Thread: Why is "everything", but dialating time possible in a lucid dream

Everything is possible in dream, including time dilation, i am not exactly sure how to control it though, but it should be possible if you fully believe and find a good way that works around in dream, maybe try using a clock of some kind?
Good luck!

*Moved to Dream Control*

people have experienced lucid dreams that felt like it was an entire life time (on purpose)

Yep. Dilating time is possible. I guess it depends on who you ask. next time someone says it is not, then ask then about their WILDs. I have went to sleep at 6:00, woke up in one second dream time and woke up at 6:45. So one second vs. 45 minutes. Sounds like accidental time dilation, and if it can happen one way, then it can happen the other way. Also, hukif, sageous, and lucidis all have experiences with major time dilation. All trustworthy people IMO.

All you can do is altering time's perception. Remember that you are still asleep, and you'll wake up at some point. But altering that perception? You do it every time you're awake. When you're having fun, the time seems to fly, and when you're bored, the time seems to slow. When you're in panic, the time seems to stop. And so on and so fourth. There's even studies going on regarding top athletes that experience time slowing down experiences.

There's actually some range of "abilities" that are still left to be explored, even in a scientific point of view. Things like synesthesia, time dilation, dream characters, etc etc. I would use BrandonBoss's direction and ask one of our most experienced lucid dreamers about their experiences, and hopefully try to make some sense of it. I don't think that anyone has come with a solid way to perform it though, but it's for sure worth a try ^^

Well hukif can. I don't know about sageous, I think he said he could. Lucidis is looking more into it. Last I checked. I am waiting till I get a few more LDs. Probably after summer.

Originally Posted by dreamer7

people have experienced lucid dreams that felt like it was an entire life time (on purpose)

Who exactly spent a lifetime in a lucid dream.? Now that would be something else, I'd live a different lifetime every night..!

The obvious problem with this is that there are only so many hours per night and so many hours of REM sleep in a single night.

I have had non-lucid dreams that I would have sworn had lasted more than a year, but when I remember the actual, literal events that occurred during those dreams, there usually wasn't more than an hour or so of activity. Stephen LaBerge has said--and I agree--that we can experience the illusion of time passing but cannot actually dream for longer than the span of a night. Contrary to what people say, you don't only use 10% of your brain--we're using almost all of it all the time. The idea that we could speed it up to experience a true lifetime's worth of actual thoughts in the span of 45 minutes is a lot to swallow.

That said, I fully believe it would be possible to, say, convince yourself that you spent a year training at a mountain shrine in a lucid dream if you had enough dream control. I think the events of that year would have to end up being concentrated, like a montage, but that you would come out of the dream feeling like a year had passed.

Originally Posted by Salathor

The obvious problem with this is that there are only so many hours per night and so many hours of REM sleep in a single night.

I have had non-lucid dreams that I would have sworn had lasted more than a year, but when I remember the actual, literal events that occurred during those dreams, there usually wasn't more than an hour or so of activity. Stephen LaBerge has said--and I agree--that we can experience the illusion of time passing but cannot actually dream for longer than the span of a night. Contrary to what people say, you don't only use 10% of your brain--we're using almost all of it all the time. The idea that we could speed it up to experience a true lifetime's worth of actual thoughts in the span of 45 minutes is a lot to swallow.

That said, I fully believe it would be possible to, say, convince yourself that you spent a year training at a mountain shrine in a lucid dream if you had enough dream control. I think the events of that year would have to end up being concentrated, like a montage, but that you would come out of the dream feeling like a year had passed.

See a lot of people explain the "science" as to why it shouldn't and that it was like a montage, but I have had both experiences, so I know the difference. People try to convince other people that it isn't possible, but it has happened, so I can't be convinced.

Originally Posted by Checker666

Everything is possible in dream, including time dilation, i am not exactly sure how to control it though, but it should be possible if you fully believe and find a good way that works around in dream, maybe try using a clock of some kind?
Good luck!

*Moved to Dream Control*

This is the worst advice in this thread.

The only way someone is going to get time dilation to work is by activating a very specific sequence of abstract schema which will vary from person to person as the archetypes for evocation will be highly personalized. Relying on belief will just screw the pooch, since it's a crap schema to begin with and has absolutely nothing to do with dilating time.

Hukif's approach involves some weird combination of focused counting and abstraction that I don't quite get. I don't know about Sageous' or Lucidis' approach, but mine relies on abstracting out repeated forward time skips and combining that with a sort of raw, intrinsic melding. Haven't done it in awhile, but the headache isn't worth the experience, IMO.

