Dream Time = Real Time?

[Kid-Lucid]

If whatever you do in dream time takes up the same amount in real time, how come I only remember about 3 minutes of my dream over a period of 8-10 hours? :S

[Je33ica]

probably because you dont remember all your dreams completely, and though we can dream in all stages of sleep, the most common, lengthy, and vivid stage of sleep is REM. so you only remember 3 minutes of REM...

[Amethyst Star]

In addition to what Je33ica said, the mind tends to work at different speeds. As the saying goes we only use about... 10% (?) of our brains and my thinking is that since we don't have to respond to external stimuli when we're sleeping the mind can work faster, causing a 5 minute sleep time to yield 30 minutes of dream time. You can also ask these questions in the general forum if you'd rather do things that way. See you 'round! -Amé

[Tsen]

Yeah. Time dilation is something you'll hear about a bit on these forums...and usually I like to comment about it. Just 'cuz I've had experience with it. First of all, you're not likely to remember much of your dreams anyway. When you leave REM and go to another phase of sleep, you're mind blanks out and you forget all that happened in that dream. When you wake up and remember a dream, it's because you skipped a few levels of sleep and woke up directly from REM. There's a few other ways, but that's the most common. Second, in a dream you can endure long amounts of time without much real time passing. As has been said earlier, your mind doesn't have to deal with external stimuli. For example, I've had dreams that have lasted several months, and there are a few people here that have had dreams that have lasted years. They're not common, but they can happen. How? Simple. Not only can the mind work as quickly as it is able, it also doesn't have to fill in the gaps. Whenever there's nothing happening, the mind will conveniently skip over it. If you look back at a dream, often small details will be left out. For example, an entire day can pass in a dream when you only remember a few minutes worth of the dream. Your mind doesn't like to fill in empty spaces with a lot of nothing, so it just pretends the gaps don't exist...convenient, actually. That's why it's rare that you'll get bored in a dream...