the speed of thought is faster than the speed of light
i believe it is entirely possible to slow down time in you dreams.
i’ll try when i get lucid and then document my findings on this web site.
I don’t think that speed has anything to do with it at all. Time is really measured by things moving. What I mean by this is that moving things take time. It takes time for the earth to go around the sun. It takes time for the moon to go around the earth. It takes time for you to physically walk across the room.
However, in a dream these things do not actually take time. There are no moving parts in your brain. While there are chemical reactions taking place, these things happen sooooo quickly.
Basically, I feel that there is more dream time every night than real time for every person. It is merely altering your concious perception of these things.
As for “movie effects” being the best answer for it… It IS the answer coz:
A) I know from my own experience.
B) I’m sure scientists have proved that this is how dreams achieve such “apparently” long durations. I read an article about it somewhere…I’m gonna have a look…
So far I can extend time, slow time, speed-up time, reverse time and stop time and save it so I can return to the same point. Is there anything else I haven’t thought of?
Pedro you forgot to loop time!
…You decide what that means…
no offense to anyones belief, but i absolutely refuse to accept that it isn’t possible spend months, or maybe even decades in a dream. when i get lucid i will find a frickin way or die tryin’. 
I find it plausable that one could experience a time in their dream which is longer than real time. I hold with those who suggested the the Brain is capable of experiencing much more than it does in waking life. Reasonably, it would be possible then to “speed up” the brain, or experience more events and sensation within the short timespan of a dream. Our minds have the excess capacity to process additional input.
For my own part, I have experienced numerous lucid dreams, but I am not yet proficient enough to carry out such an experiment. Once I can LD at will, or nearly at will, I’ll be resourceful enough to experiment with a technique to speed up my perception.
IT’S EASY TO SPEED UP OR SLOW DOWN TIME - AND USELESS!
We know the amount of time we feel pass can be pretty differnt from what the bloody alarm’s saying. It dreams this differnce might be even larger. It’s just impossible to say how much. Might be possible to feel only twice or even thousand times more time that actually passes while you are asleep. The reason we just can’t say is the physical limit of our brain processing input into memory. 
A computer could save one our of our sensual input in a 2gb sized file. But the brain can’t use all that informations, and deletes everything on a one-hour three-step-way from short- to long-term-memory but a single 1.44mb disc. Only these small amount of informations enters your long-term-memory, of which only a small peak is conscious. Most informations sink slowly under the surface into the subconscious. It’s not lost. A trigger can bring it back into your concsious mind - even the oldest memories from childhood or the smell of your primary school. 
All this is so important for dreaming because your memory works the same when you dream. When you have a dream you will have an sensual input of less than 2gb - the dream is usually not that real as reality and often you might have to concentrate on a specific sense for completly real impressions. 
But training LD will improve the the amount of data your memory will feed the sense-centers of your brain and that will make the dream feel more real.
So the amount of information you are able to remember from a 30min-dream will be pretty much the same - it’s up to you if all the information you remember is from 10 minutes or a years of your in-dream-time - it won’t be “more” information, anyway. 
If u want to wake up and feel as if u dreamt much longer than you really did you need to manage to wake up as long as the dreams still lasts. It is the only way to remember the some more things when you enjoyed a couple of dreamdays in some hours of sleep.
It takes you brain about an hour to filter all input it had. Up to one hour after you dreamed there will be up to hundred times more information than you will remeber in long-term. And THAT’S WHY U SHOULD ALWAYS WRITE DREAM DIARY
time is an illusion (we have created watches and calendars true, but what makes 1 second 1 second, the pulsing of a quartz crystal??, where did nature define a second? it all depends who or what you are and against what are you measuring…) Take for instance a fly, for it a day can seem, and in some cases is, a lifetime and 80 years for a sequoia tree is barely a childhood. I believe it IS possible to live years in a dream, just as long as you manage to remain lucid, keep creating, and speed your mind up enough. Maybe not even that, since in dreamworld you drop all man made ideas and beliefs, and in there nothing is based on the realworld. I have had ND where I did so many things I began forgetting them before waking up, and when I did I believed at least an hour must have passed, but I had been dreaming for 10 minutes. It’s all pretty subjective I think.
Trying meditation or simply practicing WILD, I have been at it wholeheartedly, and not being able to achieve more than paralysis I got up to find that I had been at it for more than 3 hours!!! Time definately distorts when your around dream world, since it felt to me as half an hour had passed. But of course all this is pretty personal, you take away the watches and calendars from our world, and you’ll see it crumble and go nuts!! 
For you who have lived for years in one dream;
When you wake up and recall your dream, does it really feel like you have lived those 6 (or w/e) extra years? When your actually 20, do you feel like 26 or w0ot?
That would be kind of cool. And if you really could live for years during one night you could solve all your problems, personal twists so on during one night. That would rock. 
Its not exactly the same thing at all, but a few nights ago in a non-lucid dream, I somehow got to a point where I paused my dream and then rewinded it.
i’ve recently come across of a technbique for actually experiencing a time slowdown- only in RL! check out this link: braincourse.com/timea.html
if one did this while WILDing, maybe he would enter a lucid dream while there still is a slow perception of time
In my last LD I had fun with stopping time for people, making them “lag” as in Counter-strike 
Wow, cool stuff in this thread. Will try in my next LD.
