# Lucid Dreaming > Attaining Lucidity >  >  Can We Really Spend Years In A Lucid Dream?

## LucidDreams17

I been doing some research on this topic and many people claim it's possible to spend YEARS in a lucid dream. Is this possible to actually spend years in a lucid dream? P.S. I don't mean like reality years, like real life years.. I mean like with Cobb in Inception.. he spent a lifetime in a lucid dream and woke up back in his house like nothing happened.. is that possible? Can we do that?

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## Oneironaut Zero

To the best of what's actually been verified - that I know of - we can _simulate_ the feeling of living years, in a dream. However, this simulation is caused by 'lapses' in dream time (basically hopping from moment to moment, in a sequence that makes it seem like years have passed - kind of like when you try to recall the past few years of your life, and you remember it by individual moments, with gaps in between).

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## LucidDreams17

@Oneironaut so it's possible to basically live in a dream for years and wake up back in reality in the morning like nothing happened?

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## MadMonkey

I'd add to what Oneironaut said in that some of tha gaps can seem filled in by false memories that make seem more consistant. It is posible for your perception of time to actualy go slower but the limits of it are still unknown. It has been proven though that in a typical dream time is perceived at about the same speed as in waking life.

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## afnan

> To the best of what's actually been verified - that I know of - we can _simulate_ the feeling of living years, in a dream. However, this simulation is caused by 'lapses' in dream time (basically hopping from moment to moment, in a sequence that makes it seem like years have passed - kind of like when you try to recall the past few years of your life, and you remember it by individual moments, with gaps in between).



Exactly. Plus.. a two year long rem period..? :Eek:  I thought this forum was past the inception stage  ::roll::

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## MadMonkey

> Exactly. Plus.. a two year long rem period..? I thought this forum was past the inception stage



The time dialation in inception is based on reality. I have actualy heard multiple first hand stories of people having dreams that seem to last months or years. One of them was a good friend of mine who is a reliable guy.

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## Oneironaut Zero

> @Oneironaut so it's possible to basically live in a dream for years and wake up back in reality in the morning like nothing happened?



Not necessarily. More acurately, it's possible to live a few dozen minutes in a dream, but have the dream skip from moment to moment, so that - in the timeline - it makes it seem as if years have passed. But, no, you wouldn't actually feel like you've 'lived out' a _full_ few years.

It's like when you're watching a movie, and the movie timeline spans two years. You don't actually feel like you've spent two years watching the movie, but you still got 2 years worth of (relevant) story.

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## LucidDreams17

I think it's quite possible.. I mean in our minds, we can do ANYTHING. Our minds have the potential to expand time in a dream. So why not expand it to a few days, months, even years..especially if we're consciously controlling it.

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## Oneironaut Zero

> I think it's quite possible.. I mean in our minds, we can do ANYTHING.



There is a difference between 'doing anything' within the dream state, and doing '_anything_', with implications on physical impossibility. People often use the 'we can do anything in a dream' to believe that they can see the future, or communicate with Gods, or travel to other dimensions and turn into werewolves and things. People tend to take the word 'anything' a little to literally sometimes, I think.

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## Mopy

this is intresting topic, I believe that it is posisble to have a dream and feel  like if a couple of years has passed in a single moment, flowing seamlessly. I have had dreams which generated the feeling that years has passed and I have become an old man, but I know that is impossible and a false reality.  Oneironaut I agree with you 100%. 

Have you ever when to sleep and feel like you only took a short nap but in reality work up the next morning or have you ever felt like you slept through the entire night, only to look at the clock and realize that you only slept for one hour.

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## Deliverancer

Hmm, Up until last month I would have agreed to the sensation or feeling of time, specially when false memories are included. I have had dreams (not LDs) where I literally had completely different time lines- 1 was an alternate childhood to my actual one where I visited an old farmhouse which was my birth place (in the dream ) and was able to recall and reminsce on  many past childhood experiences (completely different from the waking world) and in  another dream I did a similiar thing where I sat and chatted with 2 friends about many detailed (but completely false) adolescent incidences. This was so utterly real for me that when I woke it really shook me the depth and intensity of these emotional memories. It certainly got me thinking on the whole parallel universe issue.

However last month I did have a Cobb style dream. Where after an emotional breakup with my wife I wandered off into a desert where I spent over 30 years during which the tiny sleepy dust covered settlement that I visited for supplies slowly involved in to a large modern city (think LA in Bladerunner) where  finally as I was dying I re encountered my wife and incidently became lucid for a very short period before waking. But what stood out was the eternal slowness of time as I trudged across the desert re examining again and again where I had gone wrong in life and how this was literally limbo of sand and dust. It was my "punishment" as it were to suffer every individual second of those many endless years. And the people  I met during that time slowly helped me to reintegrate myself through a series of particular actions,and  the things they explained to me.
I really DID feel that imense stretch of time.
IMO The higher self, source, subconcious or what ever you want to call it uses the dream plane to comunicate with us. If it can create a seemingly physical world for our minds while we are dreaming, the notion of time can be equally molded / stretched / shortened to provide the necessary backdrop for these experiences. I dont believe there are any limitations to what it can do.

