How long do dreams last?

[General-Army]

How long do dreams generally last, not necessarily how much you remember, but how long they last in total, memorized and non memorized. Back in the summer when i got tons of sleep i remmeber i would wake up sometimes feeling as though my dreams the night before lasted hours or the whole night.

[Logic]

Its subjective, there isnt even a way to record or measure information from an observers point of view. What feels like 10 seconds for you could be 10 hours in reality, and vise versa.

The best way would be to time youreslf inbetween dreams, which would be really complicated and sleep depriving.

[experimental]

lol -  this sounds abit mad but a idea all the same ~


Try and  have a " wake induce  lucid dream "  and create a imaginary  watch on your wrist  throughout the subjective expereince , keep watching the seconds tick away and calculate howlong it  took from the point of dream awareness to the point you woke up   laffin


Experimental

[StaticExperiment]

your subconscious isnt a clock... it probably cant calculate seconds like that... it would probably be what you feel would be a second and not an actual second.  The time would be way off.

[Mattoid]

Hmm..  i don't quite agree with you, static.  
Biological Clock

A tiny sliver of brain tissue, less than the size of a pinhead, regulates the timing of our bodies. Within this sliver lies a biological clock that keeps track of the time of day, and seasons of the year, and marches our bodies and brains in step.

The small cluster of nerve cells that forms the biological clock is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). Its name derives from the location of the SCN, just above where the broad optic nerve trunks cross over each other (a site known as the "optic chiasm") on their way back from the eyes to the visual center of the brain.

The SCN also receives information about light and dark from the eyes, but it has its own dedicated pathway of nerves, the retino-hypothalamic tract (RHT), which is separate from the main nerve bundles carrying visual information to the brain.

We know that the SCN is a biological clock because when it is destroyed in an experimental animal by surgical pinpoint lesions of the brain, rhythms in sleep and wake, and many other rhythms, fade away. Interestingly, the animal, minus its SCN, runs, eats and drinks the same total amount each 24 hours, but these activities are now randomly distributed throughout the day and night.

Human biological clocks follow a pattern of about 25 hours. Hence, if someone lives in a cave or an apartment without windows (as people have done), their circadian patterns of sleep and wakefulness shift 'westward'; by about one hour a day.

However, in the regular world, sunlight and darkness serve to reset - the biological clock every day and keep us on a 24-hour cycle.

Basis of biological clock Is Two-Faced Protein - January 2003 - Yahoo News

A two-sided protein that tells cells when to grow and when to rest is nature's timepiece, a discovery that offers help to those whose internal clocks have been disrupted by jet lag or health problems, a husband-and-wife scientific team said Monday.

The two-sided, cylindrical protein, which has been recreated in the laboratory and altered by the team to confirm its function, directs 12-minute growth and rest cycles in living cells, the Purdue University researchers said.

"One 'face' handles cell enlargement. Then the protein 'flips over,' allowing the second face to carry out other activities while cell enlargement rests," said James Morre, a medicinal chemist at Purdue's pharmacy school, who has researched the origins of biological clocks since he was a student 40 years ago.

The protein's precise timing and its links to living organisms' biological clocks was tested by altering cloned versions to produce cycles of between 22 and 42 minutes. "Now we have an opportunity to tell how organisms tell time," said Dorothy Morre, a professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University.

"This could give us new insights into cellular activity, such as cholesterol synthesis, respiration, heart rhythms, response to drugs, sleep, alertness -- there's so much," she said. The body's biological clock, sometimes referred to as Circadian rhythm, has been thought to have hormonal and, ultimately, multiple genetic sources -- though it has been tenuously linked to cycles of the moon and to sunspots. The mechanism seems similar in all organisms, directing plants to unfurl leaves or animals to start a mating cycle.

The couple's research, which was published in the journal Biochemistry, was sponsored in part by NASA (news - web sites), the National Institutes of Health (news - web sites) and the Purdue Botanicals Center.

The protein's switching mechanism is difficult to see, because it is constantly moving and has not been crystallized to get a closer look at it, James Morre said.

The prospect of speeding up or slowing down the body's biological clock may not be possible, but it should be possible to reset the clock, he said.

"This discovery also affords an opportunity to improve our methods of clock setting, from minimizing jet lag to correcting sleep disorders," he said. "We might even be able to develop simple artificial clock-setting environments to aid astronauts and those living near the Arctic Circle, where day-night cycles are absent for long periods."

[Logic]

Hmm, I believe you're right mattoid, I remember reading about how the human brain (and probably body too) runs on a 25hour schedule.

Though given a bit more thought, I guess it could be possible to measure the length of dreams in some way. I always believed that the concept of an internal clock was peoples sensativity to the Shuman-Renaissance (amount of energy from the sun at certain times in the day).

I still doubt that more than a few determined and experienced individuals could manage to try this and have accurate results.

[experimental]

ahhh well maybe its true then ,

experimentalism would verify it anyways , but another level we all have different levels of abilitys in these states maybe , where by some can  get better perceptions and results to others

[DarkQuest]

i kinda jus skimmed people's thoughts on this topic, and as far as a biological clock in you... that is definitely true, because i know in health class when i was younger, the teacher would talk about how doing drugs or something can mess up your biological clock while on something... for example, a stimulant can make 15 seconds feel longer, or a depressant can make 15 seconds feel shorter.  i think i may have that backwards, but you get what im saying i hope

all in all, I think the subconscious mind is not part of the brain that has the biological clock, because i know how dreams can feel like they've lasted for days, when its only a couple hours.  if you made an imaginary watch in a dream, that prolly wont work, because you'd end up going by how time goes by in your dream.  a day in your dream would probably match a day on your subconscious watch, just because your subconscious mind probably sees the day go by in your dream as if its real life, so then you could go through an hour on your subconscious watch, when its just a mere 10 minutes or somethin.  of course you could experiment it, but you would have to fall asleep and be like clockwork, maybe using an alarm set after a certain amount of time.  if you are a good dream recaller or lucid dreamer, then the odds of testing this could be better

for example, go to bed at like 12am, set the alarm to 2am, and then in your dream get a subconscious watch, then as your alarm rings, you think its your watch and look at it right as you wake up to see how the times compare.  it could always work as a coincidence or maybe some could have a better perception of time in a dream than others, so i think this experiment has several factors if you wanted to pursue it...

[Vector 9]

each "dream" has its own setting of time acording to ur power and the level of your dreaming.
i have been in a dream and known the time i fell asleep, i then wached a clock for a peroid of time, when i awoke. the time passed was twice as long as when i went in. i did this 4 times more that night, every time becoming lucid and looking at a clock i "focused" into my dream. the other three time were diferent, two were faster than "real" time, a two were slower than "real" time