DREAM RESEARCH

A while ago when I was young, I heard a scientific theory about dreams - that they do not play out in real time. Instead, they take place in just a fraction of the time that they seem to be taking, and it is only our interpretation and sense of reality that makes them stretch out to seem like real time. In other words, you may have a dream that seems to occupy 10 minutes of your sleep, but in reality, from start to end, it took only 5 seconds.

I never bought this theory, and who knows, it may have been shot down long ago. But like many other things - dumb jokes, embarrassing moments - it stayed in my head, to be recalled this morning. Why? Because last night, something happened that interspersed reality into my dream in a scientifically measurable manner. I couldn't have invented this one if I tried.

I dreamt I was meeting with a group of people in San Francisco, on a business trip. We were on the street, talking and deciding where to go to dinner. And as we were talking, an electronic device that one of the guys had, went off - it beeped. I didn't think much of it because in real life, people have devices that make noise (phone calls, text messages, beepers) and we simply (try to) ignore them. But I did notice that as we talked and later walked uptown, it continued to go off on a regular basis. Based on my sense of time in this dream, I would estimate that it sounded every 10-15 seconds. Eventually, we arrived at the crest of a hill to see a sunset illuminating the low clouds in a bright, beautiful, pale yellow light.

This is when my wife woke me up to tell me that the carbon monoxide detector has been beeping and she doesn't know how to shut it off.

Um...

Now let's not get off topic here.

The detector was actually malfunctioning and the way it indicates this is to emit a single high pitched beep every 30 seconds. I slept through it very well, thank you. But in doing so, I had a unique opportunity to compare real time to dream time. And as I figured, that stupid theory I heard when I was young was wrong. In fact, it appears that just the opposite took place for me last night - that I compressed time by a factor of 2 or 3. Thirty seconds or real time seemed like 10 or 15 in my dream. This implies that I did not play out the dream like a movie, but composed images while ruminating over the thoughts - making it seem continuous, but in reality was not. What I was "seeing" took longer to produce than the time that seemed to elapse for the actions.

You just never know when science is going to rear its pretty little head.