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## Twisty

Y'know, I think that it could be possible to spend a long time in a dream, maybe not a year, but a day or two.  If your brain sped up the events in your dream, to where one real minute equals one dream hour, then that could work.  Sort of like Narnia. :p

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## Oneironaut Zero

> If your brain sped up the events in your dream, to where one real minute equals one dream hour, then that could work.



Exactly, and this is pretty much the premise that most people use, when wondering whether we can spend years in a dream - the whole 'time dilation' thing.

But, the way I see it, time dilation in a dream works much like it does when you're in waking life. Some things can happen in your waking life, which makes your brain perceive that time is happening either faster or more slowly than normal, however, even with this being the case, it is not a _extreme_ case of time dilation. It's a _perceived_ case, where one looks back and says 'well that seemed to have lasted much longer than it actually did,' but when it comes to, say, turning a single minute into a full hour, that's a tall order to fill. I think people get caught up in the mysterious nature of dreams, so the subjective experience makes them come out of it saying "OMG, THAT WAS A WHOLE YEAR", but what they experienced wasn't a full year. It didn't even actually _feel_ like a full year. But the images and the timeline were cut up so convincingly so that what seemed like it might have been a much longer dream than normal actually lasted much, _much_ longer. 

Time dilation - even while awake - can slow down a 95mph fastball so that you're able to hit it with a tiny wooden bat, but it can't slow it down enough to where you can stop, mentally review all the items on your grocery list, and then still have time to hit the ball.

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## Puffin

I agree with Oneironaut. It's not physically possible to spend more time in a dream than the length of one's REM periods, let alone stretch that time out to a year! You could create false memories in the dream where it seems like you've been in that dream for a long period of time, but it's mostly just lapses in time (made possible with dream control by teleporting to new situations or locations) that create that illusion.

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## Original Poster

Time is such a difficult concept to grasp. When on psycho-active drugs, one typically feels an effect of time dilation because their mind is enhanced and the passage of the moment seems much slower than the passage of clock-time compared to normal. But then it doesn't matter because though it feels like time is an illusion things don't change in this state at the rate you'd expect, that happens according to clock-time, locked to patterns and cycles.

There are essentially two ways to experience much more time in the dream than actually passed. To feel "years" one can only perceive an increased passage of clock-time according to the size of the time-line that passes, like O said.

The second, one can feel like they spent an eternity in the moment by opening up to higher levels of awareness.

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## Deliverancer

> Time is such a difficult concept to grasp. When on psycho-active drugs, one typically feels an effect of time dilation because their mind is enhanced and the passage of the moment seems much slower than the passage of clock-time compared to normal. But then it doesn't matter because though it feels like time is an illusion things don't change in this state at the rate you'd expect, that happens according to clock-time, locked to patterns and cycles.
> 
> There are essentially two ways to experience much more time in the dream than actually passed. To feel "years" one can only perceive an increased passage of clock-time according to the size of the time-line that passes, like O said.
> 
> The second, one can feel like they spent an eternity in the moment by opening up to higher levels of awareness.



I totally agree. IMO it is wrong to view the subconcious, the source or whatever from the physical linear limitations of our base existence. You cannot compare timeframes to a state with there is NO time, where the concept of past, present and future do not exist. So the subconcious when it presents these basic dreamscapes to us can do what ever it likes with the idea of time irrespective whether we are lucid or not.

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## Alric

It is like watching Harry Potter. The movie takes place over an entire year but it only last like 2 hours. Like Oneironaut pointed out you basically skip everything. So you don't eat, sleep or go to the bathroom and all travel is nearly instant. Dreams are good at cutting stuff out. If you step out you front door and into a shopping mall an hour away, you don't even realize you teleported that far.

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## faceonmars

I have never had a LD that lasted hours, days, weeks, months or years ... nor do I believe they can. For me LD time is equal to real world time.

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## pikachu2460

speaking of inception...has anyone lucid dreamed while lucid dreaming?

or is that also hollywood pepperoni

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## StaySharp

Well LD time isn't equal to real world time. Time isn't even such an mundane concept for it to be possible to call a second always a second. Time is relative. Now you have to understand what relative actually means. Time passes depending on circumstances.
Now to put it simply, taking all things about reality, like physics and the concept of humans: It is theoretically possible to spend years in dreams. And it is at least practically possible to spend more time within dreams, than you spend dreaming lying in your bed. Talking without gaps and false memories.

To make it even more beautiful there's such a thing as percepted time and passed time. Both are relative, even to each other.
Then what is a second? It is an amount of time relative to our earth drawing circles about the sun.
Percepted time: Is relative to each individual human. Let's take human A and B as an example. A processes information twice as fast as B. Both will feel one second of the real time to be as well one second of their percepted time. A percepted second of B however will be twice as long as an percepted second of A. Likewise a percepted second of A will be half of the percepted second of B. And now what's important: if A processes information twice as fast while dreaming compared to waking life, he will experience 4 hours of dreaming within 2 hours of sleeping. Now what actually happens is even far more complicated, this is just to put it simple.
Passed time: Now how is this relative? Time changes with speed, the faster you are in relation to something else the slower your time will pass in relation to theirs. That likewise goes relative to the speed of light. How old do you think is a photon after travelling for 30 years? Exactly 0 seconds, and no moment more.

