Spirit Bear Dreaming

Part of the problem of this sort of question is that when you try to define time itself you run into problems. We tend to describe time by using that which we created to measure time. That is, we invented clocks to measure the passage of time, so using clocks to define time seems to be a bit of circular reasoning, from my view. We all have a sense of what time is, but I've yet to hear a definition of it that does not refer to itself in some way. So, there is a lot of weirdness when you try to pin down what time actually is.

The approach I use to work with the concept of time is to picture it as something our body does to structure experience for our mind, something that comes from the way our senses work. Given that, then it seems to me that what we call time in dreams is of the same sort of thing, something that we impose on dream experience to give it order and structure.

I've often noticed that during dreaming that I am having experiences, but upon waking my mind will assemble a narrative of sorts, deciding if the sequence makes sense as it goes along. Some part of me is imposing order on the dream and making a report of the dream that my waking self can handle. These two, the experience and the report, are not necessarily the same.

I've had some unusual dreams that seem to have no-time, or run in parallel threads of time, and when I sit with the memory of them I cannot decide if the order I impose on the dream when waking was the right order. But I live in the world that we share, where we communicate in linear, time-based experience. So I seem to need to make experience into a linear sequence of time. Out of habit? Is time a requirement? I don't know, but it is useful to talk as if it is.

So, to try to flesh this out a bit more, and hopefully not to make this more confusing, let me restate things. A dream is experience, which may or may not be in time. It can feel like it is outside of time, or like it is in waking time or in strange states that match neither of those. Perhaps it can be in real-time on some occasions.

We have a memory of dreaming, and that memory may be structured by our need to impose time on the experience, in order to make it conform with the way our brain or waking mind works. Then there is a report of a dream, a narrative that fits the way we tell stories, laying them out in sequence in the convention way.

So, to answer the question, we might dream in real-time, but it is not required that we do so in order to have dream experience. My sense of it is that we have many ongoing threads of dreaming in our consciousness at all times, but that the waking, dealing-with-survival part of our awareness may or may not pay attention to those. When sleeping we may sometimes shift attention to those dreaming parts and sometimes our waking selves participate or notice those dreaming threads of consciousness.

I suppose that one aspect of dreaming is to make us aware of how our sense of time is essentially arbitrary, in that we seem to make time as a frame around experience. Perhaps other modes are possible?

~~fran

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