Thread: Timing dreams?

Indeed, you can't use your watch for this, all you can do is estimate it. The notion of time is not changed in the dreamstate, so this shouldn't be harder than in waking life.

Yes, most people are estimating their time spent during dreams. Some may be timing WILDs, which is more easily and accurately done. I myself have trouble with estimating time spent during a dream, but others seem to do it rather easily.

Originally Posted by RouteToSomewhere

How exactly can one "time" their own dream?
I read about people saying their dream was like 5 minutes or so
But does your watch even work properly in the dream world, I mean the timer-function.
I find it weird

Cheers,

Will.

Unless they are closely monitoring the clock upon awakening from each dream (pre-supposing they've trained their bodies to do this), then I think they are just speaking in terms of how they perceived the length of time to be within the duration of the dream.

well, there are two different types of times, even in non lucid dreams. There is time in physical world and time in dream world. For example, the other night i had a dream that lasted 2 days, but i only slept for 2 hours during that time.

Incidentally, Stephen LaBerg did a study where lucid dreamers counted the seconds in their dreams to see if their counting was accurate. It turns out that generally speaking their perception of time was about the same as when they were awake.

http://www.lucidity.com/slbbs/index.html

Personally, if I have a WILD, I check the time before going to bed and again when I wake. So I can usually estimate the length of the dream (for example, I know I went into SP after about five minutes) with decent accuracy. My longest WILDs have lasted upwards of 25-30 minutes. Very rare. DILDs are tricky; I estimate them at about how long I believe them to be, but since time is relative/subjective, there's never a way to be completely sure like with the WILDs.

I don't tihnk it is possible to have an exact time but I believe it is possible to estimate.

Well, recently I've been having this situation happening to me where I'll go to sleep say, at 11:00, and wake up at maybe 12:30 or 1, and I feel like I've just had 3 or 4 hours worth of dreams.

It happened again last night and every time it happens I'm always blown away at how little time has already passed. So my perception, at least, of time within the dream world is way off the mark!

I can estimate my LUCID dreams....

If it's WBTB my estimate is like 80% correctly...

In my dreams the time is like the real time

I had an idea for this a while back.
I have quite a good memory for songs and music, i thought if i can play back a song or piece of music and get the accurate beats per min then i could count my dream in bars (as in music) and then keep that number and work out from the beats per min of the song how long my dream was.
Though i reckon i would have to lucid for this and I'm a bit of a noob so may not happen any time soon,
If anyone tries this then please PM me and tell me how it went.