You can spend 1 hour as: 1 hour passed time and 1 hour percepted time with 1 passed second per percepted second. Or as 30 minutes passed time and 1 hour percepted time with 2 percepted seconds per 1 passed second, making things around you seem 50% slower. Or 2 hours passed time and 1 hour percepted time, making everything around you going twice as fast. Depending on how fast you currently process information -you maybe guessed it- relative to your average speed.
Not to mention that you have both "variants" of time within dreams, further inertvining with the "real" time.

So it is very well possible to spend long times within dreams. Given your brain processes time differently within dreams. If that's not the case you can say LD time is equal to real world time, for you that is.

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## Skybridge

Hmm a friend of mine says she can spend a week in one of her dreams. It's awkward to wake up afterwards. I don't know why she would lie about a thing like that though. Seems unreasonable to me.
Maybe the amount of time you experience when spending time in your dreams is the amount of time you want it to be. Expectations and attitude makes a big difference on everything concerning Lucid Dreaming. If it contains false memories and gaps is irrelevant since it still feels like a very long time when experiencing it.

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## Oneironaut Zero

> Well LD time isn't equal to real world time.



It's indeed a wonderful and mysterious idea, but unfortunately there are not a lot of facts to back it up. Sure, we all say that 'everything is relative', and what seems like X amount of time to one person can seem like Y amount of time to someone else. However, there has never been verification of time being stretched _that drastically_, that I can recall. It's very easy to say 'well one person can experience time slower than someone else', which is true, but when you start trying to quantify it and say that "it's possible that one second to someone can equal an hour to someone else" (etc), then you are getting into the realm of making assumptions, or trying to use unconfirmed logic to support an idea that (theoretically) _could_ be possible, however is not probable.

As Dr. Stephen LaBerge says, dream time does not pass all that much faster/slower than 'real world' time. There are tricks and perceptive fallacies that can make the passage of time seem different from one person to another - true - but to assume that it is possible to spend A Full Year in a dream simply doesn't have any scientific basis to it (unless maybe that person's brain has some kind of damage to it, where the passage of time is abnormally skewed).

I've had dreams that seemed 'incredibly long', and that are 'weird to wake up from', because it seems like you've been away for such a long time, but even when recalling those dreams, I will only have a couple of hundred words for a dream entry. Why? Because there are so many different details that simply do not exist. You know that living a year in a dream entails having 300+ dinners? Think you actually dreamed about that many dishes? How about lunches. Trips to the bathroom (as someone said)? Trips to the grocery store? Etc.

Even when people are insane, it's not very often that you hear of time dilation like that. A year is _a long time_ to condense into a matter of minutes, and even with time dilation being a real phenomenon (and it is), I think it's a bit of a stretch of the imagination (albeit understandable, since dreams are 'so mysterious') to assume that it is possible to fit an _actual year_ or more worth of experiences - even in a dream - into a few minutes of sleep.

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## StaySharp

> "it's possible that one second to someone can equal an hour to someone else"



Um did I say that anywhere? At least be sure that wasn't what I was talking about.





> I think it's a bit of a stretch of the imagination (albeit understandable, since dreams are 'so mysterious') to assume that it is possible to fit an _actual year_ or more worth of experiences - even in a dream - into a few minutes of sleep.



I as well. That's why I said theoretically possible, not practical. It might work under specific circumstances like an ridiculous fast brain, including the proper setup.
The only thing I claimed to be practically possible is to spend more time within a dream than sleeping in reality, and be it just 60 minutes of sleep with 61 minutes of dreams.

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## Twisty

Just think of it as Narnia.  When you enter the wardrobe, it is possible to spend a very long time, days or even years in a matter of seconds.  It only dawns on you that such little time has passed once you're out of the wardrobe and back to reality.

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## Oneironaut Zero

> Um did I say that anywhere? At least be sure that wasn't what I was talking about.



No, I know. By 'you', I meant people in general, not _you_, specifically.  ::wink::

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## lotsofface

Didn't Laberge do a study that demonstrated that perceived dream time is essentially the same as waking time? (using his eye signals).  I'll take science over anecdote any day.

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## StaySharp

> No, I know. By 'you', I meant people in general, not _you_, specifically.



Ah, I thought so but wasn't sure since you quoted me specifically  :smiley:

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## TRL

I'm no expert on lucid dreaming, but if you could spend years in a dream, wouldn't that mean your brain is perceiving days within mere seconds. That's a lot of brain activity.

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## Munstaan

Well if you know AL3ZAY on DV, He Said he had opened up a Time Warp Portal and he opened the door to the portal he had a realtime watch and a dreamtime watch, and he had his dream companion to help him remember that he was dreaming. So in the end he said he spent 60 years in a dream and when he got out he said he was in a biiiiig daze.

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## goodkat

You cannot expand time in a dream no more than you can with a day dream, in a book, or in a movie.

Signals in your brain can only fire off so quickly, it most definitely has limits, and it does not have infinite capabilities.

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## saltyseedog

Yus. I have.

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## Swikity

I'm not too sure about "years" but I remember one experience from not too long ago that was pretty cool.

