Thread: Lifetime Dream?

I know there are some gurus and masters on this forum who apparently can and do spend years of subjective time in their lucid dreams living alternate lives. I don't know how frequently they do this, although I imagine if you're good enough to induce something like that once, you're probably good enough to do it regularly.

Me, though... well, I'll get back to you when I actually have a lucid dream. That'll be the day.

Originally posted by Spamtek
I know there are some gurus and masters on this forum who apparently can and do spend years of subjective time in their lucid dreams living alternate lives.

Isn't that a little... sad? To live in your dream for several years without the will to wake up?

Well, you can wake up if you want to. As far as I understand, you can actually bend time in your dreams, so that a minute may seem like an hour, and an hour may seem like a minute (best quote ever). Actually, people just see you as a person getting a good 8 hours of sleep, but little do they know, that you are living an entire week/month/year/life with super powers and all that stuff.

an entire lifetime would be birth to death. i have had dreams of dying and immediately waking up (not able to experience afterlife from death, but i have dreamt of the afterlife by other means other than dying), but never of being born. i can't imagine any appeal to having a complete birth to death LD (with several years inbetween). it seems a bit mundane and excessive.

Originally posted by Marvo
so that a minute may seem like an hour, and an hour may seem like a minute (best quote ever).

So if they are good enough, can they freeze the real time when they are sleeping, and experience as many different dreams as possable until they had enough and wakes up?

cool

I am not really into it, so I can't answer that particular question.

Well, you can't stop time, not in your dreams or in waking life, but dilating time is not just some special ability but something that everyone does all the time. An hour spent relaxing at the beach is subjectively not nearly as long as an hour spent taking a killer final exam. The same amount of time went by in each instance, but your brain was acting faster during your exam, making the rest of the world feel slower by comparison. If you think in terms of computers and clock speeds, during the beach scenario your brain/"processor" would be running at, say, 1Ghz, whereas during the test it's operating at 3 Ghz. In the latter case, you're registering your surroundings and making decisions three times as often as in the first, making the experience of your surroundings feel thrice as slow.

So when you're dreaming and staying in the dream for what seems like days or weeks or longer, what you're really doing is taking advantage of the subjectivity of your internal clock and revving it up to insane speeds so that you're experiencing a great multitude of things in a very short period of physical time. Because you're disconnected from the real world, you aren't restricted by the normal pace at which reality is processed by your mind and can dilate to, for instance, experience a whole years of dream time in a single night. Of course if you train yourself you can accomplish this to an extent in real life as well, but it's quite a bit tougher because you don't have control over the pace of the stimuli you interact with whereas in the dream-world you can create your surroundings and have them come at you as slow or as fast as you like.

Hope that made some sense. It does make me wonder, though - you must have to "overclock" your brain an incredible amount to be able to experience months and years in the span of a single actual-life night. A computer processor will begin to decrease in efficiency, start producing errors, and eventually break down completely (and often irreparably) after its physical limits are overdone. Is there a parallel with the human mind? Is there a certain point at where you're causing serious damage to your brain by running it faster than it was meant to be run for a prolonged period of time?

Wow Spamtek, you're quite smart.

Yes that makes sense.

I'd like to be able to do that someday.

_glitch_

Spamtek put it quite right but the computer metaphor is a bit off, because a brain is not a computer. It's quite unlikely that anybody is to experience months dream time in minutes or hours of waking time, simply because of the capacity of the brain. It can't be overclocked, but the subjectivity thing is what counts. If one goes into detail about such an experience, one will quickly find out that whoever claims this will barely remember more than 1 to two hours or REAL happenings in the dreams.

Short example:

Let's say you're riding a bike from one place to another, maybe over a distance of 10 km. Maybe in the dream you will see this in fast forward or it will seem like it's really happening. I often get a kind of fast-forward scenario but it might be different for others. The information the dream is giving would then be "Riding a bike 10 km for 14 minutes". But it's much like a book or a movie, in that you imagine this timespan and kind of feel it's consequences, but it's not REAL time. Even if you watch a movie or read a book, it is possible that you really feel as though you spend a LOT more time, but it's just an illusion.


