All Night LD (6-8 hours)

if you were to have an LD for the entire night, wouldn’t you feel exhausted in the morning like you got no sleep? Or would you feel completely rested and refreshed?

I ask because you are conscious the entire night, not allowing for the natural brain recovery that goes on while you’re unconscious.

would love to hear some answers :smile:

I don’t think you can LD all night. You have certain stages of sleep with dreams and certain stages without dreams. Although, you can remain conscious all night. I think that it would be tiresome to your mind though.

You will have some times that you will not be dreaming during the deep sleep phases. Other than that this question comes up a lot. We’ve had one natural LD’er say they lose a lot of restful sleep due to LD’s, and another say they feel fine. Perhaps the first had another existing condition that accounted for the tiredness and the frequent LD’s, but who knows? I personally don’t think it is draining based on my own experience, but I have yet to have an LD lasting anywhere near that long.

thanks for the answers :smile:

I too have yet to experience a really long LD :seer:

I don’t think its possible. Or if by some super endurance training you manage it, it wouldn’t “count” as sleep. You’d still need regular sleep to rest your brain.

As it is, sleep comes in cycles. It’s seperated into NonREM and REM phases. REM involves most dreams and is normaly only 20-25% of the whole sleep time. The percentages change from person to person and i wouldn’t be at all surprised if regular LDers account for more REM uptime than regular dreamers. It would be interesting to see a study done on this.

A lot of people report dreams that appear to be an entire day long. I think I’ve heard about dreams that appeared to be weeks too. I’ve experienced at least half a day. You can’t really know how long you actually dreamed in real time.

I have never felt exhausted from LD’s. It’s the opposite for me. I wake up with more energy.

It’s possible to dream even during nREM sleep, according to more recent studies. Even so, it would not be possible to dream throughout the entire time you sleep. You wake up for a brief period after each cycle, thus making a continuous dream out of the question.

There is such thing as time dilation though. It’s somewhat of a controversial subject, but, as some have already stated, people have reported having dreams that seem to have lasted for days, weeks, etc.

You can dream all night, in fact, you do. You just can’t remember it all. Dreams that occur during nREM are substantially less vivid and less memorable. I remember watching some show on TV or reading it online, though I can’t remember where.

Interesting, i generally keep rough track of time within a dream. It’s not exact, but i’ll guess correctly within half an hour if asked what time it is (if i wake up for some reason). I’ve had dreams that spanned longer periods of time, but never lasted that long. It’ll be a new scene of the dream, where it’s clear that a significant amount of time has passed from the previous one, but the in-between time hasn’t been “dreamt through”, it’s just been skipped.

I do think i’ve read that we do dream in certain periods in each cycle, like lolatheloner said, not simply whole night through with memory gaps.

Another thing i’ve noticed with myself is some sort of parallel dreaming. Near the end of the night, say 5am+, i’m more aware of my dreaming (when not in a fully fledged LD) and often “juggle” two or three dreams in my head. I do have to choose one, i don’t think it’s possible to have two at once, but if i don’t progress into first choice far (or hit a dead end) i can pick up another and follow that one. It doesn’t happen always and i don’t think i’ve had more than 3 separate dreams at any one time.

Interesting, and it only seems like you have dreams during certain periods of the night. This is because during REM sleep your dreams are more vivid and ‘just there’ than during nREM sleep, but you do dream all night.

And the choosing from more than one dream sounds interesting. Remember those REM periods? They become longer the longer you’ve been asleep so it sounds like during your long periods you have your parallel dreams.

Parallel dreaming! Thank you for reminding me! I also felt that a long time ago and forgotten about that, although the memory of that is rather vague. It sounds similar - being aware of multiple plots at the same time.

Courtesy of wikipedia

You do dream more as the night progresses. You may dream whole night. I know when I see something during non REM, most of the memory of the event is gone immediately upon becoming aware of this fact.

As for really long lucids, it is possible to experience unnaturally long dreams that are chained together. This is REM rebound. Here a few distinct episodes may be experienced one after another.

I think apart from the discussion wether you could dream all night I think there is a big difference between aware and awake. Point is your mind is busy during a normal dream as well. You don’t realise it’s a dream but anyone who had a really vivid dream they remember knows that in a ND your mind is working just like in real life (which makes me wonder wether you would react the same way if all those nutty things happened IRL but that’s another matter). Point is your mind is not more active during a LD than it is in a very vivid ND. So saying LDing would leave you tired is like saying dreaming leaves you tired. And in my personal experience dreaming is just as good a way to rest as any other.

As Rhewin said there are people saying they feel tired after a long night LDing but as he pointed out as well there are others with different feelings. That leads me to think that it has indeed something to do with a different factor, and the tiredness isn’t the result of LDing itself.

Anyway in the end lucid dreaming is a very personal experience for all but it shouldn’t leave you unrested.

how long does a lucid dream last anyway? not all that long, right?

IRL your average dream cycle lasts anything upto an hour, perhaps on special occasions even longer. So that would be the technical max, but in general they are quite a bit smaller.

It is however possible to stretch time in a LD. So you can make an hour last many hours. There have been reports of dreams several weeks long, if not months. This can be explained through higher activity of the brain and therefore faster time, the brain skipping things and false memories.

The best method of stretching dreams that I know of is the dreamclock that WritersCube invented.

You people forget,
LD time is not real time.
Monroe had a 100-year LD.
It lasted for 2 hours actually.

yes yes, that’s exactly what i’m saying. perceived time is different than actual (i really hope to use this loophole someday :content: )

has anyone tried the dreamclock method?

the what now?