I woke up and looked at the clock. Clock said it was 5:45, so I still had 15 minutes to go before I had to wake up. 
I went back to sleep and I had the longest dream. It was such a long dream, I remember every moment of it. The dream was basically me on vacation with my family and we went to the beach, some amusement park, on a cruise, etc. In the dream, a couple hours must have passed.
I woke up thinking "holy shit, I must have slept way past my alarm" but only 10 minutes had passed in real life since the dream.

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## Munstaan

@goodkat How do you know have you tried it? Anything is possible.

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## faceonmars

In _regular_ dreams we can 'feel' as though much time has passed as we will fill in the blanks between dream scenes. However, _lucid_ dreams have always occurred (for me anyhoo) in real time.  Entertaining the idea of fanciful 'month long' lucid dreams belongs in science fiction or possibly with coma patients.

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## gan_naire

I think it'd be badass if a dream could last a continuous amount of time that stretches out without it taking up the amount of time in real life. I have done studies on DMT, dimethyltriptamine (if I misspelled that, give me a break, it's a big ass word), but a lot of people say that they can spend hours on a trip, and yet in real life, it's only about five to ten minutes at a time.

On a side note, I had a dream last night that spanned like two days time, BUT even though there didn't seem to be breaks in the dream, from the journal entry, I can tell that it was simply the same plot, characters, etc., and like O said, it was basically like a movie, it stuck to the main parts and skipped across the minor stuff.

Still hoping toward the idea of a dream lasting days straight with zero breaks.

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## Sageous

Aside from asking why it's so important to spend years in a LD (don't we all waste enough time in waking life as it is?), which I won't do, I'd like to throw a different wrench altogether into this conversation:

*You cannot expand time in a dream.  Or contract it.  Or anything else it.  Want to know why?  Because time does not exist.
*
That's right, folks, there is no such thing as time.  There are _no_ time particles,_ no_ time waves, _no_ "thing" at all out there waiting to be slowed down, sped up, or whatever in any dimension.  Time -- and space, for that matter -- are concepts humans use to make sense of the world around them.  Time is also instrumental in making the physics equations work, but that still does not make it a physical, bendable ting -- just a workable constant, another concept. Concepts are not real things. Yes, we use the concept of time to measure our reality, but that doesn't make it real, any more than numbers and letters are actual things.

Yes, there is causality, and yes, you are born, grow old, and die, but this has nothing to do with time.  It has to do with mass and energy, the two things in nature that do exist.  And you can do lots of things with both of those things.  But you can't change a thing that does not exist.  Period.  

_That said:_

There is something about time that I imagine _could_ be changed with enough effort, and that would be your own subjective _perception_ of time.  In other words, altering a major tool you use to make sense of reality.  Perhaps, in an LD (and in waking life as well, I would imagine) you can change how you perceive time, and alter the amount of information passing through your mind accordingly (to perceive that great amounts of time are passing, you would also need to invent or gather great amounts of information to fill that passage -- aka hours, days, years, and everything that comes with them).   Making such changes to your subjective time would be enormously difficult, because you would need to change mental programming that's been in your DNA for millennia.  This could have a real effect on your sanity -- not that that's necessarily a bad thing!  And yes, I understand that small changes in subjective time happen naturally, and are common -- time "slows down" when you are bored, and "speeds up" when you are enjoying yourself.  But these are tiny adjustments relative to actually adding days and years to your very existence. 

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but this is one of many threads addressing this subject, and it's been driving me nuts that you guys are discussing changing a thing that does not physically exist, and therefore cannot be changed.  In any direction.

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## sh4rkbyt3

Maybe we can do this , sometimes in SP 5 sec. seem to last 5 hours.
Maybe we can do the same in a LD , that would be fucking awsome.

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## Katsuno

I often dream of living a couple of days in the dreamworld. They are not lucid and not intended but inside the dream I notice how the sun rises/goes down and I even go to sleep in my dreams and have a dream within a dream. When I wake up from those dreams I'm still where I was in the first dream and continue it. My longest streak was 4 days and nights and I remember all the dreams inside the dream and all the stuff I did...When I woke up only 3 hours have passed. Of course I didn't feel every second and I'm sure my mind skipped a few hours but it still feels like you dreamed for ages when you wake up.

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## crazydude007

I have never experienced any time lapses in my dreams such as was seen in Inception, but in real life I have experienced something similar. A few years back I "experimented" with certain substances, one of which was Dex (aka robo, the stuff in cough medicine (I was a stupid kid back then)). One time when I did a large amount of the stuff, I remember looking at my watch a few times, maybe each glance at my watch being 30 seconds apart. I was actually at school waiting for the bell to ring, which was only in a few minutes, but at the time it seemed like each interval of me looking at my watch was at least an hour, and the few minutes that separated me from the bell was more like several hours. It wasn't a lifetime, but it felt endless. This had me come to the conclusion (obviously when I sobered up) that time perception is a conscious thing, and being a conscious thing you can alter it. It is more easily altered in a non-normal state of consciousness (ie under the influence, sleeping, effects of brain injuries). Our normal conscious state perception of time is influenced by our environment (our physical surroundings, things we are doing), and since we have such a "human" environment, we perceive time as we are now. For example, we consciously tell ourselves that we have 40, 50, 60, 70 years left, we have time; we schedule things all the time, organize certain tasks, and expect things to happen between defined times, or within a relative undefined time. Our mind then produces a certain sensation of passage of time directly related to these 'schedulings'. I have a cold which is effecting my ability to articulate properly currently, so I hope I explained this well enough.

