Ive heard that time is a illusion, and it made me think that maybie there isnt really a solid concept of time in the dream world. When I see someone from my past in a dream, that I havnt seen in years, I dont really question why are they in my life now. I wonder why? Theres people I havnt seen in years, that if I seen now I would be very excited, but in my dreams, I just go with the flow of the dream. like the past is the present, so is there really time in our dreams?
The reasoning for that is similar to not recognizing dreamsigns. We are so used to accepting whatever happens in a dream or rationalizing it that you are not surprised. You know you haven’t seen them in years but you rationalize and assume and accept that you have been seeing them and that they should be where they are in your dream.
As for time, dream time is the same as real time. Stephen LaBerge did an experiment to test this and debunked the myth that dream time is different from real-time. How then you ask can you have had a dream that lasts for a lifetime. Here’s what happens: You are waking down a one mile sidewalk and are at one end, instead of walking the whole thing you will “jump” to the other end and assume that 10-15 minutes has passed, very much the way you do when watching a movie, you seem the actor going to bed with 10:00pm on his clock and the next moment there is light and it says 7:00am. You know that it has only been a second but you go along with the assumption that 9 hours have passed.
I dissagree, in the scenario you gave you wouldn’t be able to tell details like how many times the actor tossed and turned, but in these long dreams you can, so I’m of the oppinion that you dream them in fast forward, but when you wake up your concsous mind slows them to normal speed while you’re remembering them.
If that was true how could the timed signals from the dreamer be equivelent to the real life time?
the problem I have with this is … if the dreamer expects to dream in real time … he will
therefore the passage of time in different dreams could be different. we would just be limited by how fast we can think.
Its an image of perception…Time may be passing exacty the same but you may not necessarily be experiencing/perceiving it in the same way.
I have to say that I have had a dream that I percieved to last a week, but it was mostly made up of jumps through time(as percieved in the dream), false memories filled in any of the gaps. So it seemed like I had been dreaming for a week, but really I only experienced a normal amount of dreams. Think of your consciousness as a rock, and a dream as a lake. It is like skipping that rock on the water; you’ve travelled a fair distance across the water, but you only touched it in brief intervals. Anyways, that’s how I look at it… 
but how does that explain the people who have a continuous dream? I suppose the dream could stop/start during NREM without the dreamer realising but wouldn’t it be unusual to have that type of continuity for an whole night?
I think maybe we should try to do a Lucid Lab experiment with this dream-time/real-time concept 
Dreams are a hyperreality that’s extremely plastic…perhaps all of our theories on dream-time could be right because that’s how our subconscious prefers dream-time to work for us 
I don’t see why any of your guys’ ideas couldn’t be right 
There is a big difference between lucid dreams and normal dreams. The fact that normal dreams can seem to last longer is due to the fact that your logical part of your brain is shutdown. You wont the fact that you just skipped to another scene while you would notice this if you were lucid.
I quoted myself 
Okay…it’s not that funny 
But what I wanted to say was, my theory on “time in dreams” is exactly what I quoted above 
My perception on time in the dreamscape is that there is no Time. I believe that once in my dreamality, I’m living Eternity–within the Infinite…within my mind 
It’s only because my physical body is tied to this Time-based reality that I even “wake…”
What I mean by saying that time is the same for dreams and real life is that is you counted one-one thousand, two-one thousand in both the dream and real life they will match up very closely.
Time is only an idea, an invention. It doesn’t actually exist as some sort of entity–moving, or flowing or whatever method you may attach to it.
Tomas has the right idea about how in normal dreams you don’t think logically. Think of all the ridiculous ND’s you’ve had, that, at the time, seemed perfectly logical, even though they jump around in all sorts of different ways.