# Lucid Dreaming > General Lucid Discussion >  >  My dream felt like 5 years!!!!!!!!

## westonci

First off i want to say im not making anything up or im not exaggerating!!

Last night was weird, it wasn't a lucid dream. i still cant believe it

The dream was cool, there was some international secret agent group like the FBI after me and right before they can get me i become invisible and can do whatever the Fuck i want!

The weirdest thing was my dream was EXTREMELY STABLE nothing changed no abrupt scene changes or anything every thing happened like real life. 

Once again I wasn't lucid. But it felt so real!!!

I woke up and i find out i only slept for only 3 hours. I could swear it was like 5 years!!!

I think I know why it felt so long, its because the scenes where extremely stable and wouldn't change randomly so it makes it feel longer.

This didnt feel like a normal dream. Isnt this not suppost to happen in a dream, Where the stability of the dream is the same as real life?

If only i was Lucid,  shit!

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## MrDeJaWu

so wad u did during the "5 years" ? ^^ or is it a scarscam lol

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## Lseadragon

As a general rule, I am suspicious of anyone who claims this.  But you were not claiming to be lucid, so that lends a touch of credibility.

Can you provide an account of the days? If you can, you're either telling the truth, or really fanatical. And you don't seem fanatical.

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## Hazel

I have read something about this in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. It is like on a movie when you see someone go to bed, and a few seconds later they turn an alarm off. You automatically think that 8 hours have gone by. This is how it is in dreams that seem to last a really long time.

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## Adrenaline Junkie

weelilhazel pretty much explained it to you. Imagine watching a film and it may be set over a year for the entire film though you only see 3 hours of that entire year. Its similar, you only think you lived 5 years or so due to the events in the dream, though it was probably only a few minutes or maybe an hour or what not. If you really did have something that long, go ahead and write it down and give me a proof of concept.

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## tiddlywink101

No, thats only Stephen Laberges' THEORY of how this can come to happen for people making these kind of claims. 
We know that dream time nearly always unfolds in real time, and  with each dream period lasting about 30 minutes how would it be possible to experience such a long dream without the above method?

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## mylucidworld

I have quite a few dreams that last for a few days or weeks sometimes, well at least it feels that way. Last night it felt like i was in a dream for about a week because i recall days going by i moved houses, got a different job, and I recall having an interview and then hearing i got the job, then i started the job what felt like about two days later, i also recall working for a few days and it felt like i was working for about 8 hours a day, i was happy to wake up.

I started longer dreams like this since i started taking b6 which is supposed to make u have longer, and more vivid dreams and is doing exactly that for me.

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## westonci

okay maybe i went to far, it was more like 1 year

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## TheSixthSide

> okay maybe i went to far, it was more like 1 year



We'll thanks for exaggerating  :Eek: 

About the movie theory and such. That could be definitely be true. Your mind could give you thoughts so detailed while you are asleep that you believe you experienced it in the past/future of your present state of dreaming.

Or also. You might experience a few sleep cycles and they could all be vaguely attached to each other. This would like trying to re-enter a dream when you WBTB.

An experience I had just last month was dreaming about my past (which never happened this way). It was me and my best friend growing up together and we was poor lived on the streets about 5-6 years old. These 3 asian women down by the beach that lived in a hut that was held off the ground by wooden beams raised us. As I watched us grow up in a Third Person view. I remembered everything and it was so vivid. I remembered the three women's names (sorry I can't recall them right now though)

But anyways... I watched myself and my friend grow up from that age to around 14. It felt like a long time. That's about 3-4 years in age, but my dream didn't actually feel that long. Felt more like an hour. (Like the movie theory.) I was so convinced in my dream that this had happened in my real life that I thought to myself I have to call Jake and tell him I remembered all about our past life and was gonna ask him if he remember the women. I didn't become lucid though when I thought that. Of course, when I woke up I didn't call him, but it was one crazy dream.

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## tiddlywink101

> Or also. You might experience a few sleep cycles and they could all be vaguely attached to each other



Thats possible, I often can't tell if I have had one long dream or a just a few that carried on like sequels

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## Moonscape

My LD's are consistently stable, if I dont feel that it is, I will 'false awaken' myself and start the LD again. 
Yes...everything is real, solid, nothing crazy happening, I can go anywhere I want, eat, drink, drive, and talk to DC's. 
The LD environment is so close to real life for me.

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## KuRoSaKi

It can happen all of my Non-LD's are as Vivid and stable as my Lucid's. However my Lucid's tend to be far more vivid but still the Non-Ld's look like real life.

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## Moonscape

> I have read something about this in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. It is like on a movie when you see someone go to bed, and a few seconds later they turn an alarm off. You automatically think that 8 hours have gone by. This is how it is in dreams that seem to last a really long time.



Some time ago I was having a very solid LD, I mean everything was absolutely normal.
It was an office dream, we sat at my desk going through the mail. 
I decided to time this LD and took a small clock off the shelf. 
I watched the sweep hand (seconds) going by in realtime fashion.
We read the mail, threw out the junk, I drank two cups of coffee.
30 minutes went by.

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## Hazel

> Some time ago I was having a very solid LD, I mean everything was absolutely normal.
> It was an office dream, we sat at my desk going through the mail. 
> I decided to time this LD and took a small clock off the shelf. 
> I watched the sweep hand (seconds) going by in realtime fashion.
> We read the mail, threw out the junk, I drank two cups of coffee.
> 30 minutes went by.



I didn't mean that is always the case, like tidlywink101 said: that is just LaBerge's theory. I believe it is a good theory, but in some cases it might not be true. Dream time could possibly go by at a different rate then actual time. (Although they did testing on this and found that dream time and real time were the same, some dreams could possibly be different.)

