Thread: How long is a dream?

I just started off reading most of the site yesterday and tried to remember my dream this morning.
What I remebered was 1 or 2 pictures from every dream, for example I remembered I was shooting at different characters from videogames etc but I cannot recall a story behind it.
Is a dream like a long story that stretches over several days/months or perhaps even years? Or can that vary from time to time?
I really wanna know when I have remebered the _whole_ and not just framents of it but I dont know how long I should try to remember?

they do vary quite abit, dont' be concerned you only remembered small bits your first time. It can take abit of practise, but u'll get there and have a fairly good recall

hey man, i have that too, but now that i have started my dream log, i have been getting alot better at my dream recall. i dont know about dreams connecting through months, or even a few days, i know after i wake up, i feel my dream kinda, floating around but i have to kinda think about it for a while, sometimes i can grab more, sometimes not. but yea, start a dream journal, and it will help your dream recall alot, if not at first, it will later. Good luck.

Moifay

It is true that dreams could just be one second flashes of pictures and whatever. However, when I wake and move my dreams from my brain to my journal I tend to organise them in a way that makes sense to me. That is, in some sort of chronological order. My guess is that seeing as my brain works things out according to time, I do actually dream in a way that makes sense with time.

But I still could put six minutes worth of dream into two seconds. Perhaps one day one of us will dream of watching a clock.

Chab

how long is a dream?
as long as a string?
it could be .00001 seconds to a long time

Dreams can be immensely long, sometimes they can last for what feels like decades. This is because your brain is not working based on your waking life, and your perception of time there. Your brain probably works more efficiently when you're dreaming, so it seems as if time has slowed down in waking life. I know that a few people on the DV forums have had dreams that last a few weeks.

According to good old LaBerge dream time is more or less the same as real-time. As I understand it the scenes in your dreams can be hours (or longer) apart but right after one another, you then 'remember' what happened in the intervening period so it seems like something happened but you did not actually experience it as it happened.

However I expect this is all somewhat subjective since if you think about what happed a week ago in real life and what happened yesterday the only way you can tell which happened first is by looking at what happened between them. So I guess the answer is dreams happen in real time but it may not seem like real time!

I hope that made sense :-)