Thread: are dreams realtime?

I mean, if I'm dreaming and I walk across the street (in my dream), would 10 seconds have passed in real life?

This has been debated. Experiments done by the Lucidity Institute have shown that it is indeed real time, but other have claimed to extend dreams over days or weeks.

But normally, they're in real time.

What if you slow time in your dream, or make time go faster.. does real time also go faster or slower then?

i saw in one lucid i had time go by really fast but i don't know the real time comapred to it

Not for me. At least the feel.

Some dreams feel like days and weeks, some minutes.

Often I look at the time and think, "That doesn't seem right, this felt like hrs/mins."

Dreams are real time. LaBerge did experiments to prove this.

His view on it is that dreams are like movies. In one scene you might be with friends having a picnic on a Sunday morning on the park. The next quick scene might be of you driving back and seeing some random things. The next quick scene you're at home having dinner and doing some more random things.

This gives the illusion that a lot of time has passed. You did a lot of things that covered an entire day in just a few minutes, giving the impression that a lot of time has passed.

Originally Posted by tyrantt23

Dreams are real time. LaBerge did experiments to prove this.

did he do experiments on only himself, or on others as well. Because it might vary from person to person or situation to situation. I'll have lucid dreams that seem to last at least an hour, where I hadn't skipped from "scene" to "scene" and when I woke up just after the dream and looked at my alarm clock, only half that time had passed.

or maybe I was disoriented cause I was tired

I know for certain that he did the tests on himself, but I don't know about other people.

It's my personal opinion is that dream time is flexible. If you stop and start timing things, they will correspond to reality, or at least your grasp of how long a second lasts in reality (1-mississippi, 2-mississippi). But, you of course know how time can seem to go by really quickly or really slowly in real life, I believe the same happens in real life, only it does actually go by slower or faster.

So 5 minutes of dream time listening to a boring lecture could actually be 10 minutes of real time.

But, I can't prove this of course.

Stephen Laberge tested this and..yes

he asked his students to LD and move their eyes (in dream) left to right for ten seconds (it would move their eyes in Real Life also)

students moved their life for ten seconds in the dream

they moved their life for 10 seconds in RL also..


i may have gotten some of the info wrong (i kinda skimmed thru that page of the book)

Originally Posted by antiflag

they moved their life for 10 seconds in RL also..

I wish I could move my life...

The human brain can only experience time as the perception of time. As other people have stated, Laberge's experiment only proved that people can accurately time something from within a dream when they try. This makes sense.

The best arguement for time dialation in dreams comes from very brief dreams. Think of the times when you are trying not to fall asleep during a very boring lecture or presentation, you start nodding off. In the seconds it takes your head to fall to your chest (or if you're unlucky, the time it takes to fall out of your chair), you can have a full dream and wake up totally disoriented. I've had dreams that lasted miinutes, but have missed only seconds of the presentation.

Its all perception. Just as time passes quickly or slowly when you're awake, it can when you're asleep. It is more pronounced in your dreams, because you can skip ahead, and see the dream like a movie preview.

Originally Posted by ThisUserNameSucks

I wish I could move my life...

lol i feel dumb ... *they moved their eyes for 10 seconds in RL also*