But no matter how you look at it, belief doesn't play a part and would likely just distract from the goal at hand.

Some advice for everyone out there: don't believe anything, and don't disbelieve anything, only consider, identify, and act accordingly; you'll be much better off for it, and not just when it comes to dream control.

Wow quite a bit of replies, I already knew that some forms of time dilation were possible, but I think we need to focus and come up with ways to control time, like telling your mind how long you want the dream to be in your mind or trick your mind into deceiving time differently.

I've spent 6 months in a dream, but I wasn't lucid and it wasn't like i had 6 months of memories. I bet quite a few can remember an instance when they went to sleep and woke up after what felt like hours to find that they had only slept a few minutes. I found it to be similar to when you get wrapped up in a movie or book, and you feel like you are experiencing the passage of time that is depicted instead of the real time until you snap out of it. It was slightly more convincing than that.

Whose to say what advice is good or bad. In the end no one yet knows the true potential of our dreams. I see no reason this isn't possible

Here's the thing, as I see it, about time dilation.

There is no such thing as time. There is no thing made of mass or energy that can be called "time." There is no time wave or time particle (sorry Star Trek fans). Time is simply the tool for measurement that we use to understand actual physical events like change, movement, velocity or acceleration. Unfortunately (for these purposes), that tool has been so completely embedded into our psyches that we are hard-pressed to experience reality without time on hand to help us wrap our heads around what we see. Indeed, our invention of time the tool was so complete that it has followed us into our dreams -- a dream, especially a LD, will pass in about the same amount of time as whatever time is passing in waking life. Under the rules we've created for observing reality, even dream reality, there seems no way to experience reality without using time to measure it, and apparently that yardstick of time is ruled immutably.

So, you cannot dilate time because it doesn't exist, and how can you change the dimensions of a concept that has no dimension? Also, you can't dilate time because its "length" has been perfectly fused into our psyches, giving us a nearly indomitable "sense" of time that can only be slightly effected by things like boredom or excitement. Seems a pretty tough nut to crack.

But what if, in dreams, you can possibly eliminate the nut itself? As the OP suggests, since you can do anything in the reality that is your dreams, instead of dilating time -- which might be impossible for the reasons I just said above -- why not simply ignore it? Why not just remove it from the process of how you observe and participate in the reality of your dreams?

This would be extremely difficult, because the programming is so perfectly imbedded in us to use time, but it seems that, with enough effort, you ought to be able to produce a dream that does not include time. Here's the irony in successfully doing so, though:

Erase time from your dream and suddenly your existence in the dream is eternal. You might be in your dream world "forever," but you won't know it, because eternity is no more than an endless here & now, with no time passing.

tl;dr: So, Tye, your conundrum might be more simply stated: Yes, you can do or change everything in a dream, but time, unfortunately, is not a thing, so it cannot be changed... it must instead be ignored, erased, or rather removed from your mind's toolbox for comprehending reality.

I don't think I'm being very helpful or clear here, and I'm confident that my opinion is in an extreme minority, so I think I'll stop ... just thought I'd share my thoughts, and maybe plug the thread I started about the nonexistence of time, because I think that's what really matters in a conversation like this.

Thanks for your response Sageous and i did actually find your post helpful. I think the topic of "time" is a great mystery no one will understand for awhile hopefully one day I can find a way to permanently alter my perception of "time".

You can't do anything in a dream, you are still restricted by the laws of the real world. The dream world is an illusion that we can manipulate, it doesn't mean everything is possible. Whatever happens in a dream isn't exactly actually happening in real life, it is just us interpreting a series of neurons firing in a certain pattern. You can affect which memories you recall or how the dream goes on etc but there is no evidence to say that you can actually dilate time because it require you to process more information in a shorter amount of time. Just like an old computer trying to play a new game our brain probably couldn't keep up with some of the radical claims members have made about dilating times up to ten or twenty times.

Due to the nature of dreams you can however create the sensation of anything, since it is only a sensation you are never going to do something that isn't physically possible. We are capable of assuming what something would be like and this is what most people do in a dream. If we don't know what something feels like we use existing feelings and memories to simulate it. People claiming that they are "Dilating dreams" may in fact just be creating a false sensation of a lengthy period of time and not actually have a two hour dream in one our time frame for example.

Here are a few examples of other things which are potentially impossible to truly do in a dream.
1) Render an entire scene 360 degrees around you in full detail
2) Occupy and command the bodies individually of 100 people
3) Do maths calculations ten times faster than in real life

All of these things would probably be impossible to do in a dream because your brain just doesn't have enough processing power to be capable of such activities.

