Thread: 100 years in an LD

Well people say that yes you can, others say no you can't it depends what you mean by it, if you mean perceiving 100 years and remembering living every second of it then i don't think it is possible and if it is it would be very difficult to do, but what this probably means is that the person lived 100 years in the dream but didn't actually experience everything, so they maybe experienced 100 years but only interacted in it for about an hour, if you understand me

No it's not. Dream time and real time run equivalent. Laberge proved this by having people count to ten in their lucid dreams, signalling via eye movements to the lab attendies when they began and finished the counting. The result was a synergy in relative time.

People can be fooled into believing dreams last a long time due to the disjoint nature of dreams. Much like a TV scene that jumps from day to night in an instant - we get the perception 12 hours or so have passed. The same effect affects your perspective of how long a dream lasted.

Originally Posted by DrTechnical

No it's not. Dream time and real time run equivalent. Laberge proved this by having people count to ten in their lucid dreams, signalling via eye movements to the lab attendies when they began and finished the counting. The result was a synergy in relative time.

People can be fooled into believing dreams last a long time due to the disjoint nature of dreams. Much like a TV scene that jumps from day to night in an instant - we get the perception 12 hours or so have passed. The same effect affects your perspective of how long a dream lasted.

You definately explained it better than i did! lol

Originally Posted by DrTechnical

No it's not. Dream time and real time run equivalent. Laberge proved this by having people count to ten in their lucid dreams, signalling via eye movements to the lab attendies when they began and finished the counting. The result was a synergy in relative time.

Logical fallacy. Showing that an event did not happen does not prove it never happens.

I'm sure under strange circumstances, and with the kind of control that monks typically have over their minds, it would be possible to experience long periods of time in a dream... a whole lifetime's a stretch, though.

From what I understand, it is possible to perceive a dream to be many years, but you don't actually experience every moment of it.

LaBerge's experiment showed that dream time and real time are equivalent, not non-lucid dreams.

In non-lucid dreams, you can dream of abstracts and your subconcious will fill in the details. I think if you then dream of multiple sequential abstracts that follow a chronological order, it is possible that a dream may be perceived as lasting a long time.

I remember having non-lucid dreams that seemed like they lasted days, but never lucid dreams.

Where you heard them ?

It's possible that they exited one dream then got into a new one, and lucidly recreated the last scene that there were in so that they could continue the dream.

it might be possibe that our perception of time is distorted in dreams (like how time seems to pass slower when we're bored)

I'm not sure about 100 years, but I know that you can dilate dream time; I've done it

I read about this somewhere. If you become a master of dreams, I heard that you are able to distort time. Like walking really fast would like like being slower, do you get what i mean? Like it would feel like an hour but it would actully be 5 minutes. Kind of hard to explain/understand but I hope you get it

Sure it's possible. But like already explained, it'd be a 'bad' 100 years. You'll get detailed snippets and then "3 months later..." and more detailed dreaming and so on.
IMO

I've had a dream that "lasted" 40 years before (using the in-dream chronology).

If "felt", however, like a few weeks. In addition, as the users above me have explained, it did not actually take this long in dream time (let alone real time, I think they call that comatose...), I guess it was a mixture of disjunction, illusion and dilation.

The speed at which your mind can think and persive things is incredible. Hasn't anyone here ever had a super slow moment of incredible focus while not in a dream? I have seen baseballs hit passed me(in the infield) that were seamingly going only a few mph that ended up hitting the fence. The whole thing happened in slow motion. This is just one example. If that can be done in "real time" it should be able to be done in a dream as well.

Would be nice...take a lifetime worth of vacation time everynight....


Of course...its not like even if you did live 100yrs you would remember all of it...Do you remember half the crap that happenned even in the last week that you were alive? hehe.

I can confirm this is possible.

I have dreamed multiple years in a single dream, but not in the way most people would think of it. Time in dreams isn't always flowing at a constant rate. It can speed up or slow down depending on the certain circumstance at hand. Perception of time, however, is a constant. Lets say you experience 1 year in a dream. That 1 year would not be experienced consciously at the same rate 1 minute would. You wouldn't live every second of that 1 year at the same you experience a second in reality. Instead, the second is 'compressed', and thus the one year would fit into the space of 1 minute, or whatever unit of time is being used as the scale constant in your dream.

However, this does not necessarilly mean that dream-time is incoherent. On the contrary, it flows just as fluidy as real time, just faster or slower, or perhaps not at all at points.


In the particular dream I referred to above, I had experienced 2-3 years in a matter of what would normally have been 2-3 minutes in reality, though I remembered every bit of those 2-3 years. However, it wasn't like I experienced those 2-3 years at the same rate you would in reality, but rather I experienced them 'quicker'. Things went by much faster, but I still understood them fluidly. This time acceleration ended after what would have normally seemed like 2-3 minutes, and the rate at which I experienced time went back to normal.


Therefor I believe it is not time which flows faster, but rather the rate at which you perceive it.

I remember reading about some guy that claimed he had done it. It is rather hard to say what some people have actually experienced in dreams though. Can't really tell whether or not they are deceiving you.

I have a friend that frequently experiences multiple days in a single sleep session. He has even vividly described these dreams to me, but, he might have also made it up. I really cannot say with certainty that he actually experienced this.

I know that I have felt like I lived days, but upon awakening, I realized that I had not. Instead, my mind actually supplied false memories for the past several days. In the dream, I actually recalled what happened over several days, even though I never actually acted it out.

I would love to be able to live a few days in a lucid dream. I haven't really tried to do it yet.