This part really interested me:
Is dream time the same as real time?
Upon waking from a particularly vivid dream, it can feel as though you
have been through a lifetime in one night. In the film Inception,
characters can achieve an hour's worth of activity in a dream that actually
lasts 5 minutes. However, research suggests that the reverse is true when
dreaming.
Daniel Erlacher, now at the University of Bern in
Switzerland, and his colleagues gave 15 lucid dreamers tasks to perform in
their dreams. In separate experiments, each participant counted to 10, 20 or 30
and walked 10, 20 or 30 steps.
The dreamers signalled their progress through eye movements. These were
recorded using an electro-oculogram, which monitors changes in electrical
activity as the eye moves between two fixed points. Dreamers signalled that
they had begun the task by looking in one direction and finished looking in the
other. The researchers ensured participants were asleep by recording brain and muscle
activity.
Both tasks took longer for the dreamers to perform while asleep. The
participants took around 30 per cent longer to count and 50 per cent longer to
walk in their dreams than they did while they were awake. The findings were
presented at the 2010 annual conference of the North American Society for
the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity in Tuscon, Arizona.
"There may be a cognitive slowing in the simulated dream
world," says Erlacher. "It's the opposite of what happens in Inception."
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