay the same even if the elapsed time is different, as long as space is warped to compensate for the difference. If light travels at 186,000 m/s, how fast is the light coming off the headlight of a car traveling 30 m/s? It is still 186,000 m/s. Nothing can travel faster than that. Space and time (more commonly, spacetime) compensate for the extra boost of "speed". This augments our reality and makes it subjective, or as Einstein put it, relative. Things like gravity warp how space and time exist. If we are at the edge of a black hole, we would perceive time and motion normally. However, if we were then teleported back to earth, we would see that what we saw as a "year" was like 10,000 earth years.

This is all in our reality. Now when we compare it to dreams we are also adding our perception of space, time, and motion in the dream world. Certain actions or events in dreams can augment our perceptions. Like I quoted above, action movements (squatting) distorted how the subjects perceived time. However, the motions themselves seemed normal.

SCIENCE!