Thread: Fitting infinity in a moment of dream

Yeah I know about that study, it's by Stephen LaBerge, but I don't think it's legitimate. The subjects had to move their eyes in a certain way once every x amount of seconds, the eye that moves in the dream also moves in real life. So the experimenters can see if the dreamer experiences time at the same rate. But what if doing this, paying detailled attention to the passage of time (instead of just vaguely noticing it) puts the passage of time back to waking life speed? Maybe if you're not specifically counting seconds time can actually be dilated? Plus, there are many many people that report experiences of time dilation.

Originally Posted by Ginsan

I don't think it's legitimate. The subjects had to move their eyes in a certain way once every x amount of seconds, the eye that moves in the dream also moves in real life. So the experimenters can see if the dreamer experiences time at the same rate. But what if doing this, paying detailled attention to the passage of time (instead of just vaguely noticing it) puts the passage of time back to waking life speed? Maybe if you're not specifically counting seconds time can actually be dilated? Plus, there are many many people that report experiences of time dilation.

The reason the reports can't be trusted, is that by definition when you are asleep your brain is half turned off.

Science needs experiments, I don't see why people reject the counting and eye movements as a flawed experiment. The theory above seems to be that it is because of the contentedness of the eye movements that are being consciously controlled in the real world while counting is being consciously done during the dream.

Therefore we would need a way to measure something unconsciously controlled in the real world to break the link.

So what would be required, a different experiment. Lets say that you could show that the galvanic skin response (an unconscious response) could be linked to a conscious act such as lying to DC's in a lucid dream. The DC's aren't real the lie isn't real, and response doesn't have to be thought about like eye movements in response to counting. You would then need to have subjects that could lucid dream be trained to lie continuously or refrain from lying for what they perceived to be a fixed amount of time during normal-time lucid dreams, then have them trained to supposedly dilate time, then have them dilate time and tell an equal number of lies. Eventually you could try to do experiments where they switch from lying to truth telling during the lucid dreams as you measure the oscillation of skin response.

I doubt such an experiment is possible. In the end it just seems likely that consciousness requires time, otherwise why couldn't we just close our eyes and compose a years worth of books in our heads in just a few minutes, because thinking like dreaming, takes time.

Of course if it could be done, then we could use the dreamers lies to prove they were telling the truth.