I don’t think anyone ever proposed the time in the dream to be real. While it would certainly be “tricks” of the mind that make the dream seem that long it would still be percieved as that long. if you are tricked by the dream to think you’ve lived 100 years in in it you would STILL get the same shock when you awaken because at that last moment of the dream you were certain that it had been 100 years. And i don’t think one would aútomatically be that shocked either. No more than if you wake up to realise you aren’t actually rich. Certainly one would expect a great reaction after a life time in a mental space and that it would change you… and why wouldn’t it? Would it be so bad? There have been people who took hallucinogens and experienced years in a matter of hours. and Yes it has a profound effect on them. You can’t walk away from an experience like that and pretend nothing happened.
They may be met with the same scepticism. “You can’t have experienced that, there wasn’t time.” or “you just imagined it” well duh. it doesn’t change the experience. it’s possible, and it happens. It’s all mental and not restricted to drug experiences. Who is to say the brain cannot produce a lifetime of events in a few seaconds? I think saying it can’t is rather arrogant.
I am. Is that arrogant? Well, then, I do apologize for applying logic to the subject.
It’s all well and good to say, “anything can happen inside the brain, because we don’t know exactly how it works,” but that’s a little short-sighted, and seems to be a show of faith more than anything else. We know that thoughts take time to occur. We know that emotions and feelings are, if not the result of, then at least represented by physical reactions that take place in the brain. To feel a set of emotions, or engage in a conversation with a fictional being, our mind is still working to process and present that information. It still takes real-world time for neurons to fire, and for chemicals to accumulate or dissipate depending on the emotion or experience in process.
Therefore, it seems sensible to conclude that events which take place in a dream will also take at least some time in the real world. I’m not disputing the mind’s potential ability to function faster while you’re asleep, allowing you to think and experience more than you would normally be able to in the same amount of time while awake. But I think there’s a limit to it, and basic physics doesn’t smile on the possibility of living years worth of emotional experiences in the time that your brain would normally take to assume just one or two emotional states. We can even watch this occur on EEG readouts, pinpointing moments of distress or happiness in the observed subject’s dream as it’s taking place. A massive increase in mental abilities would be right there on the chart, and it simply hasn’t happened yet. At least not to the point where we’ve been able to witness a vastly sped-up thought process that might be providing the dreamer with a distorted sense of time.
Now, I think it’s time for another routine disclaimer. If you believe in paranormal activity, or you don’t think our brains are directly responsible for our experiences either while awake or when dreaming, then please disregard this post. I’m presenting a strictly scientific view here, and unless your rebuttal is along the same lines, then we’re not going to establish anything other than the fact that we have differing views on reality. 
i guess i forgot to mention that it would be just as arrogant to claim that the brain can indeed make up so many events in an instant. However There seems to come reports from here and there about ‘long dreams’. And while I’m not saying they contain the same amount of events there would be IRL ocer that percieved time. Or that it’s not merely tricks of the mind. Isn’t coinciousness itself a trick of the mind? And we can explain it to death if we want to. To me being rational often just means making excuses to disregard something that doesn’t fit our world view. It’s not important HOW it works. If the brain can work superfast or whatever. It’s the experience that is interesting. I know some will make up stories to fascinate us or whatever. But i don’t believe all these stories are lies. I believe the experience is possible by whatever means it is produced. delusion or not. false memories. snippets of events. Even though these explanations seem plausible I feel they only belittle the experience. Besides. Anything can seem to take a long time. it can be one single event.
Besides on the quantum level time does not exist.
part of the reason hallucinagenic and altered experiences last so long is because consciousness is shifted to reside in and focus upon something that does not have a sense of objective time.
so for instance you said that we only go at the speed that neruons are firing… well I’m only basing this off of a Tim Leary recording and he could be wrong, though he was a Harvard Psychologist… under the influence of *** (because of forum rules) you shift into cellular awareness of your body, rather than gross world awareness.
but forget that because it’s pretty abstract… look at the delta brainwaves, the brain is slowed down to almost death. it is easy to conceive that in such a state if a person were to go there by fixing consciousness on breathing (because breath bridges all gaps and is always present) they could experience a profound state of literal timelessness, and in it could spring multi-year (in actuality, in terms of the subjective experience) scenarios.
now.
