I often notice when I’m waking from a dream, lucid or not, that the millisecond I’m awake that the dream seems so far away. It’s as if I had the dream an hour ago when actually it was something from the dream that woke me. Why is this?
I use to think it was due to the “memory fade” that dreams have. “Memory fade” is when you wake up the dream memory instantly starts to fade away. but I don’t think that is the case anymore. It feels like I fast-forward into the future the moment I start to wake up, and leave my dream an hour behind me. It’s really weird. I’m sure other people experience the same. So does someone have a decent explaination to this, other than my time traveling description.
I know what you mean, DreamAddict. The only explanation I can think of, is that for a long time we are used to remembering our dreams as they happened “sometime last night”, and only when we try to become concious of them do we notice they happened, “just a moment ago”. I think this, “sometime last night” feeling creeps back into our mind when we are remembering dreams that we just had.
My take: we think it happened an hour ago exactly BECAUSE our memory is not so good after waking up, we’re used to remember things clearly when they happened just a second ago and since this is not the case with dreams, we associate the memory instinctly with something that has happened an hour ago (and if you never write your dreams down it’s more like a year ago ). It’s just a nice “memory illusion” that distorts our perception of time.
Maybe our brain thinks that what we remember can’t possibly be from a time that we are unconscious, so it imagines that we actually had the esperience yesterday, but i guess it can’t completely move the experience that far back so it moves it back about an hour or two.
I know this is a long shot, but you never really know what the brain is doing.
but what about when they did happen just a second ago? Like if you wake up from the dream. Like a nightmare for example. It still feels like it happened long ago.
Thanks for all the replies. From what I’ve read from you all, it seems that “switching consciousness” seems to “distort time.” I only wish I knew why.
-add that to the list of unanswerable questions of life.
During normal dreams, your memory is not working at it’s usual capacity. Things that occur while dreaming are not clear enough for the mind to perceive them as only happening a short time ago.
I think on the most basic level, that’s how we decide how long ago something was. Simply by how well we can remember it. It’s just one of those subconscious processes that happen without us realizing.
I don’t have that feeling. More a feeling like: oh that happened over there and right now i’m here again.
just this morning i woke up with the dream fresh in my head - still ‘dreaming it over’ (sort of thinking it over but with dream images flowing). The feeling i had was not that that happened an hour ago but that i was someplace else doing those things and now i was returning to another place.
Ooops, I should have communicated more clearly: “since this is not the case with dreams” points to “remembering things clearly”, not to “just a second ago”. If you wake up naturally it’s almost always from a dream (REM-sleep), so the dream always happened “just a second ago”. But we don’t remember them very well and that makes a big difference to perception of time.
BTW for me, most of the time it is also like it happened just a second ago, not something far away in time. Maybe because I just ASSUME that a dream just happened few seconds ago, an assumption based on some “objective” knowledge about dreams ans sleep cycles. We “know” that people normally always wake up from a dream so if we wake up from a dream we don’t get tricked by memory-time-distortions of the mind - good memory or bad memory, if you wake up from a dream you just “know” the dream happened just a second ago.
That’s the reason why people say “I remember it like it was yesterday.” and not " it HAPPENED yesterday", because they “know” that their calendar doesn’t lie, it happened around 1987 and 1987 is not yesterday, even if it feels like yesterday.
Dream calendars, however, are not so reliable .
Almost everything we think is based on personal opinions, belief system, assumptions, so we better check if those assumptions have some connection with the reality we live in whenever this is possible. And our mind and memory are not always trustable, that’s why we have science, an attempt to gain “objective” knowledge about reality. Science has its limits too BTW, reason why “the list of unanswerable questions of life” is so terribly long. For example: why the hell are we here? Many people will surely THINK they have the answer but NOBODY will ever give you an answer that is not based on some personal opinion/assumption/belief system. Challenge of life: keep up the curiosity of “wanting to know” and still manage to cope with the harsh reality that we may never find an answer for some fundamental questions of life. How to combine the virtue of curiosity with the art of “not knowing”?
That’s an interesting point you raise there, BrainHacker.
One thing I noticed though was that this dosn’t seem to apply to Lucid Dreams. If I wake up from a LD, it feels like it was only a few seconds ago.
I think this was raised in a different thread, only more based on clarity of memories rather than time perception. Still, as we can see they are probably related. The more clear the memories, the more recent it seems the event took place.
I think when people say “I remember it like it was yesterday”, they are generally implying that they have some very strong memories of the event, not because it actually seems like it happened yesterday.
What you say about lucid dreams not neccesarily having that “feeling” lends this idea to my theory: The feeling comes only by association with the past experiences of having dreams “some time last night”.
). It’s just a nice “memory illusion” that distorts our perception of time.
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