I had a dream the other day that seemed to last a “normal” amount of time (whatever that is). But the interesting thing is that I was able to determine the precise length because it began and ended during a 2-3 second gap between tracks on a CD I was listening to. It felt pretty strange having a complete (and rather complex) dream in such a short period of time. Is this normal? Are the duration of most dreams quite small, even though they may feel lengthy?
strange, it’s always the other way around for me. The dream seems to be much shorter than the duration of actual sleep.
Maybe it lasted the exact length of the CD and you had it on “loop”. Eerie that you woke up at the exact same point on the CD, though 
So… anybody got an answer to this? I’m curious, too.
I don’t have an answer, but it’s happened to me a few times too. Typically it’s during class, when I’m dead tired and drifting off for a few seconds at a time. The dreams can seem to take a long time, but I’ll fall asleep in the middle of a teacher’s sentence and wake up before the end, so I can’t be asleep for any length of time.
I think a relevant question is whether or not you ever actually experience a dream. Perhaps you only ever remember experiencing a dream, and amount of time it takes to generate the memory is actually quite short.
In dreams information that’s normally linked is disassociated. One of these things is your sense of time, in a dream the lack of normal transitions combined with the strange ways of information delivery and the lack of an objective way of telling time gives you a strange subjective guess when compared to how much time elapses.
You were probably abducted by aliens man.
Now this is just what I remember from my Psych 181 class, so take it for what it’s worth.
You go through stages of sleep, I don’t feel like getting too in depth, but one of those stages is REM sleep. REM sleep is the sleep stage when dreaming occurs. If you are sleep deprived (like a college kid), then as soon as you fall asleep, this is the stage that you go right into.
Then there’s something else that I just remembered. Just as you’re drifting off you might wake up and have an uncertain feeling about what you were just thinking. You don’t know if you were dreaming or if it really happened.
Maybe someone that’s taken a couple more classes than I did will be along to clean up the mess I’ve got there.
Vague memory and it’s too late in the day to look it up…
I thought ALL dreams were only a few seconds long.
Do you have a source for this? I always thought it took some time to progress into REM sleep. However, when I am very tired, as soon as my head hits the pillow, I can feel my eyeballs start twitching rapidly when I’m still conscious.
I recall someone telling me that dreams were generated in a period of seconds - that they simply sort of entered your memory, rather than “experiencing” them… I don’t know where they got it from, though.
Ok basically you have a bunch of random neurological activity coming from the brain stem (IIRC). As it starts activating systems associated with various things you can experience (mental images, sounds, smells, face recognitions, what ever) the states that are generated are remembered (in the sense that the brain has a record of them). You experience this as the strange sequence of events in a dream. You only remember dreams you wake up during, and once you wake up the whole thing gets run through the thing which does the transitions between conscious states that makes everything seem smooth when you’re awake. The result is the whole narrative which is generally strange.
Now as for the specific question in the OP you get a certain sense of time from the dream. This has nothing to do with the events of the dream. It’s just another bit of info that goes into the making of the whole. Also it has nothing to do with objective time, as all that you’re getting is random information that gets fed into something that is meant for real data.
Anyway this is all just the cognitive psychology. perspective at a glance. You do technically have the individual dream snapshots but not all of them are remembered. I don’t have a good book to recommend, this is just from the text books and similar sources on cognitive psychology.
There was a study published recently that showed that mice dream about running mazes. I’m not sure how they know that, but it probably has something to do with measuring the patterns of activation in the brain when dreaming and comparing it to what’s going on in a mouse’s brain when it’s actually running the maze.
It would be interesting to see the study and see if the dreams happened in ‘real time’.
I don’t have a cite*, but I was taught this in my biological psych class as well. The experiment was performed on a cat who they deprived of only REM sleep (basically, they woke it up whenever it entered REM). After a day or two of this, as soon as the cat fell asleep it would enter REM sleep.
On a related note, similar experiments yielded the assumption (conclusion?) that the behavior we tend to associate with a lack of sleep (irritability, etc.) were due more to a lack of REM sleep than sleep deprivation in general.
*I would have a cite, but a friend of mine seems to equate the word ‘lend’ with ‘give.’ For example, “I’ll lend you this biological psych book.”
This is stuff I remember from psyc 101, which was a long time ago, so no, I have no cites, but…
This “short dream” phenomenon might also explain short-term premonition. For instance, someone in your dream turns on the light and you wake up when someone actually turns on the lights.
A better example: In your dream you are waiting for a phone call. You seem to wait for a very long time, and when finally the phone does ring, you wake up to the sound of your actual phone ringing. The dream that seemed to take place over an extended period of time only happened between the first and second ring.
What I think is important to remember is that what we call time, from a human perspective, results from the simultaneous workings of memory, perception, and anticipation. The relationship between the amount of data registered, perceived and anticipated will affect the psychological length of an event. That’s why 5 minutes spent with my gf is short, whereas 5 minutes with a drunk salaryman complaining about his shitty life seems to last an eternity.
Thus, the surge of data being processed in a dream might indeed occupy a lot of psychological time, while spanning only a few seconds of physical time.
Or at least, that’s kind of how I understand it.
Good night.
Bossk, I don’t have a cite off hand. There’s probably something regarding it in my old Psych book, but it’s not here at school with me.
KKBattousai, I think that’s the same thing I was thinking about when I wrote my post. I also remember a study where a cat was kept from sleeping and ended up dying from sleep depravation. Poor kitties. Perhaps that study is the basis for the “if you don’t dream you’ll die” stories. I suppose that maybe it’s true that if you don’t ever expereince the sleep stage where you dream, then you’ll die. Just a guess though.