Thread: Lucid dreaming Time control?

^^ Excellent (and pretty funny) points, Cooleymd (especially the one about ND2) ... Much better, I think, than saying "Oh, great, another time dilation thread!"

Seriously: though it has been discussed so often, the book is probably still at least slightly open on this subject. In terms of actual evidence (i.e., experiments done by folks like LaBerge), it's been concluded that time moves at about the same pace in LD's as it does in waking life. In terms of subjective evidence (i.e., testimonials from folks like Hukif and Mylynes), it seems that the perception of time's passage can be extremely flexible in LD's. So there is a lot of room for debate, curiosity, and, I suppose, hope, left in the question.

As far as I'm concerned (to date), the best you can do to dilate time in LD's is what you can do in waking-life: namely, that your subjective time can pass more slowly when you are, say, very bored, or more quickly when you are, say, having a great time. Beyond that, I haven't yet seen time change its pace significantly during a LD, and yes, I have tried to alter that pace. So basically you can dilate time a little bit in a dream, maybe adding a few minutes to an hour, but turning a 10-minute dream into a week or much more of subjective life seems to be improbable.

I suppose I still hold out hope for practical time dilation in LD’s, though, because I also have suggested that perhaps there is no such thing as time, so, if time does not exist at all, then its passage can be ignored during a dream, offering a chance to exist in an eternal moment…I've had better luck with doing that, BTW, and it's pretty cool!

Also, if time dilation in LD's is possible (and I do wish it were), I doubt it would have anything to do with brain physiology, so I don't see much sense in discussing how your brain must work faster or in much greater volume to dilate subjective time; in other words, expansive time dilation would probably have to tax a brain’s processing abilities far beyond those with which it is naturally endowed, so there must be something else going on.

Note that I keep talking about time dilation in LD's, and not NLD's. That's because time dilation happens all the time in NLD's -- or at least it seems to do so: when you are not lucid, you are not aware that your dream is jumping from scene to scene without an actual passage of time between them, and you also cannot remember that your time in a dream really only started 5 minutes ago, and not, say, many years ago, as your dreaming mind would have you think. I’m sure you’ve all heard the movie analogy by now, but let me repeat its general theme: while watching a movie, you accept without question that it (the movie) can encompass many years within its story, even though the movie only lasts 2 hours in reality. An NLD can be very much the same, in that it might seem like much time has passed, but what you are really remembering are an assemblage of scenes, each quite short, that seem to span a long period of time, with the time that should have taken place between each scene never having existed; also, you may have been given an historic background by your dreaming mind to flesh out the dream, so that you actually believe this scene has been going on for possibly years…this belief can feel pretty profound upon waking, too, which I think fuels many of the stories of extreme time dilation.

tl;dr: There is much conversation about time dilation on these forums, with none of it being very conclusive, but it seems that much of time dilation’s mythology might have been born in non-lucid dreams, where the impression of the passage of time can be pretty profound, even though it never happened.