Wow Mental, I've never heard of such a real waking life consequence from a dream.
reading about MB's dream makes me think I may have had a couple in the kind of ball park we're talking about, I just didn't get nearly as deep into it as some others.
especially this
I wasn't really controlling anything about the dream, but just going along with the story
The story and meaningful aspects of the dream seemed to be in overdrive. The creative aspect of the SC provided more raw experience than in say, 20 or 30 of my "normal" lucids. In particular I'm thinking about one where I started at a party, became lucid, then left, met a girl I recognized as my dream daughter. We stayed up all night making pastel drawings in someone elses house. then in the morning, this Sandra bullock looking woman came home with her boyfriend. She was the girl's mother and we had this long and difficult process of figuring out what to do. I ended up beginning a new family with her and our daughter, but her old boyfriend was still there, just in a different role. it ended with us driving away towards some kind of new life and some theme song was playing in the background as things wrapped up. I remembered every detail and even learned the song on guitar upon awakening.
Everything was so meaningful and profound feeling that to attempt anything like a "dream task" would have seemed like an absurd thing. I've had two others of this kind of caliber, (the first one of which is the one that inspired me to come to Mortal Mist in the first place!) When I describe them to people, I don't even like to refer to them as 'dreams" because that already gives people the wrong idea about such an experience.
So the narrative was about 12 hours with no skips or breaks. I didn't feel like I had lost any time upon awakening, and the events could conceivably fit into 3 hours (though I don't know if I would have thought this if I didn't have certain psilocybin experiences to draw from), so I didn't really question the issue of time dilation. I think if I was in LaBerge's experiment, like in my question, I could have counted a fairly accurate 10 seconds.
But thinking about it yesterday, something Hukif said in the last thread struck me, something like how he "compresses time in his body". By the end of the dream, I FELT exactly like I had been up all night having profound experiences. Mentally too, I was spent. I just wanted to rest, which in this case, meant waking up.
.... so here is what I'm getting at - and why I asked that last question. I think that its conceivable that someone could experience a time dilated dream AND count out an accurate 10 seconds in the midst of it, because I think we are talking about a rare and profound type of brain state that is hard to even discuss with our usual ways of talking about this kind of thing.
Creative dreaming aspect of the mind on fire. Time related mental processes affected in powerful and strange ways that could even contradict one another. Experience and meaning related parts of the mind also on fire. Or whatever.. different parts on fire at different times for different dreamers - this is just my example. On top of all that, we then must remember and piece together the experience in our more usual capacity if we want to process the experience later, when we may not even be able to relate to the extraordinary mind state anymore. - kind of like if, say, a computer functioning like a quantum computer for a brief time, then going back to binary.
I think we're talking about mind states more different than the usual dream state than the usual dream state is to the usual waking state. We're talking about mind states profoundly different than even the more usual types of lucid dreaming states.
And the month long dreaming mind is probably just as different from the kind of thing I experienced, but I may be getting a sense of direction at least, if I'm not completely off, which I may be, because like I said, I'm pretty much in binary mode right now, scratching around in the dark.
I'm not pretending to understand or even relate to a month or year long type dream, but I think I've got them at least pegged into a kind of "family" of dreams - namely - the ones that occur when our minds profoundly and inexplicably depart from the scheduled programming.
In lucids, I think its possible to give our minds a kind of "permission" to try on all kinds of different hats and rearrange themselves. States that are simply not options for the waking mind, because who the hell knows what would happen then? We've spent too many thousands of years evolving for our minds just to start shuffling the entire deck willy nilly. But if its "only a dream" well why the hell not.
