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Time In Dreams

UnknownUnknown

UnknownUnknown

Gone But Not Forgotten
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How does time happen in dreams?

A couple of days ago I was really tired in the afternoon. I checked the time on my phone (3.14pm) and set my alarm to wake me in 20 minutes.

I must have been asleep before my head hit the pillow because I fell immediately into an extremely vivid and heavily symbolic dream. It seemed to have been going on for some time (lots of things had happened at least).

I woke up abruptly - as instantly awake as I had been instantly asleep. In consternation I reached for my phone, convinced that I'd slept through the alarm. But the time was only 3.15. My whole epic dream experience had lasted only a single minute of 'real world' time.

So my question is: how does that work?!? I felt as though the events in my dream were consecutive, and taking place in something approaching conventional time. But clearly they weren't! I'm guessing that this happens all the time but we don't often get to concretely 'measure' the length of a dream. That was just chance.

Has anyone else experienced this? Or do any neurologists know what's actually going on? I'm genuinely puzzled.
 
I think that this is fairly common phenomenon - certainly, I've had similar experiences - though perhaps not to the extreme where only a single minute has passed.

My guess is that, sometimes at least, dreams are a muddle of images thrown together, and our brain tries to sort them into some kind of intelligible narrative, which is the version we remember afterwards.

Although we can feel quite sure about what we have dreamt, we've only our memories to go on, after all!
 
Very similar experience a couple of days back. Was woken by my alarm around 06:30 and hit the snooze button, for another 8 minutes of sleep. Went almost immediately into an incredibly vivid dream involving an ex-girlfriend, time travel, some mixed-up childhood memories, unassisted flying and plenty more weird shit, which seemed to last for several hours. I was pulled out of this trippy dream by the alarm at 06:38. Felt a real sense of loss and difficulty to accept I had experienced seeming hours of fantasy in a handful of minutes.
 
This theme was explored in one of the greatest STTNG episodes "The Inner Light" in which captain Picard is thrown into a kind of dream state by an alien power beam and experiences a whole lifetime on a now long-dead alien planet in 20 minutes of real time.

Brief extract here:


Also, the US remake of Life on Mars kind of reprised this idea too, as the astronauts in suspended animation on the trip to Mars experience years of life in a cop-based fantasy back on Earth.
 
UnknownUnknown said:
How does time happen in dreams?

A couple of days ago I was really tired in the afternoon. I checked the time on my phone (3.14pm) and set my alarm to wake me in 20 minutes.

I must have been asleep before my head hit the pillow because I fell immediately into an extremely vivid and heavily symbolic dream. It seemed to have been going on for some time (lots of things had happened at least).

I woke up abruptly - as instantly awake as I had been instantly asleep. In consternation I reached for my phone, convinced that I'd slept through the alarm. But the time was only 3.15. My whole epic dream experience had lasted only a single minute of 'real world' time.

So my question is: how does that work?!? I felt as though the events in my dream were consecutive, and taking place in something approaching conventional time. But clearly they weren't! I'm guessing that this happens all the time but we don't often get to concretely 'measure' the length of a dream. That was just chance.

Has anyone else experienced this? Or do any neurologists know what's actually going on? I'm genuinely puzzled.
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I've spent a period writing down my dreams (back in my middle 20s) and these sorts of disjointed images, once you become practised in recalling the dreams, join up into a continuous narrative.

I'd hazard a guess that the dream narrative is running faster than 'real time'.
 
Coal said:
... I'd hazard a guess that the dream narrative is running faster than 'real time'.
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I've had similar dream experiences, where the dream timeframe seems to be far greater than the 'objective' timeframe within which it apparently occurred.

The subjective sensation of time passing is something of an after-effect based on whatever perceptual / cognitive events occur. Nothing stirs consciousness, and subjective time passage drags; a cognitive riot breaks out, and subjective time flies by.

The mind is capable of operating at breathtaking speed, but this speed isn't apparent unless consciousness / awareness is disengaged from the pace of the 'real world'. Dreaming is one example of such disengagement. As I've reported elsewhere on FTMB I've experienced the total life review memory dump more than once, and this comprehensive autobiographical reprise takes no more than an estimated maximum of 2 - 3 seconds of 'objective' time to run its course.
 
