Hi Friends,
One of the dominant factors which induced me in to Lding is the ability to learn and master new skills. I have a phobia of driving a car. I learnt driving in a tutorial but have not been practical about it for an year. I have this fear that unless i practice it properly i wouldnt be able to drive on road for i would meet with accident. Can Lucid Dreaming help me with this problem?
Say, i am in Lucid dream state and with the help of timer i extend the dream to 12 hours, can i keep driving my car in the dream world for 12 hours on different roads, different speeds, different styles. Can it improve my skill and confidence in waking reality if i back it up with practice in waking reality?
Sorry for this long post…
I would certainly agree that dreams can heal some phobias. I am not so sure whether phobias like this can be healed, but why not try it? If your mind gains confidence, sees, that driving a car is not dangerous after all, the fobia will disappear.
I would doubt that you can extend the dream to 12 hours, since our REM sleep cycle lasts no more than 1-2 hours. That means, in the best case scenario, you could drive that car for 2 hours.
One of the main reasons I was intrigued to start lucid dreaming was for this same reason. Not particularly for driving, but to being able to practice my skills or confront certain challenges I otherwise wouldnt in real life has always been one of my goals. Personally I believe its possible, Good luck in your attempts!
Dear friend,
Thanks for ur comment…I think u misunderstood me…I meant to say u lucid dream in waking reality for 2 hours and extend lucid dreaming in dream reality to 12 hrs…I believe its possible with the help of a timer…Imagine driving a car for 12 hrs in reckless speed in dream reality and waking up after 2 hrs with full confidence…
You should go for it. I have certain phobias (spiders…) that I want to adress while dreaming too. I think you can speed up dream reality so you can drive longer.
It has been proved by S. LaBerge, that waking life time is the same as dream time. That means, that you cannot dream for 12 hours.
Answering to those people, who claim that they’ve dreamt for days, weeks or years - it was simply an illusion, false memories. It’s easy to confuse the brain of a human being. If you dream about Spring, then suddenly it all changes to Winter, the illusion of having dreamt for several months is created. It all happens unconsciously and is hard to notice, but it is our brain’s nature. If you dream about Spring and then Winter, our brain will simply unconsciously fill in the gaps with false memories.
Dear Friend,
By whatever name called , illusion, illusionery, the thrust is not extending the dream time but rather mastering the skill. It happens even in waking reality, like for ex: i might have been reading for the exam for hours together but in the exam hall these hours seem like a minute. Time itself is illusionary. Its because we got used to time in waking reality our thinking about time is narrow in sense.
However, people in this forum agree unanimously that the rules of time can be flexed in LD’s and i also read few books, most notable, Robert waggoners “Gateway to inner self” where he contested many claims by Stephen La Berge.
Like, Stephen says that you cannot read in a dream as we dont have paralinear vision in dream and RC by reading text is the best thing, However Robert Waggoner contest this claim by saying it all drains down to your expectation and belief. If u have this mindset in Waking reality that its not possible to read in dream then you probably will not be able to read in a dream. I find it more logical. The same thing applies to time element as well.
I think LD can help you with phobia’s, because virtual reality can also help people get over their fears of spiders and height. Since LDing is in a way like a virtual reality, it should be possible.
But don’t have to high expectation about LDing, because if you expect 12 hours LDs within a little practice you can absolutely forget that. I think in over year, dozens of hours practice and 50 LDs later, I’m lucky to have achieved a total of 3 hours lucid time. So asking for 12 hours LDs and full control over them is asking a lot I’m afraid. It’s better to first aim for your first little nice moment of lucidity and see how things evolve after that.
I agree with your statement about reading in dreams, however, it is completely different subject than time. Maybe you are not aware on how S. LaBerge found out that time in dreams moves at the same speed as in waking life. Here’s how it was done:
We have straightforwardly approached the problem of dream time by asking subjects to estimate ten second intervals (by counting, “one thousand and one, one thousand and two, etc.”) during their lucid dreams. Signals marking the beginning and end of the subjective intervals allowed comparison with objective time. In all cases, time estimates during the lucid dreams were very close to the actual time between signals (LaBerge, 1980a, 1985).
And here’s a graphical comparison between waking life and dream time:
So, as you can see, time is stable in our dreams.
People aren’t clocks and they cannot estimate time precisely. Therefore, many illusions occur, like the one you’ve mentioned.
You may have noticed that when you’re having fun, time passes fast. On the other hand, if you’re bored, time passes slowly. That can be easily explained:
When we’re having fun, our mind is relaxed. Therefore, many details and events may pass unnoticed. As a result, we remember only the main events, which were the most fun of all. Since huge parts of our experiences are forgotten, the illusion of time passing faster is created.
When we’re bored, for instance, sitting in a room, waiting for something. Since no important events are happening, we take our time to study the environment we’re in. Our mind is concentrated and therefore we remember all the details. Since we remember many details, i.e. how the room looked like, paintings on the walls, and none of them were particularly important or fun, we seem to remember many things, which causes the illusion, that the time is passing slower.
Of course, this is just an illusion created by our minds, but the real time (in minutes or seconds) is still passing at normal speed.
In dreams it may seem that we have experienced lots of events happening, although we dreamt only for 1 hour. As I said in my earlier post, this illusion happens because our brain “fills in the gaps” during the dream recalling proccess. Dreams are always harder to recall than waking life events, therefore this illusion is especially significant when talking about dreams. If we dream about the year 2011, then about the year 2012, it doesn’t mean that we dreamt for 1 year. However, since our brains don’t allow any blank spaces, the nothingness is filled with a feeling that we’ve really experienced that time, that we’ve really dreamt for one year.
Do not confuse illusions with reality.