You’re spot on about the tremendous shock that would come from it, which is why such states are not part of normal consciousness, and why they generally require tremendous work to get there.
Part of the thing about timelessness, is that if you are grasping nothing and simply being present in silence, time ceases to hold any meaning, and everything is fresh, eternal, potent.
and then should you choose to focus your attention upon a piece of classical music lasting 20 minutes, you can experience 20 minutes of time just in the first movement of the 20 minute track… depending upon the levels of immersion and the patterns that the music gives you.
for instance
beep beep beep beep beep beep beep beep
now if all you were was a BEEP that period of time would be almost an eternity, but if you are a human annoyed and not paying attention it was only a few beeps and it’s done with.
so if a skilled musician makes a piece that distorts time, and you flow in complete surrender to their music, and a cascade of repeating patterns arises such as the multiple beeps in a row, each beep would be fresh, and would be your sole basis for attention, perception, and YOU are RELATIVE to the music…
[rather than the music being relative to you]
in such a way a sense of timelessness arises…
now… how does this work for dreams? I really have no clue.
maybe pick up an instrument you like and play it until the entire dream is created BY your music and nothing else, so that instead of dreaming you are in a room playing a music, the dream music you are playing creates your entire dream reality and your dream reality is simply your music.
sounds wonderful and i should try it.
and if you are playing for hours on end you can always stop and resume normal dream consciousness, should timelessnes ensue.
i did an experiment with this. i hypnotized/meditated a friend to what i believed to be alpha. i told him to imagine himself holding his ipod with headphones in his ears. i told him to listen to his favorite song when i said go. he knew this song from the bottom of his heart. i said go and started timing him simotaniously. i told him to say when it was over. when he said it was over, i stopped the time. roughly 2 minutes had elapsed. the song was 5 minutes long. i asked him to describe it as vividly as he could, and he said it was almost identical to the song. he also said the tempo was identical. this demonstrates the minds ability to cause a distortion to your concious mind.
i’ll try to expand on the “time doesnt exist” statement.
we have a physical way to measure and clock time, but there isnt a predefined way to measure time, just like 1 foot isnt the same as 1 meter. if time isnt predefined, how do we know that our mind adapts to our measurement of time? how do we know that our subconcious thinks the same rate we percieve time. for example. you might say “i wonder whats on tv today”. does your brain take about 3 seconds to think that, or does it “say” it in less time? you would probably deduce the latter to be true. if this is true, wouldnt you also play back scenes in less time then they happen? for example. you’re watching tv and a circle floats from one side of the tv to the other in 3 seconds. when you try to recall it, you dont actually think of it happening in 3 seconds unless you conciously try, and even then i’m not sure if it would be so. you might remember it in 1 second, yet you dont see it moving in fast forward, do you? i believe this principal can apply to dreams as well. anyone second me?
I think I get what you’re saying. In your example, you’re not watching the circles moving (in real time or otherwise), you’re simply remembering that the circles did move and in which direction etc.
Theres not really any way to prove that these long dreams aren’t just false memories or something. If anyone’s had one of these dreams, have you only been aware of it lasting so many weeks when you’ve woken up? Or have you been in the dream thinking “man, ive been here a bit longer than usual havnt i”?
On one forum, someone posted that theyd had a dream which seemed to last longer than real life and the interesting thing they said was that they noticed whenever they spoke, they appeared to be speaking at high speed.
So thats some stuff to think about… I’m not really sure how you could do a scientific experiment for this though. 
Longest I can remember is having a dream that lasted a month but it wa a long time ago so I can’t describe how it felt anymore 
light-and-dark, it’s rather common to have normal dreams whose story develops on a longer period than their real duration. As for me, they are just like movies and there are many ellipses in them. In one of them, it was the story of one life, from childhood to old age.
Yet I never had one normal dream in which “real time” was distorted in a noticeable way. Thus I suppose it’s the same in LD’s.