^^ Damn, Dutchraptor, that post was sort of a downer. Where's the hope? Where's the magical mystical stuff like "consciousness does not equal brain, it only uses it?" Where is the surety that there is something "more" than our God-and/or-DNA-given machinery? Limits are no fun!

Seriously, though, everything you wrote is correct, and you make a couple of the points I can never quite fit into my posts, and you do a much better job than I in explaining why time-dilation is a literal fantasy; you should save the post and throw it up every time a time-dilation thread occurs. But...

Do we really need to establish such limits? Our brains are still, even after all the science studying them, unimaginably complex machines, with many trillions of synaptic connections firing in patterns, frequencies, and multiple-lobe complexity that makes a supercomputer look like a gramophone. Maybe there are things going on in there that could defy the rules of physics as we know them and, even if they're not, maybe our imaginations as created by this synaptic complexity, are capable of building believable worlds that exceed all rational science and rules of physics. Not a bad thing, I think!

It could be that the potentials of our dreams are limited by the physical nature and power of our brains, but perhaps those brains are less limited than you imply?

That said, I agree completely that the things you list are likely impossible to truly do in a dream, though I think it may be more due to limits of imagination than physics.

Originally Posted by Sageous

^^ Damn, Dutchraptor, that post was sort of a downer. Where's the hope? Where's the magical mystical stuff like "consciousness does not equal brain, it only uses it?" Where is the surety that there is something "more" than our God-and/or-DNA-given machinery? Limits are no fun!

Seriously, though, everything you wrote is correct, and you make a couple of the points I can never quite fit into my posts, and you do a much better job than I in explaining why time-dilation is a literal fantasy; you should save the post and throw it up every time a time-dilation thread occurs. But...

Do we really need to establish such limits? Our brains are still, even after all the science studying them, unimaginably complex machines, with many trillions of synaptic connections firing in patterns, frequencies, and multiple-lobe complexity that makes a supercomputer look like a gramophone. Maybe there are things going on in there that could defy the rules of physics as we know them and, even if they're not, maybe our imaginations as created by this synaptic complexity, are capable of building believable worlds that exceed all rational science and rules of physics. Not a bad thing, I think!

It could be that the potentials of our dreams are limited by the physical nature and power of our brains, but perhaps those brains are less limited than you imply?

That said, I agree completely that the things you list are likely impossible to truly do in a dream, though I think it may be more due to limits of imagination than physics.

Don't worry, I still like to fantasize about it myself sometimes
I just wanted to make a clear point that by our current knowledge the boldest claims that people make are likely over exaggerated and also that our dreams are as far as we know not entirely distant from real life (hence why they are still to some extent governed by the laws of nature). I was trying to address the OP more than the ongoing discussion about time dilation.
I honestly think there is still a lot more to be found out about the brain, I have had some pretty interesting discussions with physics students around here who showed me all kinds of funny ways our brain utilizes quantum effects. I totally wouldn't be surprised if shared dreaming or time dilation would be possible in dreams and I definitely recommend everyone to try it for themselves.

Originally Posted by Sageous

Erase time from your dream and suddenly your existence in the dream is eternal. You might be in your dream world "forever," but you won't know it, because eternity is no more than an endless here & now, with no time passing.

That reminded me of a false lucid I had a while back. I knew I was dreaming, but I quickly became convinced that I was an injured football player in a coma and stuck in a dream. This realization destroyed my sense of time and I couldn't even begin to try and understand how long I'd been asleep. When I woke up I realized pretty quickly that I was only there for a few minutes. That sense of eternal here & now combined with the stupid coma thoughts made it a very miserable experience.

I don't believe time dilation is really possible in a fully lucid dream. By fully lucid I mean not only knowing it's a dream but also having a clear mind like you normally would while awake. If you are lucid and have all your normal mental faculties within the dream, you are not going to be able to mistake 2 minutes for 2 hours. Just like you won't mistake 2 minutes for 2 hours while awake unless your mind is being seriously hindered in some way. You can't be lucid and at the same time trick your mind. That's a contradiction. So dilating time in a dream would involve sacrificing true lucidity and making it more like an ordinary dream.

@ mzzkc

That is how hukif does it for major time dilation, when doing it for minor time dilation he has other ways. I think that it is one of the ways to do it, and maybe the most effective, but I don't think that it is the only way.

