Dream forking

the Stuff Dreams are made of...
1

I’ve experienced this several times, as well as today. I’ll recount today’s pertinent segment to explain what i mean.

I’m in a large crowd gathering, which is steadily coming to an unwelcome conclusion that wouldn’t be very healthy for me. No sense waiting around, waiting to be lynched i say, and i slip out of the hall.
Now as i step out the door, i don’t know where to go, the surroundings are unfamiliar. I choose one path, explore it a bit, decide it’s not suitable. The second one as well. The third one finally leads somewhere, so i follow that one. The rest of the dream goes on, but it’s not important anymore.

The thing that’s strange to me is that while time didn’t stop during exploration of first two paths, none really passed. As i started on third path, it was the same time, as if i didn’t search first two before.
Basically, dream went in 2 dead ends, which then got erased somehow, they didn’t really happen according to dream continuity, but stuck in my memory. There wasn’t any “decision” to be made by my dream self, because the alternate paths just got erased to him.

I’ve had similar cases, not relating to location only. Dream progresses in one direction for a short while, then decides not to continue there and “covers it up”, creating a new, alternate progress from a specific point previous.
I think it can be very closely likened to a video game savepoint. You save the game, play a specific part one way, then you reload the save and play it another way. According to the game, first play didn’t happen, because the current version that’s been loaded from the save is different. The player however, experiences both forks.

Has anyone had similar experiences, or is it perhaps even a known phenomenon?

2

I’ve split into two dream bodies that experienced parallel dream worlds simultaneously, and I often like restarting from a save point in a dream, but nothing quite like you describe. In the latter, for example, time had passed for me (the player/dreamer) even if it officially didn’t pass in the game data (the dream.)

3

Wow, that’s amazing :o
I don’t think i’ve ever led two (however similar) dream bodies before. Switching between them, sure, but not at the same time. It might have something to do with the differences between female and male brain. With the former being able to multitask much better than male brain. It’d be interesting to see if there’s a statistical difference in how many guys and how many gals have experienced this.

Time behaved as you put it in my cases as well. Dream treats it like it didn’t happen, continuing at the moment i choose to return to, but player perspective knows that the dream fragment that will just get overwritten has happened and took some small amount of time. It’s always short for me, if it goes on too long it’ll just flesh out and become the official single dream version.