Apparently people can go from zero to Neo in the Matrix in just under 14 days.

The perception of time in dreams vs clock time is something that does come up in dream culture. Also with entheogens, hypnosis and other altered-states of consciousness people have reported having a sense of time, or "duree" that is longer than physical clock-time.

Very noticeable in dreaming during short naps where 20 minutes of napping seems to produce hours of dream content. Having written on this topic over the years, I have had a lot of e-mails from people who have had "extended time" in dreams that span not into just two months, but some say entire lifetimes.

I know dream practitioners who invoke this, one who is from India that has trained in dreaming exclusively for spiritual practice and can do what he claims as being 10 years.

It creeps up in my dreams from time-to-time but the longest perception of dream-time that I can safely guage is only 2 weeks, can never seem to break that barrier. Still, it's interesting when fully lucid to find yourself in such a prolonged state of time. I can hit the eject button anytime so I do push the limits as I value the cultivation of time in dreams as part of my personal practice.

I have about 10 dreams a night, most more real than waking life.

Some dreams will be feature length and last hours even after waking up and going the toilet they continue like a pause button was pressed.

I read Stephen Leberge stuff 20years back and bought a dreamlight, all worked.

If you want to stay lucid in a dream don't let on you know you are dreaming to the subconscious mind or it will wake you up. It's very hard not to tell the other dream characters they are in a dream lol.

The thing that brings me most dreams is eating cheese late at night.

Thanks for posting your research.

What are your thoughts on the Carlos Castaneda ?

Also, what health benefits do you find with taking charge of your dreams?

I like Castaneda's work minus the drug use. That caused a lot of dream drug culture even though Don Juan told him that he didn't need the drugs but had insisted. In doing so it did cause a lot of scientific pushback on dreaming is all linking it to just tripping balls.

That said, his work is very interesting for me. So is Terrance Mckinnon and Rick Strassman. Although I don't personally use drugs in my practice, I do see lots of similar types of experiences in dreaming that tie into other people's experiences with psychedelic drug use.

But I also don't drink either, kind of boring I guess.

Here's the weird thing, the longer the experienced dream time seems to be the shorter the actual time spent dreaming.

And what are the advantages of harnessing our dreams? Are their health benefits?

It's both... if we look at dreaming as just a tool, it's there for what ever purpose we want to use that tool as. As dreams connect to our limbic-system and this is not only evident in fear-elevation in the body with nightmares that can lead to night-terrors but also the dreams that need some clean-up on Isle 7 so to speak.

Nightmares are harmful because they trigger our fight-or-flight fear mechanism causing the amygdala to release Adrenaline and Cortisol which is a stress hormone that can be harmful on both our mental and physical health. Although our dreams are trying to help us resolve this fear or trauma, it can also fail to cause it to further embed leading to paranoia, phobias, psychosis and even other mental health problems such as anxieties, panic attacks, depression.

The effect on the body can be enlargement of the amygdala it also impacts our hippocampus causing it to shrink (loss of long-term memory) and can affect development in the prefrontal-cortex plus other impacts on lymph nodes, the stomach, etc.

However, happy dreams or positive dreams can have a reverse effect and do the Dopamine, Endorphine, Seratonin and Oxytocin releases that promote healthy cognitive development improves the immune system, lowers stress etc.

I cover all this along with substance-induced nightmares in the fourth course because I do feel it's overlooked in how we can eliminate nightmares through dream programming and produce "sweet dreams" for better mental and physical health, even just a little more happy ending dreams for some people are better than a nightmare imo.

Thx for your thread, OP! One of my fav subjects, actually.

Will check back later to see added comments.

Is it really necessary nowadays to market your dreaming course as "Dreaming for Gamers"?

I haven't been a gamer ever, but I've had a few experiences on the other side of consciousness: One or two OOBEs, a few lucid dreams, dreams within dreams and false awakenings, but all of that is decades in the past.

Sometimes I still experience the vibrational state that precedes an OOBE, but I'm unable to keep my consciousness "on" and fall asleep each time. I dream, I can remember some dreams, but they're 99% meaningless garbage nowadays...

So your course is free and can fix that? Help me get over your "for gamers" branding... I'm a bit old school. I'm in my 50s, and when I was younger we called stuff like this "expanding one's consciousness"...

For you... it's not necessary but there are billions of people who are in stunted or poor cognitive development with dreams that won't bat an eye at the concept of dreaming for higher-consciousness but would for entertainment, which in turn would start the rehabilitation process and promote better brain-function, creative thinking, resolve fears, anxieties, stress, that would then kick in the self-edification process, that would then start to naturally lead to higher-consciousness through direct-experience that otherwise is being blocked by amnesiac sleep, drug abuse and other vices that stunt the dreaming mind keeping it offline.

You can bypass the gaming portion, although students in their 50+ now started to play games recognizing hey this does make really good dream paint.

In the end of the day, if it helps people start to develop a rich, meaningful relationship with their own 3-5 nightly dreams without fear and nightmares, then my work on planet Earth is complete.

Wish I diss not dream, sleep paralysis often as well my dreams are morbid and hard core twisted shit I would not want anyone one else to ever experience.

1 week

I have found that if you are sleep deprived and you nod off
for 15 seconds ...you wake up with the memory of hours worth of dreams that were going on subconsciously while you
were awake.

As some of you know I put together this comprehensive dream training program that is unique to the world, so unique that several dream researchers are now taking a closer look because unlike old-school methods I'm targetting actual neurological development with regards to dream experiences because dreams aren't some magic puff the magic dragon event, they really do require neural pathways and neurons to process the dream experiences in all regions of the brain.

