How long can lucid dreams last?

I often see people talking about cool things they can do in lucid dreams, like adventuring through dungeons and defeating dragons or going on crazy adventures through space, but my question is, to be able to do cool stuff like that how long can lucid dreams actually last? What is a reasonable amount of time to spend on a good lucid dream? Of course, it's hard to know the exact amount of time spent on dreams, but I mean roughly? Are there ways to prolong lucid dreams? I mean, I haven't even gotten the hang of short lucid dreams yet... I had one kind of successful WILD I think, but I lost lucidity within about a minute, maybe even less. Seconds. I've attained lucidity within dreams a few times, but usually just for a second and it's too foggy to do anything with. But that's beside the point, I'm just curious about this. So, if it's too hard to answer in a unit of time, what I mean is how much do you generally achieve in each lucid dream?

It's fairly normal to have your first few lucids be fairly short, especially if you wake up from excitement. However, once you get more grounded in lucidity, it's entirely possible to make the dream feel significantly longer than the actual amount of time that it takes. I'd advise checking out this tutorial from our wiki: My Tutorial for extending Lucid Dream Time. Hours of LD. - Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views

Personally, the longest feeling lucid I've ever had felt like a few hours, even though it was really only about an hour, but I've heard of people having days and weeks long lucid experiences.

Aside from the subjective time dilation Spellbee mentions above, LD's can last as long as your REM periods last; in other words, you can be lucid for as long as you would normally be dreaming. That length can vary, but generally REM periods max out at around 90 minutes. However, if you use DEILD to move from one REM period to the next, you can potentially "chain" your dreams together and make your overall dream last for hours.

Hey Sageous, it's the dream cycle that is typically 90 minutes long, not the REM period. That tends to last only a few minutes at the beginning of the night, and maybe 20 minutes at the end. The Laberge eye movement experiment that proved LDs were real tends to suggest that dreams can be in real time (eye movements done by the subject presumably in what he thought was normal time, and recorded on the EEG at normal speed).

Yo need rem sleep to get long lucid dream you need rem relapse
simply wake up a few hours early for a few days and then
sleep one full night you will get rem relapse that means
more rem longer lds it works for me

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Originally Posted by Goldenspark

Hey Sageous, it's the dream cycle that is typically 90 minutes long, not the REM period. That tends to last only a few minutes at the beginning of the night, and maybe 20 minutes at the end. The Laberge eye movement experiment that proved LDs were real tends to suggest that dreams can be in real time (eye movements done by the subject presumably in what he thought was normal time, and recorded on the EEG at normal speed).

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Hey Goldenspark, six of one, half dozen of the other, I think. If this dream cycle you mention lasts 90 minutes, and you dream during REM, I figure it must be okay to say that LD's can last as long as 90 minutes, being that that's how long this dream cycle lasts... or is there a part of this dream cycle where no dreaming occurs?

Funny thing though: I've been at this for a very long time, and I had never realized there was a thing called a "dream cycle." I had always thought the sleep cycle, or one full night's sleep, was made up of five stages of brain activity, with REM periods occuring at different times throughout the night (during what would be stage 5) after an initial NREM period of about 90 minutes as a sleeping body moves from stages 1 to 5 -- and then brief NREM periods would occur between each REM period, with those NREM periods becoming more brief as the hours pass (as the REM periods become longer and more closely spaced).

So, as far as I knew, REM periods by no means occur only during the first few minutes of sleep and maybe 20 minutes at the end. But I guess I -- and many, many others, apparently -- could have gotten it all wrong?

Also, I'm pretty sure that LaBerge's eye-movement experiment was about comparing perceived dream time to actual time, and really had nothing to do with how long a LD -- the dream itself, time dilation aside -- can last, which I assume is the subject of this thread.

Sorry, that was a typo, I meant sleep cycle not dream cycle. The REM part of each sleep cycle occurs at the end of the cycle, and is shorter at the beginning of the night than at the end. My point was that for most people the time where you dream is during REM, and this is a smaller fraction of the night than most people realise. I've hooked myself up to a diy EEG/EOG and have seen this pattern.
I was referring to the experiment that Laberge did where a subject signaled back to him with pre-arranged eye signals from within an LD. IIRC it was 10 flicks of the eyes to extreme left and right. Presumably the timing of those movements matched in the dream and on the EEG trace, I.e. no time dilation, or Laberge would have commented?

It seemed to me that the original question was asking about how long dreams can feel, and how you can make them longer to accomplish more in them. Maybe I'm wrong though, forgive me. But I agree with Sageous, Laberge's experiment doesn't disprove time dilation (that is, how long a dream can feel, as opposed to how long it actually is).

Think of it this way. If you're at a boring business meeting or a boring class in school for an hour, it can feel like an eternity. But if you're at a sports game or doing some other thing you enjoy doing for an hour, it can actually feel like less (time flies when you're having fun). However, in both situations, if you were to pull out a stopwatch or look at the clock, it would be moving the same speed.

Obviously it works a little different in dreams (I'm not saying you have to bore yourself to death to have long lucids), but it makes it easier to understand how dreams can feel longer even if they are 1:1 with real time.

"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity." - Albert Einstein

To understand how long dreams can last, whether in real time or perceived, first it's a good idea to find out how long the REM periods are within each sleep cycle. That's why I was saying that for most people, who dream only during REM, those periods are limited to just a few minutes at the end of the sleep cycle, growing to maybe 20 minutes at the end of the last sleep cycle before waking.
There are loads of resources on line that show stylised EEG recordings of this. What there doesn't seem to be is many recordings of whole night EEG data, but I have got my own data both from the Zeo sleep mask and a DIY EEG recorder that clearly show this pattern.
The typical starting point, for most people, of Max 20 minute REM periods shows how long real time dreams can last.
Time dilation I know is real. I have experienced it with independent witnesses. Although impossible to verify, the experience had a time multiplier of at least 10, probably 100, so I have no doubt that dreams can feel like at least 2 hours or more. Is no real upper limit when you add the "brain fooling itself" factor where it could be possible to perceive days.

Edit: here's a typical hypnogram that shows what I mean;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep#..._Hypnogram.svg

Sorry , but can you explain what DEILD is....thx