There are stories of people experiencing whole lifetimes within dreams, especially within comas, as well as hallucinogenic trips that seem to last many years.
The human brain is a lot weirder than we know.
And it should be deeply troubling that if we ever learn to manipulate this kind of time perception that some people want to turn it towards torture, and they could get state backing to do so.
There are stories of people experiencing whole lifetimes within dreams
There are anecdotes about people claiming to remember living whole lifetimes within dreams.
Even taking this utterly impossible to prove claim at face value, there’s no way to replicate anything like that in practice.
And it should be deeply troubling
I’m about as concerned with this as the possibility someone might try to reverse my gravity or Frankenstein my head into someone else’s torso.
I once had a dream like that, maybe 20 years ago. When I woke up, I was like:
“Oh, this is my old room. But how…? It was just a dream! Now I get to live it.”
It was a wonderful feeling. People would be hooked on it if it would be reproducible.
I also have memories of what happened in there, but I’m fully aware that my brain could be projecting.
The plural of “anecdote” is “data”, and this is a fairly commonly reproduced story. I don’t know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports. If we refused to listen to anybody about their personal stories, we’d know next to nothing about the human mind, and there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans.
this is a fairly commonly reproduced story
The “falling dream” is a fairly common reproduced story. But “we’re going to invent a device that gives you the falling dream” is a big claim and “we’re going to give you a heart attack in your sleep by inflicting the falling dream on you” is an even bigger one.
I don’t know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports.
Self-reports substantiated with medical data to correlate the symptoms with real physical conditions.
You don’t rush a guy with chest pains into the ER, then skip the EKG.
And if the guy with the chest pains says “These pains feel like they’ve been happening forever”, you don’t put “forever” on his medical record under “onset of symptoms”.
there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans
States of mind are very different than conditions of physiology. And even they have their limits. The title card is pure fiction. And trying to tie it back to “a feeling I had when I woke up from a dream” isn’t any kind of evidence-based analysis.
If those situations can create strong memories about things that didn’t physically happen, then it seems like almost anything can appear to have happened from that individual’s perspective.
From the individual’s standpoint, once they are awake they can’t really tell the difference between having experienced X and having vivid false memories of experiencing X.
Maybe some kind of real time brain scanning/monitoring could help tell the difference.
