Dreams and time distortion.

[Death Mage]

Ever notice how you can hear something in a dream, which is a real sound, so it can wake you up.. but then you hear it again as you're waking up? Certain types of alarm clocks that only play for a short time etc. Or a sudden "thud". Sometimes you can hear them in your dream, and again when you wake up, even if the sound only happens once.

So how does that happen? Are you only hearing the first part of the sound, and your brain quickly plays the rest in your dream? Or do you actually hear the full sound, which wakes you up.. but you wake up a little bit BEFORE you heard the sound so you hear it again, or WHAT? And am I the only person this happens to?

[The Ktulu]

What happens is your dream does some freaky ESP stuff, and you dream the sound before the sound is made in real life. Then you wake up and hear the sound.

[extropalopakettle]

I haven't experienced that exactly, but something similar. Sometimes I'm dreaming and hear a sound - a real sound from the real world, that I hear in the dream - but there's always stuff in the dream prior to the sound that led up to it. I can't recall a specific example, but maybe something like I'm breaking into a bank and worried about the alarm going off, and suddenly it does, and it's actually the alarm clock.

[Bicho the Inhaler]

I know what you're talking about, Death Mage. Ktulu is right. It's freaky ESP stuff.

[Courk]

I either don't dream or don't remember my dreams, so I'm the worst person to voice an opinion on this, but I'll do it anyway

Maybe you hear the sound while you're sleeping and it gets into your dream, waking you up. You remember hearing the sound, which happened just a fraction of a second ago, plus you are awake to hear the last half of it. Maybe those two things combined make you kind of hear the sound twice.

[MacadamiamaN]

I have the EXACT same occurance as extro in dreams. Though I, too, can't recall anything specific.

[MatthewV]

[Lepton]

Habitualization, as with Pavlov's dogs. When you wake to an alarm clock the same time every day, your mind adjusts to this.

[Antrax]

I always thought the body can keep track of time, and thus know when the clock would go off. Sounds silly, but I usually wake up exactly 5 minutes before whatever time I set on my alarm clock, which is what led me to that conclusion. It never happened to me with unpredictable sounds.
Antrax

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"If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love." -Victor Mancini, "Choke"

[Lucresia]

strangely enough this kind of thing where real life goes into my dreams happens all the time. Something happens in a dream..but at the same time it is happening in a kind of different way in real life. Like the phone ringing. It'll work out good too. Like my whole dream planned on the phone ringing at that exact moment. Strange shiznit. Happens all the time. Alarm clocks, phone ringing, etc.

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"Where'd you learn to be so complacent?"
-Powerman 5000 "Action"

[Death Mage]

Yea, the whole "leading up to it" part is weird too. I've had those.

Another one I can remember distinctly which shows distorion of time etc, is I used to have an alarm on my watch to wake me up. However, I had to set all five of the alarms one minute apart to do it (one would never be enough to wake me). Once, in my dream, I'd heard the alarm gonig off. Of course, in my dream I didn't know what it was, so I started looking for it. It stopped after ~30 seconds (the time it takes the alarm to go)... but started up again only ~5 seconds later, unstead of a 30 second delay.

Now, I'm pretty sure that dreams are being played very fast, we just perceive them as being in "real time". But that doesn't fully explain things that happen BEFORE the sound etc. (And yes, I was talking about unpredictable sounds as well, not just alarm clocks. What brought it up was a sound my computer makes when someone logs on-line, which never happens at the same time all the time. I'd heard it in my dream, then woke up to hear it again, but the computer only activated it once.)

[The Ktulu]

Originally posted by Lepton:

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Habitualization, as with Pavlov's dogs. When you wake to an alarm clock the same time every day, your mind adjusts to this.

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Originally posted by Antrax:

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I always thought the body can keep track of time, and thus know when the clock would go off.