People who don't develop this ability to dream (and we all have 3-5 dreams each night, some birds dream, and all mammals dream) stunt the development of this gift we all have had since birth, the older we get the more stunted and atrophic dreaming becomes until at some point many people never have a dream again.

For the first time, and I know because I'm a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, friends with many real dream researchers and authors spanning 22 years, having taken many programs myself as well as studied cultural dreaming trends on youtube that the vast majority of dream information out there is utter fallacious bullshit.

Why do I know, I've read nearly every scientific paper I can get my hands on that studies dream neurology and psychology plus have 33 years of experience as a lucid or self-aware dreamer nearly every night... decades worth of scientific and actual hands-on experience with it.

The youtube "gurus" and their stair at a pine-cone, snort mugwort, put a crystal under your bed, make a wish and it will happen kind of garbage that only further degrades the dream experience for people who actually want to learn this skill, and develop to the level where they can program and control their dream content as they see fit.

Why this is a problem? Dreaming naturally happens every time we sleep, but we do develop a dreaming mind which up until recently high-resolution fMRI studies started to compare active dreamers vs inactive dreamers to see what neurological differences existed between the two and the findings of these studies show that people who participate in their own dreams develop much higher white matter (neural pathways) and grey matter (neurons) vs inactive dreamers.

What do you think is doing all of that processing power to produce a dream experience? The brain obviously. Dreams are epiphenomenal of information processing in the brain and neuroscience proves it's a gained skill just like learning a language.

If you study language development then you will know if a child is not exposed to early language development while the brain is forming neural pathways and neurons up to the age of 25 and then reintroduce the now-adult to learning language the once feral child will never be able to speak fluently due to stunted language development. Well... turns out dreams are no different and prone to similar developmental problems hence why many adults who want to start learning how to dream having not developed it in their developmental years struggle to get results and usually end up frustrated and quit.

The problem... if you really understand the dreaming mind, you'll know that like anything in our body, without proper stimulation and development it will atrophy, even if developed in our younger years then neglected in adulthood. How do you know if you stunted your dreaming mind and it's atrophic? Well, here is a list of symptoms:

1.) Little or no dream recall from the 3-5 your mind naturally produces.
2.) Lack of sensory-feedback, no taste, no smell, no touch, no sound, dim images.
3.) Depreciated higher-brain functions like metacognition and awareness were while in a dream you are in a trance-like state, unable to preform rational tasks or make choices.

In every region of the brain that deals with dreaming people who are active dreamers have much more brain activity and neural development then non-dreamers who are in a state of atrophy.

It gets worse, the older you get, and the more neglected this becomes the atrophy can become so severe you may never dream again. How do we know? Dream frequency studies on age shows a gradual cognitive decline in the dream experience. No different than any other skill that if we stop developing tends to dull over time. It's just the nature of how the brain optimizes our current focus and interests and wires itself to adapt.

Knowing all this I created a system that uses stimulation -> review -> replay -> recall to target every area of cognitive development for the dreaming mind and treat atrophy.

What does that mean?

1.) Stimulation during the day with a source material.
2.) Reviewing the source material during pre-sleep REM Reply
3.) Observing the source material in Dream Replay as part of our mind long-term memory consolidation process that uses dream-replay.
4.) Recall when waking up and several techniques to address proper stimulation of dream recall to increase dream recall frequency.

I based this method on many years of training in cognitive dreaming using a system I developed back in 1998 called "Cognitive Mapping" long before neuroscience supported that dreams are just a cognitive skill no different than learning to play the piano, paint a picture or drive a car.

Taking a skill-based approach using stimulation exercises I wanted to see if this new system to dreaming would work so put together a website with courses and packed it full of dream research, neuroscience and psychology to see measure the effectiveness of treating the brain like a muscle and working out these regions with daily exercises would that rehabilitate atrophy and help students develop actual functional skills with their dreams.

The results have been outstanding. From people who have low-frequency dream recall ie one week, now having multiple dreams each night.

People who have been audible/visual dreamers (some as long as 30 years) suddenly having restored sensory-feedback such as touch, taste, and smell providing a much richer dream experience.

Imagine not having taste/touch/smell in your dreams for 30 years to now being able to now touch and feel, pick up dream food, and actually smell it and taste it. In the olden days that would be proclaimed a miracle but no... that's neuroscience and understanding the dreaming mind addressing atrophy with stimulation exercises... not magic, science, skill, and training.

Just like memory and perception, the awareness training addresses cognitive atrophy in the prefrontal cortex using stimulation, and every student who has engaged that course has had rapid success with lucidity or self-awareness.

The other difference is active vs passive dreaming as part of the training so students are now not just having dreams they are programming their dream experiences and almost every person who reaches 14 days ends up going full Neo in the matrix with dream control. That took me 2 years to develop when fumbling in the dark so very happy with those results.

Well, it's very new, I'm just very happy that these results are so dramatic for the people willing to go through this system and I can't wait to see where it will end up in the future. So far it's just the 3 neurological developmental/atrophy rehabilitation courses and the psychological course that has seen completion but even the psychological course was tremendously beneficial for the one student who progressed through it, again another win for dream psychology.

I did a video to appreciate and recognize their work and success with this new program. Like I said to a few dream researchers I know, this will revolutionize dreaming and having shared the results they agree so hopefully I'll publish more papers on the results in the near future for submission.

I came up with those techniques 26 years ago. Hardly unique by any means and if you read enough psychological literature you will find similar models.