I had a kind-of opposite thing happen to me on Monday evening. I got home around 5.30, extremely tired, and was home alone. I sat on the sofa, turned the TV on, and promptly dozed off and immediately started dreaming that I was running to work, as I had to be in very early, but was hitting various obstructions along the way such as becoming lost or distracted. For some reason in the dream I needed to be in at 6.00 a.m., and things were getting increasingly frenetic.. then my phone went. I started awake, answered it and simultaneously looked at the clock - it was 5.55 - and it was my manager on the line. I started explaining to her in quite animated detail why I was running late and I should be there shortly, honest.

She was understandably bemused by all of this, as she'd rung at the end of the day to briefly let me know the outcome of a review in which we're both involved, and didn't expect to see me for at least another 14 hours.

She's only mentioned this once or twice since.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The subjective sensation of time passing is something of an after-effect based on whatever perceptual / cognitive events occur. Nothing stirs consciousness, and subjective time passage drags; a cognitive riot breaks out, and subjective time flies by.

The mind is capable of operating at breathtaking speed, but this speed isn't apparent unless consciousness / awareness is disengaged from the pace of the 'real world'. Dreaming is one example of such disengagement. As I've reported elsewhere on FTMB I've experienced the total life review memory dump more than once, and this comprehensive autobiographical reprise takes no more than an estimated maximum of 2 - 3 seconds of 'objective' time to run its course.
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Thanks for this. I find these moments where the difference between what's inside our heads, and what's outside becomes visible, to be really telling.

Although in your case stuneville I think it's just saying that you're working too hard!

It makes me think that we must just be processing and filtering all this brain stuff, at incredible capacity, all the time. It's breathtaking!
 
UnknownUnknown said:
Although in your case stuneville I think it's just saying that you're working too hard!
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I second that opinion. It sounds like you are overworked and suffering from stress.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I second that opinion. It sounds like you are overworked and suffering from stress.
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Exam season and a few people off so having to cover too, but that goes for 80% of my profession (and no, nobody I know is on £65K for it.) In addition I was getting over a bad cold earlier in the week. There is a fair bit of stress, yes, but actually I'm pretty much on top of my workload, and have extremely supportive management for which I'm grateful. It does play merry hell with my insomnia though. Two more weeks then I've ten days off, in which I intend to do NOTHING.

I do appreciate the concern though - thank you :).
 
I've had the "long time in a dream" thing happen to me a lot (but, now that I think of it, not for some years). Only a few times in my life, however, have I had the opposite occur: Close my eyes to go to sleep, and, instantly, it seems, it's morning, apparently no dream-time at all! (Presumably I did dream, but just didn't remember.)
 
Get well, we wish you rest and potions
 

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stuneville said:
Exam season and a few people off so having to cover too, but that goes for 80% of my profession (and no, nobody I know is on £65K for it.) In addition I was getting over a bad cold earlier in the week. There is a fair bit of stress, yes, but actually I'm pretty much on top of my workload, and have extremely supportive management for which I'm grateful. It does play merry hell with my insomnia though. Two more weeks then I've ten days off, in which I intend to do NOTHING.

I do appreciate the concern though - thank you :).
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:grouphug:

Take care of yourself!
 
I've heard it said that you can tell if you are dreaming or not by looking around for clocks.
Clocks will apparently never be in dreams.
This is something I intend to put to the test next time I experience a lucid dream.
 
I've certainly had epic dreams that have seemed to play out over weeks or months, can't say I ever remember seeing a clock in a dream but I am fairly sceptical of any claim that "such and such will never happen in a dream".
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
I've heard it said that you can tell if you are dreaming or not by looking around for clocks.
Clocks will apparently never be in dreams.
This is something I intend to put to the test next time I experience a lucid dream.
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Clocks do appear in my dreams but it's nearly always impossible to tell the time on them. Same as books, they are there and I can open them, but the words are random and, while they make sense in the dream, on waking and remembering the words, they are nonsense.
 
catseye said:
Clocks do appear in my dreams but it's nearly always impossible to tell the time on them. Same as books, they are there and I can open them, but the words are random and, while they make sense in the dream, on waking and remembering the words, they are nonsense.
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I can never write down a phone number in a dream or dial one correctly.
 
frankiefelix said:
I can never write down a phone number in a dream or dial one correctly.
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I have trouble writing anything down in dreams, I'll constantly misspell things, or my pen won't write. If I do write something down either it changes when I look away, or I can't find the piece of paper or page in a notebook. I can open books and read what's on a page, but I can never find a page again if I try to go back. (The Book of Heraclitus)
 
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