A summary of this: to the universe (or more rather in 'universal time'), the 14 billion years the universe took to evolve to what is today, the 4.5 billion years the earth took to be what it is today, could be only a split second in relation to our time perception. But to us, this amount of time is incomprehensible.

The same thing could very well happen in our non-normal consciousness during sleep (dream state).

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## Robot_Butler

Think of it this way.  Is it even possible to remember years of your waking life?  Not really.  Our perception and memory is complicated, and does not work according to a time table.  We remember things that are important.  We sometimes forget things that are even more important.  Time can be perceived as moving slowly or quickly.  We anticipate the future and ignore the present.  

When I think back on the last 5 years of my life, it seems like a dream.  It feels like it flew by, or didn't even really happen at all.

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## Katsuno

> When I think back on the last 5 years of my life, it seems like a dream.  It feels like it flew by, or didn't even really happen at all.



It does for me, too. But when you try to remember for example the last year, and go through it day by day, you can "track" them back and finally get a picture of what you did in the whole year. I don't think you can do this in your dreams because you actually skip some scenes there. But it still feels the same and that's the important thing  :smiley:

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## vbooy57

I would imagine you could convince yourself time is passing slower than it really is. I don't really know. I wouldn't want to spend years in a single dream.

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## mcfundash

yes it is possible to expand time in a dream, but not to years or even one year.  Maybe you can get a day or two at most but it is done by your brain processing stuff faster then normal and so when you woke up you would feel very tired because your brain would be worn out from doing so much processing in such a short time.  Also your dreams can be very short in which case you are probably closer to deep sleep and your brain is processing slower therefore you perceive real time slower (but your dream would play at the same speed).   That's why time goes fast when your doing something fun (because it is relaxed and just enjoying whats happening) and time passes slower when your doing something boring especially if it is something like math since it ups your brain activity.   Since dreams are a simulation of a virtual world, I think they should be just a bit expanded because of how much your brain is processing the simulate the world.  Thats just my knowledge/thoughts i felt like sharing.

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## jarrhead

Yes and no.

I'm using LaBerge's studies as well as "quotes" from other LD scientists I can't remember the name of that I remember reading about on here during the first DVA courses.

Literally, no.  LaBerge demonstrated that dream time and perceived time are roughly the same; brain activity is near the same and he also had subjects move their eyes in time.  The exact timing was an average of 13 seconds in real life to count for 10 seconds in a dream, but that is also the average for people who count ten seconds out in real life.

Another scientist concluded (and I think this was referenced in ETWOLD) that false memories can fill in the blanks between dream scenes, creating the illusion of a long long dream.  (Who cares what happened? What you REMEMBER is what matters.  After all, that's all that you remember.) The example given was that this guy had a LONG dream about being executed by guillotine in a public square.  He was woken up by his billboard over his bed falling onto his neck, and thus concluded that the dream was made upon awakening.

I've personally had dreams that have lasted up to two years, usually my "long" dreams (maybe 1/6th of my recalled dreams) last a few hours perceptually.  But in reality, the time is the same.  The brain activity is near the same.  My brain is just filling in the gaps, much like when, in a movie, a scene changes and you, in your willing suspension of disbelief, feel as if time has passed.

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## MadMonkey

Everything Jarrhead said is spot on. That story about the execution dream was really fascinating. I'd imagine that many people (I probalby would have too. lol) would jump to the conclusion that it was a precognitive dream but he thought about it scientificly and found something amazing. 

True time dialation doesn't happen very much under normal circumstaces but I think it may still be posible. The brain doesn't have to think about the senses and the external world which helps free up the mind to create such detailed worlds in the first place so there probably is some room in there to squeeze in some faster processing. Would that really make the time perception speed up though? What about when a lucid dreamer perpously uses a time dialation technique, does that cause true time dialation or false memories. Also the most important thing seems to be to what extent would it be posible. We are just left with more questions than before that can't really be solved with out tests like LaBerge does. Maby some day we will have access to a sleep lab and tons of cool equipment and find out.  :smiley:

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## jarrhead

Because EEG activity shows normal brain wave frequency, it is false memories.  

The only documented cases of REAL time-alteration are people in fight-or-flight situations and fight situations.  Most notably military and drug abusers; huge doses of adrenaline can speed up the processing of the brain.

The brain can hold some 1,000,000,000,000,000 gigabytes or so of information, and some things can be rendered in real-time  Think of it like having the graphics code, which takes up a few megabytes while your graphics card uses 1.2GB per second or so of rendering, creating the beautiful world of Skyrim, but not using up so much space.


Besides, one million billion gigabytes is a TON of space.  In the past 11 months I've only filled up 1.1TB of a 1.36TB external hard drive, and 912GB of that is a backup of software I bought -- not really data that is used.