The point is that you can summarize what's happening with a few sentences. This is also how the dream works. The amount of detail determines the length of time passed.

So if you say: "Riding a bike 10 km for 14 minutes", it's just a short snippet like in a book, but in a dream it might seem like a real long time (14 minutes in fact). But you do NOT really experience them.
But if you would say "Riding a bike 10 km for 14 minutes and I saw person XY, saw a bunch of sheep, saw houses, asked for the way etc.", then you probably experienced a lot more than just the first example, so a lot more dream time passed, and also in real life.

What? People calling me smart, saying I'm right? Now there's a dream sign if ever I saw one.

Originally posted by _glitch_+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(_glitch_)</div>

I'd like to be able to do that someday. [/b]

Remember, you already are, all the time. The trick is convincing your brain that you need to go into perceptual overtime in cirumstances where your brain doesn't think it's necessary. Following the computer analogy (and I defend that analogy), it's like you came from the manufacturer with a really crappy motherboard whose BIOS, although it constantly fusses with the processor's clock rate depending on how strenuous the task at hand is, refuses to give the user any manual control over the same process. It's not a question of doing, but of gaining conscious control over that action.

<!--QuoteBegin-Yatahaze
...but the computer metaphor is a bit off, because a brain is not a computer.

It's not a question of which is more powerful or flexible; of course human brains take the cake in that arena. But brains take in information and stimulus, process the data into a recognizable form, decide what to do based on preexisting guidelines/goals, and send out the appropriate commands. More simply, a computer takes in information, figures out what to do with it, and then does that. Although every step in that task is exponentially more complex in the human brain than in any Beige Box, the steps are fundamentally the same. Computers are mostly geared toward linear processing of course and human brains are (much more efficient) neural networks, but that doesn't change their basic functions.

The brain is unbelievably powerful. People often are lured into thinking otherwise because they mistake their oh-so-limited conscious control over it as being the only form of brainpower around, but lying beyond our conscious perceptions is an absolute mental powerhouse. Something as innocuous as picking your nose requires an unbelievable amount of mental effort: focus of intent, coordination, firing the right muscles off at the right time, constantly checking your mental map of the body to check your coordinates... you (nor I) don't notice any of it, though. For us it's just stick, pick, and flick. I think people on this board are fond of saying something to the extent of, "you brain is constantly filtering out unbelievable amounts of information," which I also agree with although I don't agree with their often-present conspiratorial undertones. I don't know how to best illustrate just how much brains really do that we never even notice, but suffice it to say that I'm quite sure that the mind is capable of producing a month's worth of stimulus in a single night's breadth.

(by the way, the human mind operates at something like a puny 200Hz, I think it is - but the bandwidth is out of this world.)

(I also hope that someone who actually knows his way around a PC doesn't read any of this, or I'm in hella trouble)

Although I do believe, Yatahaze, that most dreaming time is in realtime, and that most experiences of extended stretches of time will collapse into storybook summations if scrutinized. I knew Stephen LaBerge had people move their eyes in certain patterns in their dreams which could be recorded in waking life by watching their real eyes do the same thing, and he observed that a ten-second pattern (or whatever it was) translated into an identical 10-second pattern in the dream, so I definitely think that realtime is the norm. I just don't think it's the rule, and I think people dedicated enough can bend it, even to extremes.