During waking life, the feeling of time may be slightly distorted due to neurotransmitters. If I remember well serotonin gives the feeling of no time past, whereas adrenalin gives the feeling of a long time in a short moment. But if you have an adrenalin boost in a LD, you’re likely to wake up IMO.
Hence those 100 years LD’s stories seems to me very dubious, unless they are scenarized like movies (ellipses, memories, etc.)
This dude sat down next to me at uni during a lecture and asked me if i knew about lucid dreams, and then proceeded to recount his 150 year lucid dream in increbile detail - we’re good friends now, and even to this day, he could write a whole book on the experience.
Yes, I believe that all lucid dreams must use movie-editing type effects to create them. I just don’t feel that time can be speeded up too much during a dream. I do believe that dream time does work faster than normal time due to a lot of people’s experiments but I think a 100 year dream has to have bits missing… surely… I’m really quite interested in this! This is something I am going to focus on when I’m confident that my lucid dreams are coming in nicely!
At the moment I’m obsessed with FA’s… On the subject of time, what is the longest FA anybody has had? The general experiences I read (and through my own) is that they are always rather short.
While I agree that at first glance a 100yr dream is appealing I also agree with those who point out that you could go into shock or a great depression after waking up from a life you have been living for an extended period of time. If I thought a 100yr dream was possible I would create a mountain, build myself a hut or find a cave and only use the time for self discovery. I would not interact with any dream characters at all, so as to avoid making connections to people who don’t exsist.
Although it seems likely at first glance that one would have a shock when waking up I think this applies to certain people. I know the relief of waking up from a disturbing dream to realise there is no permanent problem. I am not the kind of person who wakes from a wonderful dream disappointed that it will not persist in waking life because I value the experience and know it can happen again.
How it applies to a 100 year dream is that some people may have a problem accepting the transition others not. Now there is a difference between an extended dream and physical reality. Dependencies are not just mental but also physical, that means our addictions to our emotions are reinforced over time chemically so that our cells scream out for those chemicals. The time spent in the dreams is physically no different from any other night and there hasn’t been enough time for those changes in the cells to take place. So they won’t beg us for their fix of neuropeptides and we wont long for what we felt in the dream in the same way that we would if we spent 100 actual years there.
Also dream consciousness is not the same as waking consciousness. Ofcourse not in NDs but in LDs there is still a difference.
Besides all that getting attached to people or conditions in dreams and then waking up doesn’t mean you can’t go back in there the very next night. That is not to say that one would not change or need a bit of an adjustment.
Also it depends if it was a normal dream or a lucid one. If you were fully lucid for the duration of the dream then you probably would not make many connections with people because you would unerstand that it is pointless. But if it became a normal dream then I can see where this is going. Could be quite a shock waking up. I’m sure everyone has been upset or dissapointed when they have woke up from some dreams, long and short.
I don’t think it’s pointless. Not at all. People sometimes travel to places where they meet people. They stay there a while and leave. Sometimes Knowing they’ll never see the people they met again and they’ll never go back. It doesn’t mean it was pointless going there and developing those relationships. You can learn alot from it. I think that it’s even less devastating with dreams since as i said you can dream of the same thing again. If it meant alot to you chances are even bigger that you will. So it can be an ongoing relationship for the rest of your life with people that will always be with you.
One could see the long dream as a journey from wich you return a new person if you learned anything, if you didn’t you’ll just go on with your life.
Is it possible to live years in an LD?
What’s the longest you’ve stayed in your LD? (not in realtimemerged the topic to this topic since they are about the same thing
Yeah it is possible. My longest one was about 30 secs.
ok, this is a big debate amongst people I talk to. In my opinion, it is possible to extend the lucid state far beyond the limits of the average dream. This being a few hours, max. I am naively hopeful that it is possible to live weeks, months, or even years in an extended lucid state, but the evidence is lacking, and I must go on that ‘gut feeling’
As for my time, alas, I must deal in realtime. 45-60 minutes during a WBTB session. Best one so far, and I’m hoping for more like that.
Most I’ve ever had is about 30 seconds and my control wasn’t the best, but I’ve heard of people living weeks in a lucid dream, but of course there’s no proof, so it’s all about wheter you’re willing to believe that kind of stuff.