Hey all,
growing up i have always been told what you dream takes place in the last ten minutes before you wake up. That you dreamed what would appear to be hours in ten to twenty minutes.
So upon my first indulgencies into lucid dreaming i of course assumed the same would be possible, and that it was how dreaming worked.
In reading on the forum i am seeing a lot of things saying dreaming is real time, that time in dreams and LD’s directly coencide with time IWL.
I am a little confused, can somebody point me in the right direction?
C’est la Vie
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so!
But seriously - I have no idea. I thought what you thought, that your dreams come together in the last few seconds before being woken up. Though what happens then, if you get woken up by something, as opposed to just waking up naturally?
The hypothesis that your dream take place in the last minutes (some people said seconds or milliseconds) before you wake up is no more accepted by scientists.
This hypothesis was created in the XIX century by Alfred Maury because of a dream he had. Maury dreamt that he was living during the french revolution, was arrested and executed, and had his head cut-off. Then he woke up. This dream seems to last for minutes, but when he woke up, he realized that a painting which was hung on the wall above his bed had fallen on his neck. Thus he supposed that the whole dream context has been created in the last seconds of his sleep.
This dream was so curious (though it may be explained with a coincidence, or precog, or because he didn’t woke up immediatly when the painting fell, I don’t know) that people believed he was right. Freud took this example in order to create his own theory about dream “secundary elaboration”: according to it, we would just have vague inconscious feelings during the night, and collect them while waking up in order to create an intelligible story. Thus we wouldn’t really dream, neither recall dreams, but create false memories while recalling them.
This theory has been proved to be false, mainly by experiments about LD’ing. And concerning time in lucid dreams, Laberge’s experiments showed that it’s about the same than IRL.