Some of peoples most common complaints, at least once our basic needs have been met, are things like; ‘I just haven’t got time’, ‘Life is too short’, or ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day’. Simply put, everybody wants more time.
But is it possible? Could lucid dreams offer us a way to have more time.
The Perception of Time
Have you ever spoken to someone who has been in a car accident? First-hand accounts of crashes and near misses often share one unusual feature; people report that in the final moments before the impact, time slows down.
Does time physically slow down for these people? Of course not, what actually changes is their perception of time. The two leading theories to explain this ‘Slow Motion Perception’ effect are; the brain diverts more of its resources to information processing, or individual neurons put out a lot more energy during the event. In both cases there is a logical evolutionary advantage to this Slow Motion Perception; it gives us additional thinking time to try to take some action to avoid harm.
So perception of time isn’t fixed, our brain is capable of altering our internal perception of time relative to the time events proceed in the external world. The result being it appears like everything moves in slow motion.
Slow Motion Perception in a Lucid Dream
What happens if we take this same idea and apply it to the dreamworld?
Assuming you could recreate the behaviour going on in your brain while experiencing Slow Motion Perception within a lucid dream, the experience would be very different. The world wouldn’t seem to slow down because there is no external world being perceived, everything is being internally generated by your own mind.
In effect just as your internal processing of the environment speeds up, the passing of events in the environment speeds up at exactly the same rate. From inside the dream nothing would change, in fact you wouldn’t even be able to tell it had happened.
With one exception. If both your subjective perception of time and the passing of events in the dreamworld have occurred faster, but the physical passing of time in the real external world hasn’t changed, then it has taken less real objective time for those events to happen.
As an example say in Slow Motion Perception an event which actually has a duration of 1 second, appears to be stretched out over 4 seconds in slow motion. Within a dream you would then experience 4 seconds worth of events, or could complete 4 seconds worth of actions which all appeared to happen at a normal rate, in only one second.
Time Dilation Technique
Following on from the above, with practice, it should be possible to give yourself more time within a lucid dream. At the example rate of 4 seconds to 1 used above, you could have two hours worth of experience in a typical 30 minute REM phase of your sleep cycle.
Standard dream control techniques, such as using in dream technology could act as a control for activating the neurological mechanism responsible for Slow Motion Perception. However as an advanced technique, the ability to switch between states of mind that comes with lucid dream meditation may improve its effectiveness.
This technique offers up an interesting opportunity for everyone who wants to have longer, more involved adventures within their dreamworld, but for anyone using their lucid dreams to learn, or to practice and develop skills then it would be invaluable.
Most skills, both cognitive and physical also tend to improve with practice. Any form of dream control gets easier and more effective the more often you use it, and the passage of time is a necessarily subjective experience. Together these suggest it may be possible to increase the ratio of perceived time to objective external time.
It is likely there is some physical limit imposed by our biology, but just how far could time be stretched? What if in a single dream you could live out an entire day, or a year, or even a lifetime?