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## Keiju

Well to actually have time go faster in the dream relative to "reality", information would have to move and be processed at the appropriate speed.

Say you dream what is 5mins here, to make this feel like 20mins, information would need to move 4 times quicker whilst you are inside the dream, then return to normal speed once back in base reality.

Given we are not rellying on the normal feed of data from the external surrounding, but rather the internal world, thus shaving off considerable lag time, possibly enough to "slow down time" to the extent of making the dream last years.


See, time dilation is about how fast you can see, which determines how long it "feels" time has passed.

This concept can be extrapolated into the real world, I call "base reality".

Imagine 2 people who live an equal amount of time measured. One guy processed information 2 times quicker than his peer, he see's and feels his surroundings twice as quickly. He is in affect paying attention to twice as much information as his peer is in the same amount of time. What feels like 80years to the average person will in effect feel like 160 years to the guy who percieves twice as fast.

Can you see how important improving your awareness becomes when you come to understand concepts like these?

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## SwampWhompa

I wouldn't imagine it to be impossible. Although a whole year seems to push it, I've had a 5 minute dream that seemed like a whole day. It's possible if the dream is like a film, with miniscule stuff skipped.

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## Ermac

No Because:

1. Die of starvation
2. Die Of No Water
3. You can die if you stay still for a certain amount of hours

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## jarrhead

> No Because:
> 
> 1. Die of starvation
> 2. Die Of No Water
> 3. You can die if you stay still for a certain amount of hours



Winning quote.

/thread

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## StaySharp

> No Because:
> 
> 1. Die of starvation
> 2. Die Of No Water
> 3. You can die if you stay still for a certain amount of hours



 :Picard face palm: 
You, sir, just completely missed the point about time dilation in dreams, that which this thread is about.
Rollback and read this thread, then write a reply again that makes more sense.

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## Naiya

When you add up all the time you will spend in dreams over your lifetime, it's about 5 years...so technically yes it's possible to spend years in lucid dreams.  ::D:

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## Hukif

Induced coma with induced dreams with induced lucidity, anyone?

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## Sageous

I hate to, what do you call it, "necro" a thread, but I had one of these "time dilation" dreams this morning, and figured it was worth sharing.

The dream itself was fairly long, lasting over three hours (with no breaks that I know of), but it "felt" like weeks, and, given that I was mildly lucid or better throughout, that was an odd sensation indeed.  The plot doesn't matter -- I was trapped in my sleeping body in a hospital bed for weeks, watching doctors, nurses, and my wife fuss over me, worry about me, operate on me, and chat fairly rudely about my condition. I know -- a bit too "Outer Limits" trite for me too, even at the time, but it was what I dreamed.  More happened, including my escape (after countless attempts, I finally "woke up" into a new dream) and discovery of the person who put me in there in the first place (during that new dream), but none of that matters.

What does matter is that the dream _seemed_ like it went on for weeks -- upon waking I would have sworn to it as fact, and was even worn out and more than a bit disoriented.  But when I sat down and really tried to remember the experience on a day-to-day basis, and flesh out some of the memories, as we can with waking-life real-time memories, and I simply couldn't.  The more I thought about it, with the "knowledge" in my head that I had actually "lived" a week in the last three hours, the more I realized that I could not remember any more than a couple hours of actually events.  If I had jumped out of bed and announced my weeks-long adventure as real without doing that memory test, I would very likely continue swearing that that much time had actually passed. 

Anyway, this seemed like an excellent example of how people can have dreams that "seem" to stretch over a very long time, though they didn't, and memory can possibly trick the dreamer into believing that the _impression_ of time passing actually _was_ time passing...

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## Patrick

I haven't spent the time to read this entire thread, but I think Stephen LaBerge has shown that dream time is the same as real-life time. So the only way lucids can last years is if you are actually asleep for years, or if your dream gives you the illusion of spanning years.

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## hermine_hesse

I had a dream once, that _felt_ like it lasted for four years.  I was a man in the dream, running from the police.  I went to several different cities, grew a beard, rented an apartment.  Mine was like Sageous's dream in that I could only remember bits, not every single moment.

But, just to play devil's advocate...
If you were to try to recall the past four years of your life, you would remember it the same way - just highlights, not every single moment.  How can we objectively _know_ that we are only _seeming_ to live years in a dream by jumping from one important moment to the next and not _actually_  living for years in a dream - literally living every single moment in the dream - but only remembering it the same way we do everything else?

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## Robot_Butler

> But, just to play devil's advocate...
> If you were to try to recall the past four years of your life, you would remember it the same way - just highlights, not every single moment.



Exactly.  Comparing my memories from one of these long dreams to my normal memories is spooky.  I find I have more memories from one night than I have from the last year of real life.  (I have a pretty remarkable memory, too.)  It is only after the memory from the dream has faded a bit that it suddenly seems short.  When I commit the dream to long term memory, then recall it later, it seems like it only lasted an hour or two, like a movie.  It is in those first few moments after waking from the dream, that I _know_ it lasted years.

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## hermine_hesse

Right on, Robot Butler.
If I right down my dreams immediately when I wake up, it's not uncommon for me to fill 6 or 7 pages, even skimping on details.  If I were to right down the events of my normal day filling it with detail, I would be lucky to take up 2 pages.