Some thoughts on the idea of time dilation.
Even if you think of the brain as like a computer processor, with a maximum megahertz, with maximum physical hardware limits, you still cannot say that we are operating at the maximum speed. Even other animals like cats or flies, using the same basis for their neural systems (approximately), they have reaction times faster and quicker. Hummingbirds and other animals that can think faster because they can move faster.
So, even if the brain does have a physical limit, a cap to how fast you can think and feel emotion, that limit is not being reached. We have slowed it down to approximately how fast our bodies can move, due to muscle friction and mass/intertia limitation. If we thought any faster, we would tell our body to walk and it would take like… ten hours just to lift our left foot, because our brain was thinking too fast for our body. Then it would take another ten subjective hours to lift our right foot. So, our thought processes get slowed-down to the perfect speed for real-time feedback from our bodies. [I wonder if everyone’s minds are synched at the same speed… slight differences accumulated during the infant synching phase, due to genetic variance or physical differences could lead to mental excellence.]
SO, even if, in fact, dreams take place at the same speed as reality (i.e., even we cannot dream a lifetime within an hour nap), the logic above implies that theoretically, if we allowed the brain to think faster, we COULD dream faster, perhaps dream adventures lasting weeks within a single night’s sleep. It’s possible, even though the evidence seems to indicate that in practice the brain doesn’t ever let go of the boundaries that slow it down.
There could be practical reasons for this, such as that it would create a dysphoric, painful transition back into the slower body. Even though the brain as a processor is capable of running at ten times the speed it runs while awake, maybe it doesn’t because it is risky. After a dream, your speed-of-light dream body would be a far cry from the slow real body, and it might take some re-synchronization for your brain to get re-used to your real body. This would be bad if there was another caveman about to bash in your brains and you had to wake up quickly and fight.
Also, the memories accumulated during a limitless dream time might overload the neural networks, and might dilute memories from waking life with the more recent dream memories. That board meeting yesterday would seem like years ago and you would wake up after a ten year adventure and barely remember the board meeting.
Eventually, you might actually deplete the brain’s “theoretical maximum memory space”, or at least clutter the memory-webs with so many cross-references that thinking becomes painfully slow because each memory invokes too many irrelevant cross-references. (Like in free-association exercises.) This could also be a reason that you usually forget your dreams, and why dreams seem to “erase” themselves if you don’t practice the fine art of remembering them by bringing them into conscious thought to remember them.
time is a measure of speed and distance, so both are equally viable for measuring it.
Its not that simple. if it were, I could choose to have a lucid dream that lasted forever. This is physically impossible.
Also, its very hard to reach a level of lucidity where you are so godlike that you can actually alter things that are determined by your deepest subconcious. It takes more than a little confidence to alter fundimental laws like time and space.
Time isn’t an illusion, it exists. its the perception of time which is unreliable. There are actual real life applications of einsteins theory of relativity (basically, time isn’t a constant, its relative to the speed of light. Thus accelerating = going faster through time for people who aren’t accelerating), like adjusting clocks before sending them into orbit.
Good thread… I guess when I tell someone that my dream was 20 minutes long, its a perception of time based on the time I expect things to take.
After a great deal of lucid dreaming, I suppose this becomes a question of ‘how long is a piece of string’
Time in dreams is only limited by the amount of thought that has a chance to take place in that dream. If it spans several years (in concept) then each day had less thoughts available.
A lucid dream can have one quality hour, or one crap century
i once woke up from a dream, and in most of my dreams time seemst to go alot faster. however when i awoke from this particular dream time was still going fast. i was breating faster. the clock ticked faster. i was thinking faster. all in all it was really scarry. i did a reality check the make sure it was not a FA. so i sat down and w8ed as time slowly seemd to sink back to normal. time is something thaught up by mankind. it does not really exist. change in “space-time” is all that really happens. time as we observe it is the only way our brains can cope with this. time can seem to speed up or slow down depending on how we absorbe this “data”.
thats my theory NEway
Cool link.
But yeah, it seems like you can slow down time in dreams.
Last night I had WILDed into a dream (at least I think it was a WILD, maybe something close). The dream had seemed to last a really long time, but I woke up 20 minutes later. Shocked me at first because I didn’t think you could do that, but oh well.
Something interesting to point out:
In the LD above, I had stated an intention to slow down time. Though it was later in the dream, so I’m not sure if it mattered.
Also, if it matters, someone at the beginning said something about bullet time, Later in the dream, I was walking down the street, when the area around me had blurred (it was in 3rd person) and it sorta zoomed in. I was walking slowly forwards too. Drove me nuts, but I broke out of it later. Kinda interesting really.
Well, that’s my really long 2 cents.
I think the time thing is all about perception. when i took mushrooms recently (not enough to get any visuals)i was outside having a smoke and listening to people around me talking i noticed how fast they where talking i could barely make half have the words out (yes when i’m drunk i’m nosey). Then i looked at my smoke and it had burnt in a way that only happens when smoking fast, i noticed my heart beat racing and when i started to slow it down the people where talking at a normal speed. I know it wasn’t a lucid dream example but in dreams your perception is not perfect even if lucid.