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Then my mind and/or body is/are messed up. I set my alarm clock plus my television alarm every night, obsessive-compulsively checking each one before I go to bed. Even though I put my clock and remote away from me, so I have to reach to turn the alarms off, I often manage to wake up several minutes after the alarms are turned off to realize that I slept through turning them off. Or I didn't waken enough to realize I was awake, before falling back to sleep. Or something else weird. Sometimes I suspect that in the middle of the night, I turn them off in my sleep.

This morning, I had to go take the ACT Assessment, so I put my remote on the other side of the room, and put my alarm clock as far away as possible.

[Bicho the Inhaler]

Death Mage, I think you've hit on a potentially very interesting problem. Many of us have probably experienced dreams where time seems to get stretched out--I've had dreams in which events seemed to unfold over the course of a day, while I know it couldn't really have taken more than a few hours. Could it be possible for dreams to reverse the experience of time?

My perspectives:
One thing is clear. That is, when I talk about such-and-such dream, I'm really just talking about some objects that somehow ended up in my memory. In fact, for all I know, it could be possible that there was no "dream" at all; when I woke up, maybe my brain just received some kind of jolt and spontaneously produced these junk memories on the spot. However, appealing to Ockham's Razor, I strongly suspect that this is not so. It seems far more likely that there is really some correspondence between my memories of the dream and events that took place in my brain during the course of the night. (Actually, I think people have actually explained dreams in terms of concrete chemical phenomena in the brain; I forget exactly what I heard about it.) Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to me that my memory of a dream does not correspond to real events in exactly the same way as waking memories do. We really want to know exactly to what extent the two diverge. As far as I know, dreams could routinely build up memories in very unorthodox ways, like (in real time) adding some memory A to the beginning of some existing memory B.

To draw an analogy to physics: if you look at the universe on an extremely small scale, space, time, and causality lose their traditional meanings. There are what are called "quantum fluctuations" that allow all sorts of strange things to occur on this tiny scale: for example, due to a large "energy fluctuation," an electron-positron pair can just appear out of nowhere and quickly recombine. Time also loses its traditional connotation. Traditionally, the main (only?) source of time-asymmetry--that is, the way the forward time direction differs from the reverse time direcetion--is the Second Law of Thermodynamics: in the forward time direction, entropy increases. In the reverse time direction, entropy decreases. However, this isn't true on the tiniest of scales; on the tiniest of scales, it's much harder to tell the forward time direction from the backward time direction. (I think there might be a foolproof way to tell by looking at the state-vector-reduction events of particles, but I don't know very much about this. Read The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose. At any rate, this is irrelevant to my point, since the Second Law of Thermodynamics is arguably what really distinguishes forward from reverse time on macroscopic scales.)

I suspect that this fundamental strangeness on small scales is not unique to physics, but that it can generally be expected to occur in systems that use (conceptually) minuscule discrete elements to approximate continuity. The brain works this way, too. It produces a deceptively continuous-state representation of the world that in its own way is discrete. Dreams bring out the strangeness because they're so much simpler than real life experiences in that they involve comparatively very few of the discrete elements, just like quantum events aren't supposed to involve huge numbers of particles. I'm saying that the relation of real-life events to dream "events" is similar to the relation of typical human-scale events to typical quantum events. Of course, many of the particulars are different, but it could be a conceptual model.

I wonder what scientific studies have to say about perception of time in dreams; I imagine such studies would be very challenging.

[Bicho the Inhaler]

Of course, it could also be much simpler than that; it could just be a really simple illusion. Play some music, and then (making sure there isn't a whole lot of background noise in the room) make it suddenly "Pause" or "stop" without any fading effects. Did the music seem to get louder just before it stopped? Could that be an auditory memory illusion where your memory is modified after the fact?

