While the Time Dilation Technique offers an exciting prospect for greatly expanding the experiences available in, and value of lucid dreams, developing this skill is particularly challenging.
Many people claim to have dreams that last far longer than the average 30 minute REM phase of the later rounds of our sleep cycles, and some will tell you that their dreams were longer than the entire time they were asleep. However research on time in dreams repeatedly shows an almost perfect correlation between the time it takes to perform a physical action and the time it takes to perform the same action in a dream.
Theory suggests than when we experience dreams that appear to go on for longer than should be possible this is actually due to an editing processes, similar to how time is portrayed in TV and movies. If you see a child getting onto a bus outside their house, and then off the bus again at school, you assume they made the journey by bus between the two locations, and account a reasonable amount of time for that journey. It would be a pretty dull movie or dream that made you live through each moment like this in its full detail.
Unfortunately this means it would be difficult to know if you were successful in using the Time Dilation Technique outside of a sleep laboratory. Accurately knowing when REM sleep started, and performing specific dream actions with well-defined durations could be used to compare the subjective dream experiences with the objective passing of time.
However it may be possible for experienced lucid dreamers to simulate this kind of experiment, particularly those who are able to WILD on demand. By performing specific steps which do not allow any room for the kind of perception editing mentioned above, first as a timed, visualisation exercise while awake and then later inside a lucid dream, you could get a reasonable idea of the subjective duration of your lucid dream experiences. Comparing these with the actual times you entered and exited the dream would show if more subjective time had passed.
An example of the kind of specific steps that could be used is; Open a doorway to a specific location, once there ask a dream character a pre-selected set of 10 questions. Turn around, and go back through the door, this time to a new specific location, with a new dream character. Repeating this process, each time with uniquely identifiable locations and dream characters, would allow a measure of time by counting the number of locations visited.
Testing the Time Dilation Technique
1. Decide a series of steps to perform in your dream that do not allow the brain to ‘edit out’ any of the events.
2. Use a stopwatch to time the process of visualising going through the steps.
3. Prepare to enter a lucid dream by WILD, and note the time at the start of your attempt.
4. Perform the steps identified in (1) for as many cycles as possible.
5. Wake up from WILD and note the time.
The faster you are able to enter a WILD, and so the longer the duration of the in dream steps compared to the duration of initiating the WILD, the more accurate this test will be.