Originally posted by Spamtek+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Spamtek)</div>

It's not a question of which is more powerful or flexible; of course human brains take the cake in that arena. But brains take in information and stimulus, process the data into a recognizable form, decide what to do based on preexisting guidelines/goals, and send out the appropriate commands. More simply, a computer takes in information, figures out what to do with it, and then does that. Although every step in that task is exponentially more complex in the human brain than in any Beige Box, the steps are fundamentally the same. Computers are mostly geared toward linear processing of course and human brains are (much more efficient) neural networks, but that doesn't change their basic functions.[/b]

When I was writing text search software, some friends and I realised how effective the brain was at executing searches in your head. Though the computer would respond much faster to clear searches, We were amazed about the way the brain would respond to an ambiguous query. We realized that the query kinda runs in the background until it finds an answer. Sometimes the answer would come days later. It got us thinking on exactly how many queries are always running in your head, trying to find an answer. A simple query would be like: Who plays in this movie. All through the day, you’d get answers that you did not immediately get when you asked the question.

<!--QuoteBegin-Spamtek
The brain is unbelievably powerful. People often are lured into thinking otherwise because they mistake their oh-so-limited conscious control over it as being the only form of brainpower around, but lying beyond our conscious perceptions is an absolute mental powerhouse. Something as innocuous as picking your nose requires an unbelievable amount of mental effort: focus of intent, coordination, firing the right muscles off at the right time, constantly checking your mental map of the body to check your coordinates... you (nor I) don't notice any of it, though. For us it's just stick, pick, and flick. I think people on this board are fond of saying something to the extent of, "you brain is constantly filtering out unbelievable amounts of information," which I also agree with although I don't agree with their often-present conspiratorial undertones. I don't know how to best illustrate just how much brains really do that we never even notice

The only way you can illustrate this (filtering) is to go talk with someone who is loosing his hearing. I am loosing some of mine myself as I am getting older. I must tell you, it is nothing like what I expected. You don’t hear anything any differently as I assumed as a child (or even as hearing technicians working on hearing aids assume). You will talk to me and say something and I would hear something else, totally related to the current situation. I do not mishear worlds and say “what, I did not hear that word“. I totally hear another word (sentence) that makes sense. You could be going deaf yourself without even noticing it. It’s like the brain does a word lookup based on what your ears heard and puts it in the sentence in a manner that is totally logical and seamless. The amazing thing is that the sentence usually makes sense. You hear the reformatted sentence. The result is quite funny sometimes. You could tell me something about the TV show and I would hear something about the lamp in the corner (using similar words to the ones you used). The brain acting as a fourrier transform starts to make sense.

Originally posted by Spamtek+--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Spamtek)</div>

but suffice it to say that I'm quite sure that the mind is capable of producing a month's worth of stimulus in a single night's breadth.

(by the way, the human mind operates at something like a puny 200Hz, I think it is - but the bandwidth is out of this world.)

(I also hope that someone who actually knows his way around a PC doesn't read any of this, or I'm in hella trouble)
[/b]

You’re not in trouble at all, the analogy (look up analogy before bashing pls) to computers is quite applicable. RNA reads DNA analogously (frighteningly close) to a computer reading software. It is not impossible the brain processes information using self formed functions.

<!--QuoteBegin-Spamtek


Although I do believe, Yatahaze, that most dreaming time is in realtime, and that most experiences of extended stretches of time will collapse into storybook summations if scrutinized. I knew Stephen LaBerge had people move their eyes in certain patterns in their dreams which could be recorded in waking life by watching their real eyes do the same thing, and he observed that a ten-second pattern (or whatever it was) translated into an identical 10-second pattern in the dream, so I definitely think that realtime is the norm. I just don't think it's the rule, and I think people dedicated enough can bend it, even to extremes.

I believe Lucid time may be the same. Though, I can’t help to wonder about not lucid movie type dreams. Just like life, at this moment, it is impossible to tell you actually lived your past. All you have are the memories of it. It sure feels I lived 60 years but I am 60 now and it seams I was 19 yesterday. The only assurance is that each day I live a day. I cannot go back in my memory a say the same about that (I lived a whole day the day I had that memory but I cannot prove it). Get my analogy here? (I’m not 60 btw). Could dream memories be affected by the same phenomena? I feel like I dreamt a whole lifetime but I’m awake now and I am 60 now. How can I go back and prove it.