[extropalopakettle]

[The Ktulu]

[extropalopakettle]

[Kazooish]

the body works at a 25 hour clock

Strange why we go by 24 isnt it

But seriously, the body has 25 hour cycles, they did some experiment when this woman lived underground for a year, and she had no clocks or outside informatoin on the time..etc

She came out thinking it was a while later than it actually was, she gained about an hour a day according to when she recorded what she thought was night/day, so ya its a biological clock of 25 hours is what im trying to say.

Dreams: Auditory memory lasts between 3-7 seconds, the average person its 5 (obviously as its the middle of hte range). So maybe when your dreaming you hear something, and you hear it in your dream, and like we said dreams arnt necessarily "viewed" in real time. So we hear it in the dream, and then wake up, all within this 3-7 seconds that its still in our mind. So we hear it in the dream, and within a few seconds we wake up, and our mind maybe "reminds" us that we did hear it, as its in our auditory memory, but our consiouse mind didnt acknowledge it until we finally awoke.

[Bicho the Inhaler]

There was actually a famous mathematician who decided to work on a 25 hour cycle. It might have been Feigenbaum. He eventually discontinued the practice because on some days he would wake from sleep just as the sun was setting, which he found unbearable

[extropalopakettle]

Many years ago I went through a phase, for a couple of years, where I went on a longer then 24 hour cycle - probably around 30. Not planned, just sleeping and waking when I felt like it. I became convinced (before ever hearing that anyone else had the idea) that it was natural.

[MatthewV]

So does a predictable sound like the phone ringing occur in dreams? I mean, you hear your phone ringing all the time, but it doesn't happen exactally at (insert rediculusly early hour)

[Death Mage]

Reguarding the body's internal clock... It's been shown in people who work in caves etc. and places without the 24 hour rotation of the Earth etc. to guide their bodies into certain time cycles, that they go into time cycles anging anywhere form 25 to 45 hour "days". The usual time that the body does is between 35 and 40, IIRC.

[MatthewV]

So does a predictable sound like the phone ringing occur in dreams? I mean, you hear your phone ringing all the time, but it doesn't happen exactally at (insert rediculusly early hour)

[pikachamp]

woah, i just had a dream that deathmage would post that, freaky!!!

[Death Mage]

One of the behaviours of people on web boards that pisses me off the most is when some jackass decides to make one post in every topic on the front page, and as such, spams the board with totally useless shit and gets in the way of real conversations by driving active posts off the page.

[Digglu]

since i'm a little behind on the topic, here's just some stuff that's in accordance with what has been said:

i took a neurobiology course one summer and asked my professor about dreams, and the way things can seem longer when dreaming (ie an "hour" can pass in 10 mins or so) apparently, it must be some sort of artifact of events in the dream, like seeing the sunrise and then the sunset in your dream would lead you to believe you had dreamed for a "day"...however, she said that a minute of dreaming corresponds to a minute in the real world. don't know if this has actually been researched or whatnot though.

although i haven't had esp-like experiences in dreams, i have had events from the real world alter my dreaming, ie a sound from the real world would occur in my dream and events would shape around it. i guess that's kinda common though heh.

like antrax said, i believe the body keeps fairly good track of what time it is, at least on a nightly basis (given the research into it, free-running will lead to greater and greater differences) as long as you have something to set yourself by during the day or whatever. on occasion, normally when i have something important to do and can't be late for as soon as i wake up, i often wake up just a few minutes before my alarm is supposed to go off.

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"You may make no sense, but at least you're enthusiastic about it"

[pikachamp]

to be fair i didbn't actually knock anything off first page
except for maybe one when i made the bragging thread

[justindl]

I think that what happens is that your brain hears the sound,works it into the dream, and then decides to wake up. when you wake up you become conscious that you just heard that sound in the real world ( not in the dream ), also. it's like the brain "plays back" your memory of the last 3 seconds or so.

[The Cruciverbalist]

Or perhaps the sleeping brain somehow percieves sound a bit sooner than the conscious brain, so you really do percieve the sound twice. Though I guess that doesn't explain extro's lead-up effect.