Thread: Stephen LaBerge: There is no time dilation within dreams?

Hey all,

Long time no post. I have written my senior thesis on morality within dreaming, with a specific interest into lucid dreaming. Along the way, I was trying to find a source for something interesting that a neuroscientist once told me.

In the summer I was visiting with a neuroscientist at BCM where I worked. The neuroscientist was Dr. David Eagleman, who is well-acknowledged and respected. We were talking about dreams and memory. He mentioned a very interesting study that Stephen LaBerge conducted. In case you are unfamiliar with the method that LaBerge used to prove the occurrence of lucid dreaming I will recount it for you (If you are aware then skip this next paragraph):

In 1990, Stephen LaBerge proved the existence of lucid dreaming. If you are aware of anything concerning dreams, you know that our most vivid dreams occur in REM sleep. In REM, our eyes move like crazy. It had been found earlier by a different group of scientists that these eye movements correspond with how our eyes are moving in our dreams. LaBerge took advantage of this. He had lucid dreamers memorize certain patterns of eye-movements. They were connected to polygraph machines to record their eye-movements. When the lucid dreamers became lucid during REM sleep, they conveyed this message of eye-movements, and it was confirmed that dreamers were, in fact, becoming conscious while asleep.

Now here's another study LaBerge conducted:
LaBerge wanted to see the correlation between real-time and dream-time. To get a baseline, each subject was asked to count to five while awake. Then, the subjects went to sleep. Once the dreamers became lucid, they conveyed their lucidity to the real world through a pattern of eye movements. They would signal once that they had begun counting, then they would signal again once they had counted to five within the dream.
The time it took the dreamers to count to five within the dream was the same as their time in real life. This leads to the conclusion that time in a dream passes as normally as in real life.

I have been trying to find where LaBerge published this experiment, but it looks unpublished. Maybe I have exclusive knowledge (that I'm now sharing with you guys)? If anyone knows the source, please share.
If this is true, then time dilation is a big misconception in the dreaming community. How do we respond when we have dreams that felt like hours when we know they only took place during a ~30 minute REM period if there is no time dilation?
If you would like to see how Dr. Eagleman and I theorized how it could be, open the spoiler.

Spoiler for Click:

I doubt anyone is familiar with Dr. Eagleman's research on time perception (I know it was once mentioned in a Cracked article), but you all should read this: Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?

Basically, time doesn't actually slow down when we trip or when something scary happens, we only remember it as being slow motion!

Knowing this, we can explain the length of our dreams along with the lack of time dilation by knowing that they may not have ever happened, they could just be very short dreams that we think had a lot of stuff happen in them.
Dr. Eagleman gave a great personal example. He said once he was on a long car ride and nodded off to sleep. He was asleep for less then a second, as he woke himself up when he jerked his head back up. But in that <1 second dream, he experienced a ton of emotions. He had done something bad, and was feeling very guilty about it. I don't remember exactly what he said he had done, but he had done something like failed to do something.
I know we all have had similar experiences. Short dreams that had a ton of context.

If all of this is true, then our dreams may only be seconds long, but have so much invented pretext that we are convinced that we experienced the pretext as well.

TL;DR: Has anyone else ever heard of Stephen LaBerge's experiment that disproved dream time dilation? Does anyone know the source?