I made a post on this subject back in 2003, under a different name in a different forum possibly (it’s been a long time).
I had an entire week of time dilation LDing. Not as in a week of dream time, but every single night with dilation going on. My mental state at the time was not good. Multiple recent deaths of very close family members, school not going well, everything seemingly falling apart around me. I had been playing with LD for several years prior and during the period was using LD as an escape as well as supplementing with nootropics to enhance the dreams.
Now that you know my mental state, what I can best advise is that if you are depressed, if real life seems to just be kicking you in the balls… DO NOT mess around with dream time manipulation if you are playing around with LDs as a means of escape from it all. Anyways, with that in mind, here’s a rehash.
Each of these dreams involved a false wakening, and me going about my day as normal. The problem was that they just didn’t end with some RC scenario. Brains are smart, RCs don’t always work and when you find yourself doing one and the dream passes for reality it kinda sorta becomes the last thing on your mind. By “didn’t end”, I mean the time dilation was years, everything vivid but not discounting the possibility of false memories to compensate for gaps… it gets tricky eventually, you don’t recall everything in real life and just sort of accept that for what it is. These dreams were more like an entire lifetime, each getting longer. Getting married, going to work, growing old, having children, doctors appointments, dental fillings, the works. As I was in a state of some rather serious depression, I was sleeping odd hours and waking up in a state of full recall. This is honestly not very fun, especially when it feels like everything has been suddenly ripped away from you and leaving you questioning reality.
It gets even less fun when it starts to happen on a daily basis, intensifying most likely due to the fact that you spend all waking day even more depressed than before and subconsciously wanting more.
I stopped the nootropics in the end, started exercising more to add in muscle aches as a new RC and went to full black for anything lucid (think of it like setting your screen saver to blank screen and unplugging the mouse and keyboard). This crap has stuck with me till even now as it was actually rather traumatic. I can still LD, but most of the time now I choose not to and to “go with the flow”… rather than try out RCs which I have had fail on me before when I get that mental trigger that used to prompt me to check.
The only reason I am bothering to mention this now the current state of reality ain’t all that pleasing to many and inception and a few other movies have brought lucid dreaming to more of a mainstream audience.
In short, been there, done that, have a few lifetimes under my belt to show for it, don’t get carried away with it if you value sanity (or at least being able to fake sanity).