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## Sageous

...oookay then. Not quite the reactions I expected, but I'll just back off and let the majority rule. 

Before I go, though, I ask Robot and Hermine to sit for a moment and carefully try to _remember_ the things you did over the last year (or four years, as it were).  Do you really think that an accurate detailing of a long stretch of waking life would be as disjointed as a remembered dream?  If you sit back and really _think_ about that, and then still think you can't attach detail to your own memories, then fine, we might be spending years in dreams.  But think, and _remember,_ carefully, first. There might be more substance to the passing of your waking days than you think.

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## hermine_hesse

> ...oookay then. Not quite the reactions I expected, but I'll just back off and let the majority rule. 
> 
> Before I go, though, I ask Robot and Hermine to sit for a moment and carefully try to _remember_ the things you did over the last year (or four years, as it were).  Do you really think that an accurate detailing of a long stretch of waking life would be as disjointed as a remembered dream?  If you sit back and really _think_ about that, and then still think you can't attach detail to your own memories, then fine, we might be spending years in dreams.  But think, and _remember,_ carefully, first. There might be more substance to the passing of your waking days than you think.



like I said, just playing Devil's Advocate a bit...





> Anyway, this seemed like an excellent example of how people can have dreams that "seem" to stretch over a very long time, though they didn't, and memory can possibly trick the dreamer into believing that the _impression_ of time passing actually _was_ time passing...



I actually agree with you that this is probably what is going on when we have dreams that seem to last for long periods of time   My argument is that I can't be 100% sure that this is _always_ what is happening.  And, even though I have been LDing for a long time, I'm still basically a novice in much of skill set, so at this point in my journey, I feel labeling _anything_  as impossible in a dream is just limiting myself.  So I guess, my argument was less aimed at you - who is offering a reasonable explanation of what is happening - and more at the thread as whole - there seemed to be a lot of people saying this is feat _impossible_.

And please don't back off.  :smiley:   As someone who is a very experienced LDer and always has great advice, I highly value your opinion and always learn something from reading your threads.

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## Sageous

> I actually agree with you that this is probably what is going on when we have dreams that seem to last for long periods of time   My argument is that I can't be 100% sure that this is _always_ what is happening.  And, even though I have been LDing for a long time, I'm still basically a novice in much of skill set, so at this point in my journey, I feel labeling _anything_  as impossible in a dream is just limiting myself.  So I guess, my argument was less aimed at you - who is offering a reasonable explanation of what is happening - and more at the thread as whole - there seemed to be a lot of people saying this is feat _impossible_.
> 
> And please don't back off.   As someone who is a very experienced LDer and always has great advice, I highly value your opinion and always learn something from reading your threads.



Okay, I'll hang on here a bit then...I was always a sucker for this subject anyway.

I think you are correct when you say that it isn't time yet in the history of LD'ing to positively announce any suspected phenomenon as impossible.  We're all just too new at it (hell, even the Tibetans are new at it, historically speaking) to claim to know _everything_ about LD'ing -- which is what you must be able to do in order to establish impossibility of a thing like LD time dilation.

I think that I posted on this thread the fact that, since time doesn't exist (it's a tool for measurement, and completing the "big" equations, but enjoys no actual physical existence beyond our attached perception of its passage), there is certainly a chance that you can change the way you use it in a completely different perceptual world like LD'ing.  I think I also said somewhere else that I'm  suspect of folks who claim to have  spent years in single LD's though, because they're trusting their memory to define those years, which is a very tenuous tool indeed! 

Almost everything we use to define ourselves is based on memory, and not on "here & now" experience (especially because "here & now" is even relegated to memory immediately).  Indeed, all of our non-lucid dreams are memories, because we don't acknowledge their existence until we're awake.  LD's have a slight leg up, because we at least get to add a bit of "here & now" waking consciousness to firm up the memories.  But we're still remembering what happened when we wake up, so we're still in thrall to the way our memory recorded a dream.  So, if you had a dream full of different events, time changes, and a sensation of the passage of years, your memory will dutifully record all those things in a pattern that makes sense -- and that pattern will likely include the passage of years in its weave.  It can't be avoided.  

But it can be accounted for:  the next time you have a dream that seems to have gone on for years, before you do anything, try to remember the minutiae of your life in that dream; things like your morning routines, where you shopped for food, or the face of your mailman -- things that you wouldn't normally remember in waking life, but if you think about them, they're there.  If those minor details are not there when you remember that years-long dream, there's an excellent chance that your dream was simply fantastically complex, but it didn't last as long as your memory told you it did.  Also, think for a moment about your environment -- if you were gone for years, your room should seem strange, your family and friends like distant acquaintances and, on the flip-side, you would be mourning the world you just left, because everything and everyone you knew, for years, are now gone; dead.

So I guess my point here is that relying on your memory as the only source for confirmation of a years-long dream may not be the best route to take, because that memory, by design, might trick you.  And, more for Robot Butler, there's a whole lot more going on than you immediately think is happening in waking life, no matter how dull that life is.  I think you'd find yourself filling many pages with memories of the last year, if you moved past the big stuff and really thought about it.

