Spirit Bear Dreaming

We most certainly can. Since the “space” where dreaming occurs is not the same as our physical reality, and we are not limited to the kind of time and space conforming experience we have in our waking lives, we have different sorts of experience than waking life. When people talk about time they tend to make authoritative remarks as if we humans really understand time, as if the devices we build to measure time were more profound and meaningful that they actually are. Clocks are mechanical devices we've devised to measure some physical events. They do not capture any of the psyche's marvelous experience of life. And measuring the complexity of our inner lives by clocks is never satisfying or nurturing, is it?

We've all had the experience of time moving fast or slow. Consider that this might be the reality of time and that clocks totally miss it. A few times in my life I have been in situations where time seemed to nearly stop, to reach a slow motion state where I could examine things in detail as they roll on by, a second seeming like many minutes.

My point here is simply that time is not so easy to talk about, or easy to understand. We live in a post-Einstein world where classical notions of time have been destroyed, yet many of us talk about time in a blithe and mechanical manner that ignores this. Your phone uses a global GPS system, and that system's clocks are constantly being corrected to compensate for relativistic effects, or they'd get out of sync in short order, and your mapping app would be very, very wrong.

Reading deeper into the physics of time we find a lot of mind-bending oddities concerning time, not the least of which is that nobody has a great definition of time or understanding of what it is. So, I tend to be a bit critical of any descriptions of human experience being tied to such fuzzy ideas about waking physical reality. If you find them convincing and satisfying, then good, but I think the whole topic of time is much larger than we imagine, and also not well understood at all, so caution is in order.

My experience in dreaming includes many dreams where I have traveled in time, and even a few dreams where I was able to manipulate time. In one grand dream I was part of a Time Shifter team. My Time Robot sidekick and I had to beam down into a crashed spaceship that was under attack, and attempted to rescue a crew member who had been killed. We could only do this by sifting back in time.

We got there and used our time shifting powers to shift the area around the man to try to rewind it to before the lethal shot. We tried over and over, modifying our strategy each time, but each attempt had been anticipated by the enemy during the initial attack! They also had ability to modify time and also to anticipate probable outcomes to changing time. This evolved an interesting story with a lot of cool scifi ideas, but the experience of the dream was of being in a live situation where I had to manipulate time directly, and then move an area into the past and let it run forward. I had tools and a smart robot who could also manipulate time and calculate different probable outcomes of modifying the past.

It was a fun dream, and I've had a number of other time travel dreams, like traveling back to the beginning of time. But I read this dreaming as all being a part of some aspect of my self trying to make me see that time, as it is in dreams, is fluid. That my notions of time were not very useful or accurate and that I'd have to dig a bit deeper for more understanding.

So far I've concluded that time is much more flexible than we let ourselves see, that we make things conform to cultural notions of time without much notice.

My experience since these dreams has been to explore time and probabilities from a personal perspective in more depth. From here it seems that dreams allow us to construct dream time and dream space as we need them for the dreaming we are doing. So, time travel in dreams? No problem.

I wanted to note that I answered a related question, and you can read it here if you want a little more detail: Do we experience dreams in real-time?

Happy time travels!

~~fran

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