@ Dutchrapty
That is very non mystical. I am not of the idea that our consciousness leaves us, but I definitely think that it is possible. As I said before, I have had dreams that skip ahead and in the dream I thought it was a month, but when waking it was only a few minute ordeal. However I have had it happen when I can remember conversations (20 minutes a day) and games I played with DCs (15 minutes X2 a day) traveling (20 minutes a day X2) eating (10 minutes a day X3) for a week in a dream. The dream only lasted about 2 hours real time, but was at least 14 hours remembered of time that I really enjoyed. I have has other dreams that I can remember more time, but I can't categorize as well. One thing you said

Due to the nature of dreams you can however create the sensation of anything, since it is only a sensation you are never going to do something that isn't physically possible. We are capable of assuming what something would be like and this is what most people do in a dream.

The sensation. Everything we are doing in a dream is creating sensations that aren't real. "I can fly!" You are actually creating the sensations of the sight and the feeling and the sound, while your actual self is lying in bed. Dilate time is changing the "sensation of time passing." I hope this makes sense. you aren't making your brain process anything more, just sending it different sensations we think that we couldn't process that much time and info or our brains couldn't process it, but isn't all of the info and everything already in your brain? Wouldn't it just be reviewing it and thus not reprocessing it?

@sageous.
I have nothing to say to you. I like your posts, don't agree with all of it, but it is interesting. makes me think.

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

@ mzzkc

That is how hukif does it for major time dilation, when doing it for minor time dilation he has other ways. I think that it is one of the ways to do it, and maybe the most effective, but I don't think that it is the only way.

That's 'cause it isn't the only way. More than anything else, time dilation requires the dreamer to figure out their own way of doing things.

Why? Simple: the schema at play, as Sageous pointed out, are some of the most ingrained in the human psyche. To modify, overwrite, or remove them requires a certain level of mastery over your own thoughts at the most basic level.

The "everyone should fly like Iron Man!" mentality ain't gonna cut it.

Originally Posted by dms111

I don't believe time dilation is really possible in a fully lucid dream. By fully lucid I mean not only knowing it's a dream but also having a clear mind like you normally would while awake. If you are lucid and have all your normal mental faculties within the dream, you are not going to be able to mistake 2 minutes for 2 hours. Just like you won't mistake 2 minutes for 2 hours while awake unless your mind is being seriously hindered in some way. You can't be lucid and at the same time trick your mind. That's a contradiction. So dilating time in a dream would involve sacrificing true lucidity and making it more like an ordinary dream.

... Now that is an excellent point.

Let me ask a simple question here: What would happen if you dilated time to an infinity and someone woke you up?

Then you would have experienced an eternity, which as has been established is as illusory a concept as time itself. In this physical universe, nothing is eternal--entropy all but guarantees us that much.

Originally Posted by BrandonBoss

The sensation. Everything we are doing in a dream is creating sensations that aren't real. "I can fly!" You are actually creating the sensations of the sight and the feeling and the sound, while your actual self is lying in bed. Dilate time is changing the "sensation of time passing." I hope this makes sense. you aren't making your brain process anything more, just sending it different sensations we think that we couldn't process that much time and info or our brains couldn't process it, but isn't all of the info and everything already in your brain? Wouldn't it just be reviewing it and thus not reprocessing it?

I will use a hypothetical computer game as an example to try prove my point.

Imagine a game in which anything is possible as long as the computer can handle it. The system specifications of the computer is simply a processor which can handle 500 objects per second.
We will create our own racing game on this computer. Generally we load the world and it looks normal, it runs at the same rate as which we perceive time. There are trees in the background and a few buildings around you, totaling to around 250 objects in the scene. The moment we start driving the computer is forced to start processing much more, it must render what is ahead of it, behind it, the speed of each object etc. There is a threshold as to how fast the car can go and the computer cant perfectly render every object on the screen since more than 500 objects are passing at any point.

The human brain would function in a similar way. The first explanation of time dilation I will address is that of people saying that they are actually witnessing 2 hours of dream time identically as they would in a normal dream but in only a 1 hour time frame. While the human brain can process a significant amount of data there still is a threshold just like the computer.

How would the computer handle the situation? It would create the effect of a car driving really fast by minimizing the power needed by other objects in the scene. Game developers use methods where only objects directly in your line of sight are rendered, the resolution is lowered, the complexity of the scene is reduced etc.
The same is applied to our brain, there is only so much power we can use to render an environment and it's properties, the only way to possibly do it would be to create the sensation of it (Don't ask me how ). But in the case of just making up the sensation one can argue whether you are actually dilating time, if you are just making up the feeling, while it may feel good you can't actually do twice as much work in such a dilated dream. Really using an illusion for time dilation would make it obsolete.

There is no discussion to be made over the fact that there is an actual latency between processes in the brain. This shows that the brain is capped to an extent in it's functions.