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## lucidisfree:)

> @Oneironaut so it's possible to basically live in a dream for years and wake up back in reality in the morning like nothing happened?



Unless you can sleep for years and surive without eating or drinking then no , you can get the "feeling" of being in a lucid dream for years i guess .. i had about 8lucid dreams in a row last night  :smiley:  they all seemed quite long aswell it was crazy !

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## Ermac

No, because you'll die of thirst and if if you stay in one position for prolonged periods you die as well

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## StaySharp

> No, because you'll die of thirst and if if you stay in one position for prolonged periods you die as well



You repeat yourself without adding any further information, not to mention that answer still totally lies beside the point of time dilation. If no time dilation in dreams is possible you're right, but absolutely everyone here knows that.

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## Ctharlhie

> Unless you can sleep for years and surive without eating or drinking then no , you can get the "feeling" of being in a lucid dream for years i guess .. i had about 8lucid dreams in a row last night  they all seemed quite long aswell it was crazy !







> No, because you'll die of thirst and if if you stay in one position for prolonged periods you die as well



Do either of you actually know what time dilation is?

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## kel

i think ones' recall would have to be pretty good to live out a full year in dream and live to remember it all. Alot of times in my dreams I refer to other events or deja vu's that happend before affecting the current timeline of my dream, only to wake up and wonder where the h that memory came from. It feels as though it is a memory from real life and I have to question it and realize it never happened wakefully.

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## sssssssssssssss

> Well if you know AL3ZAY on DV, He Said he had opened up a Time Warp Portal and he opened the door to the portal he had a realtime watch and a dreamtime watch, and he had his dream companion to help him remember that he was dreaming. So in the end he said he spent 60 years in a dream and when he got out he said he was in a biiiiig daze.



 Oh my God Yes. --- i see it is just in nature of human mind to seeks the impossibilities instead possibilities --- it is possible to have an LD without false memories, gaps and really long...
sometimes one has to shut mind and really try the impossible

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## Barry

> @goodkat How do you know have you tried it? Anything is possible.



Anything is not possible, this saying is stupid...

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## Drax

I can't remember the exact analogy but I believe in the book 'Exploring The World of Lucid Dreaming' (You may have heard of it  :Cheeky: ) by Stephen LaBerge he described the passage of time in a dream in a very understandable manner. The way he put it was that time occurs much like it does in a movie, where for instance in a movie you are fooled into believing years or months have passed because perhaps some text flashes up on the screen saying '6 Months Later' and you witness a scene change and can clearly identify due to changes in characters and environment that time has certainty passed.

Analogous with the dream world it is still entirely just an illusion unlike reality you don't witness every second of of the time. Instead you skip scenes and just like with the movie you're tricked into believing time has passed because it makes logical sense. Actually saying "tricked" is a bad way to term it because it goes against the idea of awareness, and you would have to be pretty darn aware to have dreams with such longevity, instead it's more like going along with the game. Once again with a movie you play along, you know time really hasn't passed because the scene just occurred a second ago but you play along because the illusion suits the narrative.

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## Drax

> Do either of you actually know what time dilation is?



Yeah I also didn't understand if they were trolling, some people in here don't understand that our brain can trick us into perceiving different lengths of time.

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## The Miracle

> Almost everything we use to define ourselves is based on memory, and not on "here & now" experience (especially because "here & now" is even relegated to memory immediately). Indeed, all of our non-lucid dreams are memories, because we don't acknowledge their existence until we're awake. LD's have a slight leg up, because we at least get to add a bit of "here & now" waking consciousness to firm up the memories. But we're still remembering what happened when we wake up, so we're still in thrall to the way our memory recorded a dream. So, if you had a dream full of different events, time changes, and a sensation of the passage of years, your memory will dutifully record all those things in a pattern that makes sense -- and that pattern will likely include the passage of years in its weave. It can't be avoided.



I think this is really important, not to be thought of as nipping the idea about long dreams, but as looking for a way to develop the perception of it.
The brain is very good at confabulating a story from disparate pieces of information - the same cognitive processes that let us make sense of dreams in the first place, and stay unaware of them. 
What is time but our instantaneous processing of sensations?
If you think about the things you did yesterday (unless you are actively practicing awareness techniques) you won't remember the fine details and thoughts and sensations of every moment of that day - though you will remember key events and perceive from that the passage of a day.
(How often at the end of the year do people comment on how fast it went - yet we store it based on few key events)

So, while it is very likely this phenomenon is merely a (mis)remembering of the passage of time, I'd say it doesnt matter. If you wake up and think you've spent a long time in that state, and feel you have learned from it, grown from that experience, that is the important thing.

Perhaps there is a way to manipulate such an experience, like in a LD put yourself in an early morning, then after some time jump to the evening, and see if a) you 'remember' what happened in the intervening time, and b) whether it feels like a day passed upon waking.

On a side note, how frustrating to be in a dream for a year and not once think to do a RC?!

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## Metallicuh

Someone on the forum said they summoned a door that when he went through it time would be extremely slowed.

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## McDreamy

I've read that as well. I've also read of people creating portals, where they expected or said aloud that "1 min will feel like 10" or something along those lines. I'm definetely going to try that in one of my next lucids.

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