The other night I had a dream that seemed to last for hours. In reality it probably only lasted a few minutes. IANAD but I seemed to remember that REM state dreams don’t last long. At the end of my dream I was waiting with someone else for an important phone call. The dream phone rang and the person answered. I woke up because my phone was ringing.
Now somehow my subconscious knew how to create a plot in my dream that would require a phone to ring. I have problems in some short stories I have written trying to figure out where certain plots will go. Yet my subconscious was able to plot out that a phone call would be coming in at least a few minutes before it rang in the real world.
Does anyone know how long it takes for real life stimuli to register in dreams? If it is only seconds then maybe the phone rang and my dream plot was actually realized in few seconds although my dream perception said it was longer. If it is longer, how could my subconscious possibly know the phone was going to ring?
I’ve had this happen many times and any information or ideas you might have to help me resolve this phenomena would be appreciated.
Time sense is lost during dreams what seems like hours takes a matter of seconds. Also, your mind can retrograde memory. The phone rang and you built the dream around it.
Retrograde memory? Yikes, I have enough problems with regular memory! Now I have to worry about rewrites!
I never heard about this before. Can you provide me a place I can find more about this? Thanks!
I used to have this happen alot. I would often hear my alarm clock, and think it was a fire engine, amongst other things. It seems that the alarm clock must have gone off when I was in a very deep sleep, so I started dreaming about that, and then slowly woke up (while coming out of the dream). That made it seem like I had been dreaming of the fire truck for awhile, maybe even thinking a building was on fire.
It used to happen when I would leave the radio on at night-often I’d wake up from the middle of a dream, and the song that had been playing in my dream was playing on the radio.
erie774, I didn’t do a search. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it wasn’t fairly common knowledge.
Diseases like Alzheimer’s and alcoholic psychosis cause sufferers to “fill in the blanks” in their memory.
Here is the first of many Google sites to retrograde memory.
I’ve never done any reading on the subject, but I came to the conclusion, long ago, that my brain was “filling in” the info. in order for it to have logic. The memory part of the brain can’t store info. that doesn’t make sense, and many, if not most, dreams don’t follow logic.
I, too, have experienced the, dream to reality, connection between ringing phones, door knocks, TV’s left on, words of people trying to wake me, etc. I believe it has to be my brain’s process in making disjointed, random thoughts into some logically discernable memory.
Crap!!! I am not an alcoholic and I’m only 41 so I hope it’s not Alzheimer’s! Maybe it’s the mad cow?
Seriously, thanks for the info.
I wonder if that’s related to the “memory buffer” phenomenon - e.g. in a busy room, with lots of background chatter, if your name is mentioned, your brain somehow picks out the whole sentence, even the part before your name was spoken. I read about that phenomenon in New Scientist, I think.
I often fall asleep and eventually the infommercials start. I don’t know if they register when other TV doesn’t because I have entered a new phase of sleep, but I often dream that I am trying to get them to stop talking but nothing I do in the dream stops them. Of course that’s because they continue droning on in real life.
Were it waking retrograde memory, I’d be inclined to worry. But I think that retrograde memory is normal, while dreaming.
Yeah, I remember you told me about that before! 
Or was I dreaming?
I’m 99% sure that I don’t have Alzheimer’s and I’m so out of practice when it comes to drinking that I’m blotto from two 7 and 7’s so I don’t think I’m an alcoholic. I’m sure it’s just my imagination running away with me.