7 year long lucid dream

**polio vaccine** · 08-28-2005 11:20 PM

I read in a Stephen LaBerge book about a guy who dreamt he was in the French Revolution and was put on trial. His dream went through the entire trial process, complete with sentencing to execution, and "the next day" he was put under the guillotine, only to wake up a second before the blade hit his neck. When he woke up he realized the headboard of his bed had fallen onto his neck, like a guillotine blade would, and that was the reason he woke up. So by that logic, the dream would have had to take place over a fraction of a second, despite it feeling like several days. I think the guy this happened to was Saint-Denys or somebody, but I'd have to recheck the book.

I've had a time-dilated dream too, so I know he's not bullshitting, at least not totally. Also, taking mushrooms can stretch time out quite a bit. It's weird to be listening to a 3 minute song and experiencing it as 3 hours, but without the audio going any slower or changing in any describable way.

Seven years is a long, long time though. Wouldn't you get bored enough to quit after seven years of walking on the ocean bottom? Or at least, over those seven years, wouldn't something notable happen in between beginning and finding a portal to hell?

**Rainah** · 08-30-2005 05:13 AM

I've also had time-distorted dreams, but never lucid ones. I wake up and I'm looking at the clock and thinking "NO way was that a 2 hour nap ... what DAY is this?" and I check the computer calendar to be sure.

It's actually frequent for me to experience time-distortion in dreams, but the most notable example was when I was 12, I dreamed that my grown-up self got pregnant, and I woke up just as they said, "It's a ..." after carrying and delivering. FELT like 9 months, though I glossed over quite a bit of the ills of pregnancy, since at that point I'd only ever seen it, of course, not experienced it. I forget the gender, of course, as that's half my life ago, lol. More typically though the dream takes place over 2-3 days in dream-time, and not in real time.

But, I thought until NOW that this was perfectly normal. Does everyone NOT experience time-distortion sometimes? Am I odd in a newly discovered way?

Rainah

**Invader** · 08-30-2005 08:53 AM

Well, the subject of time dilation certainly isn't new, but to have a dream even the full length of a month would be quite astonishing (let alone 7 years). When i thought about how one was to remember things back in real life when they would wake up, i still remembered that their real bodies only went through a small period of time, so the real life information stored in their brains should still be fresh. As far as the new information that comes from the dream, maybe its like the brain creates a partition, as a computer does for hard-drive space on bigger capacity drives.... but its just a theory...

And as for learning something like martial arts in a dream, the only obstacle that comes to mind is that the body in the real world wont have the muscle memory to back it up. For non-percusion musical instruments it may be possible (assuming that the notes are right in your dream), but for drums, you also need the muscle memory for the feel of it...

very interesting topic, i hope to pull something like this off for some in-dream testing

**polio vaccine** · 08-30-2005 01:58 PM

Heh, well I guess I'm lucky I play the piano, relatively straightforward. Dream concerts ho!

And now that I think about it, everybody's dreams have gotta be extended at least a little bit, right? I mean, aren't our dreaming periods only like less than an hour at a time? Usually my dreams at least involve more action than 30-40 minutes would allow.. that is, if I can remember the whole thing.

**TygrHawk** · 08-30-2005 03:57 PM

FWIW, I don't recall ever experiencing time dilation in my dreams -- at least not enough that I could really tell. And my longest lucid dream was probably only 15-20 minutes of dream time -- of course, I've never really worked at stretching it, either.

**Gothlark** · 08-30-2005 04:20 PM

Yeah, I can experience extremely long LDs. My guess is that you only actually participate in a few minutes of it, though, and the rest is false memories you create to fill in huge gaps. It's kind of tough to say, but that would be the most reasonable guess. You can tell the length from an approximation based on its feeling of length.
Because it's compressed time, though, however it's done, when you're just normally functioning, it seems like however long it was in real time, like fifteen minutes or so on fast-forward. So, you can remember the rest of your real life fairly easily. You only really properly remember the dream when you think about it a bit, but it's obviously there to be remembered.

**Invader** · 08-30-2005 08:48 PM

Originally posted by Gothlark
My guess is that you only actually participate in a few minutes of it, though, and the rest is false memories you create to fill in huge gaps. It's kind of tough to say, but that would be the most reasonable guess.

I'd have to agree with this. As far as my dreams go, whenever i experience a full day in the dream, i only remember actually going through a full 15-20 minutes worth first hand, meaning that the other parts of the day had to created falsely by my imagination. sounds reasonable to me