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> lotto@wjh12.UUCP (Jerry Lotto)
> I seem to remember that the time scale for a dream is much faster than
> reality. Perhaps the ENTIRE dream can be a reaction to a particular
> external stimulus?

This is a popular mythology surrounding dreams that incorporate "real
world" events, to be sure, but it is not well substantiated.  In fact, I
recall some research reported in Science News a coupla years ago that
indicated that dreams happen in more-or-less real time, not faster.
This basic method (if I remember correctly) was to let people sleep, and
annoy them after they had experienced various amounts of REM sleep. The
ammount of time spent in REM corresponded closely to the ammount of time
that the dream "seemed to take" when they were prodded awake and asked
about what was going on.

> Furthermore, I believe that you are not able to
> move during a dream (assuming that the duration is a fraction of a
> second or so. I am shakey on the detail here, will experts please
> comment?).

I'm no expert, but (I think from the same source) studies show that in
REM sleep, one is indeed paralyzed and CANNOT move.  Some intermediate
sleep states bordering on REM are what tend to promote the "cannot move
and danger approaching" or "stuck in molassas" type dreams that many
folks experience.  Once the chemical nature of this suppression was
known, it was artificially prevented in cats, which then thrashed around
during REM sleep, as if they were really running, jumping, playing, or
whatever cats dream about, but with no co-ordination with the real
world.  So, your body is paralyzed in dream-state sleep so that you
don't thrash around and hurt yourself.


I think a good explanation of why external events are incorporated in
dreams is a retroactive one.  That is, the event is fit into some
existing situation after it is perceived, and the situation it is fit
into may actually be out-of-time-sequence, that is, may be a while
pastwards in dream-time.

Making this explanation a little more plausible, for the specific
example of sounds, I recall studies (again, Science News is my best
guess as to where I read it) showing that people tend to be unable to
tell whether nearly-simultaneous events, one a sound and another
something else, were really simultaneous, or which one really came first
if not.  Instead, the sound was fit into the perceived timestream where
it "made sense", not where it "really" occured.  This may be an inbred
feature, rather than an inability, perhaps developed to allow a creature
to associate a sound with a sight despite the propogation delay of sound
displacing the events slightly.  Thus, we perceive a hammer strike and
the sound as simultaneous until they are quite far displaced by
distance, and early "talkie" movie soundtracks could afford to be a
little sloppy in sound synchronization and still be perceived as being
in time with the action.

Of course, I am spinning a large speculation on few facts, but I think
it is plausible.  The "facts" I take to be: first that dream-time is not
very much faster than wake-time... one can't fit much more than a minute
of subjective dream-time into a minute of actual sleep, and second that
in terms of sound especially "simultenaity" and relative order of events
can't be reliably perceived.

--
We may not always be right; but, by God, we're never wrong.
                                --- General Wombat
-- 
Wayne Throop      <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti-sel!dg_rtp!throopw