You be the judge. Personally, I do believe that the perception of time in a lucid dream is close to real time, per Laberge’s famous eye message experiments. But then again, that is lucid dreaming. Perhaps there truly is something like time dilation in a non-lucid? (for the record, I suspect time dilation in dreams has more to do with losing perception of time due to scene shifts and the like - in other words, I consider the sequence below to be an interesting example of a precog dream).
Kicked in Yoga Class (non lucid)
I am in a gym glass, seems to be yoga based. But as the class goes on, we are doing some other various body weight dynamic motions. Mostly woman in the glass and one guy, my brother to my far right. So I am engaged in this exercise for a minute or so when the instructor gets on her stomach and starts doing this wild leg fish-tail swing thing. I realize that the students are too close to one another for us to emulate her motions and that someone is going to kick me. Sure enough, I have the sense I’m about to be kicked on my right hand side, and receive it. I wake.
I then realize my wife actually kicked me at 2:24 am because she was having a cramp. She sleeps on my right hand side.
Hmmmm. Like I said, if indeed there is a predictive space with access to likely events in the relative future, then my wife’s cramp was on the list of upcoming events. Did my dream form for the very purpose of incorporating the forthcoming kick? Or did a 90 second dream get compressed into 1 second of real time?
Here’s a related example to consider. I wonder if anyone has experienced this?
I tend to set my alarm for a potpourri of different times. Anywhere from 2:15 - 5:30 am depending on the day and my responsibilities at the time. So my wake time is by no means consistent.
Yet I have the uncanny ability to wake within minutes of my alarm clock going off. This probably happens 50% + of the time. For example, today my alarm was set to 3:30 and I woke at 3:29. Usually there is about a 5 minute window.
There are really only two possible explanations here.
Since I am a light sleeper, it’s possible I have a ton of superficial awakenings and I glance over to the clock a lot. When I see a time close to my known wake up point, my logical brain makes the connection and wakes me for good.
Precognition. Plain and simple. My body is responding to an event (alarm going off) before it happens.
I have had the same questions outlined in the first post. There have been many of my dreams that seem to be reactions to an external stimuli. The dream is quite a bit longer than the experience itself and yet there seems to be no way that the experience could have been predicted.
This may be due to what has recently been verified as presentiment. The body physiologically reacts to future stimuli. This has been scientifically verified through hundreds of studies and several meta studies. The response is typically very close to experience in time, say minutes or seconds.
It could also be as you suggest, that 90 seconds of dream time is happening in 1 second of waking time. I don’t see why our mind couldn’t make this happen as well. There have been many times where I would wake up to my alarm, hit snooze, then have a lengthy dream within the span of a 10 minute snooze.
As far as waking up right before your alarm. I have noticed my mind can reasonably tell how much time has passed at any given moment. I can predict what time it is pretty well just by feeling how much time has passed. Since you are used to waking up at each time you use, your mind can expect to wake up at that time. The body also dislikes being woken suddenly, like by an alarm so it could be preempting the alarm for that reason as well.
Yes, I am quite familiar with what you are calling presentiment. Dean Radin quoted a nice clean example of this in Entangled Minds. As I recall … A person was being shown randomized pictures. Some were innocuous (a garden, a smiling face) and some where meant to get a reaction (sexual images, violent images). In that study it was pretty clear that the body was indeed reacting to the more intense stimulant pictures with changes in skin conductance as I recall. But what was really interesting of course, is that the skin conductance was reacting a few seconds before the picture was shown. And it was quite predictable.
Your thread is eerily similar to one I authored last year at the below link. The hypothesis of time dilation for the phenomena described is not original to either of us; however, they are still interestingly coincidental.
LOL RickM. Yes, earily similar indeed. Though I have been known to pick up on some unusual things, so the verbiage we chose to use doesn’t surprise me all that much.