Thread: Time in Dreams

Time In Dreams

According to wikipedia, "REM sleep in adult humans typically occupies 20–25% of total sleep, about 90–120 minutes of a night's sleep." So we only dream for a max of two hours a night. With each REM phase lasting 15-25 minuits. How is it possible then that dreams can seem to last for much longer?

Have you ever tried to tell time in a dream? Well obviously it does not work. Infact cheking clocks can be a reality check in dreams. So if we can't tell time how do people make claims of time in a dream?

A simple answer would be, "they feel the time go by." But how do we feel time?

Think back to your least favorite class durring school. Didn't that class seem to drag on for hours? For me it was history. An eighty minute class seemed to last for two hours.

Now think about one of your favorite activities. Time just flys while ocupied with it. For me guitar is a great passion. Time just speeds up while playing. Eighty minutes of guitar seems like fourty tops.

So now you can see a contrast in time. This here shows that even though time can be mesured with a clock humans experience time differently.

A human has no dirrect way to measure time. Seconds, minutes, hours, days. All of these are made up amounts of time.

So humans have a feel for time but clearly a fluxuation of 80 minutes between experiences isn't accurate. And this can vary from day to day.

Now an even bigger confusion to time in dreams is that quite often you remeber the dream as a past event. Instead of keeping track of the time durring the dream it is a recolection. A remeberance of time can be even more skewed then just human perception.*

So does this mean that you only get 15-25 minutes of dream experience every REM phase? Quite simply no. If it feels like two hours have passed in a dream two hours might have passed. Your perception of time could have slowed down so that you crammed hours of experience into a few minutes of REM sleep.

So don't go telling people they didn't have a two hour long dream. For all you know they did.

~Zebrah