Time And Dreams
It is quite a mystery as to whether or not time sequences in dreams are the same as time on Earth. There are conflicting reports about time in the dream state and it is also very difficult to measure, since one cannot take a watch on these sojourns. There is still much exploration in this area to be done, and it has yet to be done. Some experimenting with this has been done by Stephen LaBerge in his sleep laboratory. He believes that time in dreams is quite similar to Earth time. Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold contend in their book Exploring the World Of Lucid Dreaming (1990), “In all cases, we found time estimates made in lucid dreams were within a few seconds of estimates made in the waking state, and likewise quite close to the actual time between [predetermined eye movement] signals. From this we have concluded that in lucid dreams, estimated dream time is very nearly equal to clock time; that is, it takes just as long to do something in a dream as it does to actually do it.”
One would ask then about the fact that some dreams seem to cover an entire lifetime’s worth of activity, those epic dreams that pack in a lot of adventure and exploration, time travel, or a story that goes on and on. To this LaBerge and Rheingold respond by saying, “I believe this effect is achieved in dreams by the same stage trick that causes the illusion of the passage of time in the movies or theater. If, on screen, stage, or dream, we see someone turning out the light as the clock strikes midnight, and after a few moments of darkness, we see him turning off an alarm as the bright morning sun shines through the window, we’ll accept (pretend without being aware that we are pretending) that many hours have passed even though we ‘know’ it was only a few seconds.”
This suggests that yes, entire lifetimes worth of adventures can be had in the dream state if one deletes all extraneous and unnecessary time passages like the time it takes for transportation, sleep, and other mundane tasks that can be easily left out of a story without loss of content.