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## wannywan

I've had dreams where I've _had the feeling_ that I'd been somewhere for years (in one case, thousands of years stuck in a chimney type thing) but all I'd actually experienced in those dreams was a normal amount of time with a sort of 'false memory' of the preceding years.

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## Moonscape

I experienced a series of dreams where I would be floating in a dark void that represented absolute nothingness.
There is a huge dark sphere in front of me, it represented the entire history of humanity, earth, the cosmos. It was always shrinking, my task was to get to it and somehow stop it from dissapearing, thus becoming the end of time for all. 
I would try to propel myself forwards, reaching out to the sphere as it became unreachable and smaller. Finally, to my horror...it was gone. 
Now I am alone in an eternally dark space, no chance of getting back, no hope for the human race. I begin to cry as I fall back into my sleeping self.

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## mylucidworld

I had another one of those long dreams last night. I dreamt that i moved to spain and i recall being there for a week. Days and nights went by and then i moved back after a week because i missed home. But whether it was that long or just seemed that long i don't know. (b6 100mg used)

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## Alban

To be honest, this years-in-a-dream thing doesn't surprise me at all. It's one of the things I love about dreams.

I've been experimenting with a polyphasic sleep schedule for a while now (10-15 mins every 4 hours)

The amazing thing is that I'll have these increadibly vivid, complex dreams that seem to last for hours, even days, and yet I know for a fact I've only been in REM for about 10 mins.

I think there's a really good story for a book in here somewhere

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## i_speel_good

Dreams actually last 2-10 seconds.

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## archdreamer

> Dreams actually last 2-10 seconds. [citation needed]



Fixed.

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## SEBSTER

holy moly guacamole.
i have only had dreams that seem to last days but never years!

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## mylucidworld

> holy moly guacamole.
> i have only had dreams that seem to last days but never years!



Me neither, and i don't want to either!

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## LucidMike14

Ive had very long dreams but I think I speak for everyone when I say it is hard to try to interpret how much time has been spent during your dream. Sounds cool though, yeah, the dream world is amazing.

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## Zakar

Wow, imagine being stuck in a nightmare for a year!  What a....nightmare!  I hope this don't ever happen to me.

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## TravisE

I haven't yet experienced any dreams that felt like more than about an hour (with the exception of the occasional dream where I'm sleeping through the night or having a long series of false awakenings, but it's easy to see how such dreams can feel like they've lasted an entire night while only having maybe 30 minutes' or so worth of actual content).

There are various mechanisms that many (or virtually all?) of my dreams use that others have mentioned already, like scene cuts to later points and false memories. The interesting thing, though, is that I don't seem to be readily fooled by them. When I wake up, it's usually very clear to me when I "remembered" something happening that I neither actually did in real life nor in the dream itself. And a scene transition to a later time doesn't usually make me feel like that much time actually passed.

I wonder if it's possible that not everyone can recognize false memories as easily and therefore may think they've had an extraordinarily long dream. In my case, almost all of my dreams seem to incorporate at least one false memory, but the difference between a false memory and something I actually did in the dream seems very clear to me when I recall the dream. Perhaps that's not the case for everybody?

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## polmc

> I had another one of those long dreams last night. I dreamt that i moved to spain and i recall being there for a week. Days and nights went by and then i moved back after a week because i missed home. But whether it was that long or just seemed that long i don't know. (b6 100mg used)



Liar! You can't be homesick if you live in spain!!

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## Cammy

I've had a lucid that "felt" like 20-30mins but when i wrote it down. It must have only been about 5minutes.

Don't know why it "felt" longer tho

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## TravisE

> I've had a lucid that "felt" like 20-30mins but when i wrote it down. It must have only been about 5minutes.
> 
> Don't know why it "felt" longer tho



This is kind of off-topic, but that reminds me of how a typical occurence in my dream journal is to write something like "I remember very little of this dream," and then by the time I finished writing about it it's been at least one or two full pages. Happens all the time.  :wink2:  I guess that's kind of the reverse of what you experienced.

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## dreamscaper22

the one i had last night felt like two hours but i was only asleep for an hour and 15 minutes

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## SKA

Time dilation. Some people can do this at will, but it happens to many dreamers.
You know how, in the morning you decide to roll over after checking the clock, fall asleep and have these wild dreams that seem to last for many hours and then you wake up to find out only 20 minutes have passed?

Your sense of time is distorted, sometimes completely stopped, when in the Dreaming state of consciousness. There's a story of a Tibettan monk who has lived a lifetime of a 100 years in 1 night. It is very well possible to dream an entire lifetime or years in 1 night of dreaming. There are some people on this forumk that  have mastered time dialtion and can tell you alot about it.

And stop explaining westonci's experience trying to render it meaningless with "rationality". Rationality and dreaming don't go together we know that by now. I'm sure beyond a doubt that what westonci tried to explain is that what he experienced in his remarkable dream is similair to doing stuff in waking life for 5 years long.

Imaginefalling asleep, ending up in a Dream, experiencing 5 years of (dream)life and then waking up after 5 years. No matter that it was only 1 night; that's how he experienced it. Amazing. I really need to master this.

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## Moonscape

There was a very good episode from Star Trek The Next Generation...
Capt. Picard was rendered unconcious by a space probe that they came across. 

He lived an entire lifetime into old age. To the crew, he was only out for 30 minutes.
In his other life, he played the flute, raised a family, and did research. The only evidence that he brought back with him to prove that he lived an entire lifetime elswhere, was his 'new' ability to play the flute.

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## Michael

oh, so the five years didnt go by like real years. i mean you didnt get older or whatnot? i thought you meant you lived 5 years in a 3 hour dream. i have a lot of dreams that feel like forever. never knew that was strange.

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