Thread: Time Expansion in Dreams

Originally Posted by havago

Is it possible to fall asleep for a couple of hours and wake up out of a dream that spanned 70 years (???)

I don't think that this is possible. Longest dream I ever had (lucid) lasted day and a half in dream world (couple of hours in reality) and it already felt eternal, usually my lucid dreams are quite short.

I do think it is possible. As Mellanhavande said I've only had dreams that lasted like 2 days and they were non-lucid, but I'm pretty sure it would be possible to trick the brain the same way substances like DMT do. I've experienced a million of lives while doing DMT, also created the opposite effect making me believe only 5 minutes had passed when actually were like 6 hours.

Either way, wasn't there an user here who spent a lifetime dreaming and then woke up traumatized?

Still, I'm not sure about that... Few days, maybe a week - yes, but 70 YEARS? I think that is called ''you need to watch less Inception ''

Originally Posted by Mellanhavande

Still, I'm not sure about that... Few days, maybe a week - yes, but 70 YEARS? I think that is called ''you need to watch less Inception ''

But... but I love that movie!

Originally Posted by Astaroth

But... but I love that movie!

Me too, but (un)fortunately that is just a movie.

I just read this in the HE blog, which I highly recommend to take a look, and thought that may be interesting. It's just another anchoring method but.

''Gather ‘Chi’ Energy

You don’t have to be a Chi-Gong master to accomplish this! Visualise your key meridian points in the center of your palms and the center of your feet. Start to breathe slowly within the dreamscape, becoming aware of the inhalation and exhalation of our lungs. Now, imagine roots coming out of your feet and into the dreamscape’s ground, feel them deeply rooting themselves and feel the floor with your minds-eye. Now place your palms outwards and imagine sucking in positive energy into your hands. This greatly increases dream stability and makes the experience last a thousand times longer.''

Its definitely possible. The easiest way to experience this straight up though, is to dilate time, or as Sageous has mentioned before, you could even destroy the entire concept of time in dreams completely. This would allow you to stay in the dream world for as long as you wanted, but I have yet to find out just how to do this. I'd start out with dilating time, which has endless possibilities to how long you could stay in. 70 years may sound far fetched, but I think its completely possible. In dreams, whatever you can imagine, you can do. You just have to have the control to be able to manifest those things.

I wonder whether it could be done due to false memories in dream. You know how in a dream you can "remember" being married to a dream character you never met in waking life. What if in a dream you had just the right set of false memories to make it feel like 70 years of life? And it would not even have to be all that many memories because many people have just vague memories of the past, so a small set of well chosen memories could seem like it spanned a lifetime.

Edit: A related phenomenon that would help, I have noticed that when I recall my dreams, my brain at times will reshuffle the recall to form a more cohesive story arc, so while in the dream they were in a different order, but during recall I organize them. Thus a dream could start with you sitting on the porch with your wife of seventy years, and as you sit with her you recall your grand kids and kids and wedding and how you met her, and then you wake up and reorganize the dream, and think, wow, I lived seventy years in that dream, whereas actually your brain just back filled he story in the dream with a few choice false memories to go with the initial scene of two seventy year olds on a porch.

You can basically stretch your perception of time. I find that time in dreams is never something that stays the same, and the speed that it goes by constantly changes. Do you know the days that feel very short? They're usually ones where you're busy and don't spend any time idling. You're always busy. A lot has happened in one day, which was more than enough time to accommodate many different things that happened. Now take the long boring days, where you don't do much. It feels like not much time has passed; that the day is short because you didn't get much done. Very few things happen.

The more events that happen in your dream, the longer it will feel. Each event will represent a certain amount of time. Some events can be perceived as taking very long, for example one entire night. This will be a part of the dream where all you did was stare at the stars. This what can make dreams feel like they last for days, or even weeks. Say that in a 30 minute long dream, your dreaming brain can experience 100 "events" (Definitely more than this). If each event is perceived as one hour the dream will take 100 hours. But if the events are perceived as 30 seconds it'll only feel like 50 minutes have passed. Obviously in a dream different events will be perceived as varying times. Basically dream time is as long as you can perceive it to be. When you're lucid, you can actually voluntarily mess with how you perceive time. I've made a couple of my dreams last for two days.

But just because a dream feels like it lasts for a long time doesn't mean you can accomplish more in it than another one. But maybe it does, I can't be absolutely sure since I haven't tested it.

I had a dream once where several years passed, but it just "jumped" to the future event, sort of like a time slip. The most time that seemed to pass in a dream for me was about a day.