The Dreaming Brain is a Time Traveler: Why Sleep Bends Reality
Maybe I’m too sleep deprived today, and on days like today my brain likes to go to strange places, so here we are.
Last night as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and fighting the urge to pick up my phone and start doom-scrolling, I started thinking about time again. You know, as I do.
Behind our eyelids, when sleep finally embraces us, the laws of time collapses.
A lifetime is sometimes lived in minutes, a conversation can stretch across continents and time itself without ever leaving a pillow, and a single breath can have you living an epic story.
The dreaming brain is a time traveler, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
It’s not chained to the linear calendar forced upon our waking selves, instead, it bends, folds, and rewrites time with a physicist’s mischief.
If you’ve ever woken up completely shaken from a dream that felt endless and you’re totally confused what century it is, or wondered how a sprawling saga could unfold in the fifteen minute power-nap you settled down into, then you’ve brushed against this strange reality.
Dreams are not only nighttime entertainment (although, sometimes they are too!), they’re my own personal evidence that our minds aren’t bound by chronology.
The Physics of the Pillow
In the waking world of our everyday boring lives, physics demands obedience and can’t really be broken.
In life, a second is a second, whether it drips by in a hospital waiting room or vanishes in my husband’s warm and sweet hugs.
…but the dreaming world takes whatever liberties it wants.
Neuroscientists studying REM sleep (the stage where most vivid dreaming occurs) have seemed to come to the conclusion that external time (real life) and internal time (dream life) do in fact diverge from one another.
An experiment (LaBerge’s Pilot Counting Study) asked dreamers trained in lucid dreaming to perform eye-movement signals inside their dream while timing an action, like counting to ten.
The result sometimes they kept pace with real seconds, but often, time dilated or collapsed sometimes.
In dreams, ten seconds could feel like thirty, or like three, there didn’t seem to be a coorelation.
The brain’s time perception networks are disrupted somewhere in all the haze of purple clouds and swirly trees in the dream world.
The prefrontal cortex (our waking accountant of minutes) seems to quiet itself down, taking a little rest itself.
Without it, it seems like our mind tunes into a somewhat freer stage where time is merely a suggestion, not a law.
A kiss may stretch for an eternity, or a city may rise and fall between blinks.
Time inside dreams is not really a lie, it’s just more elastic than real life.
Memory as a Time Machine
Why does this happen though?
It seems like dreaming borrows the same machinery in our little noggins we use to remember.
Memory is not the vault we think it is, it’s a reconstruction of what we think something used to be, a theater piece restaged a little differently each time we summon it back.
When we remember things, we collapse distances, skipping that long boring march of seconds and playing things in 2x or 32x.
For a moment we can be back in childhood in an instant, sitting at a desk in college hearing a chalk squeak on the board, or holding hands with your husband as someone pronounces you man and wife.
The dreaming brain uses a similar trick, but paints new and fantastical stories out of borrowed fragments from here and there.
Neuroscientists call it “hippocampal replay” , when the brain sifts through the day’s experiences, shuffling, reorganizing, and rehearsing whatever it wants to.
In this shuffle, chronology breaks. A morning meeting can follow a childhood birthday in an old home which then melts into a future we’ve never lived where we’re traveling in Spain.
The dream is a strange time collage, built of scraps glued without care for sequence or if it even makes any sense.
I suppose in that way, every dream is a strange rehearsal for memory itself.
It’s the brain practicing the art of time travel the only way it knows how.
The Artist’s Idea
Writers, mystics, and philosophers have long preached what neuroscience is now tracing with electrodes: that sleep bends reality.
Coleridge awoke from an opium dream and wrote Kubla Khan, swearing it had come to him whole as if he had lived it in another life.
Jorge Luis Borges described dreams as proof that “time is a river which divides us.”
Think of your own dreams and how often they feel more like places you’ve visited than elaborate fictions you’ve invented.
You sometimes wake with the residue of journeys, as though you slipped into another century for a few hours.
I, for one, am often mad I couldn’t bring the funny things I find or invent in my dreams back to reality with me.
On my strange lack-of-sleep-days, I think our brains are not creating dreams so much as tuning into them, like a radio wave beyond our waking bandwidth.
Is it possible that these dreamscapes, with their broken chronologies, are the normal environment of the mind, and waking time is the imposed cage?
The Practical Traveler
It’s tempting to leave dreams in the realm of myth: beautiful, fleeting, and completely untouchable to most of us.
Lucid dreamers take it to the next level though.
Some try to train themselves to stretch a five-minute nap into what feels like hours of practice.
Is it perfect? Not remotely.
You can’t learn a concerto from scratch in your sleep, but you can refine, polish, repeat, until your waking brain slides into the motion more easily.
The Night’s Warnings
But dreams aren’t only benevolent tricksters, they can hurt you too. I would know with my night terrors that frequently haunt my dreams.
A nightmare doesn’t end when you bolt upright; sometimes it stretches on like an endless corridor, dragging you back down the same hallway night after night.
I’ve had more days like this than I care to recall at this point in time.
The clock says you’ve only been asleep an hour, but your body swears you’ve endured a lifetime.
The brain doesn’t care about mercy in these moments (sadly for me), it replays the fear, rehearses the awful panic, and pushes the loop tighter and tighter and tighter until waking feels like surfacing from drowning.
That’s why therapies like EMDR feel so strange, they sort of mimic the mechanics of dreaming with flickering eyes, fractured time, and memory re-stitched in unfamiliar order.
The general hope is that by rewriting the sequence, and loosening the frozen gears in your mind, the nightmare will finally release its grip.
One of my strangest experiences was being half awake in my (now) husband’s arms and looking off to the side of the room.
I watched as a decayed hand reached up and grabbed the corner of the bed.
As the zombie (in the form of someone I wish I had never met) pulled himself up, he stared at me with his light blue eyes…the familiar view of pupils that didn’t match reaching toward me.
He put one of his fingers to his mouth in a shushing gesture, and I watched as his jaw fell on one side, held up by his beard.
I closed my eyes tightly and counted until I hit 1,000.
I could feel the wetness of blood soaking into my side as I lay there. When I opened them again, he was still there.
It took me about five days to fall back to sleep in any meaningful way, I fought it every step of the way.
It took even longer for the images to leave the forefront of my mind while I was awake.
Dreams may be time machines, yes, but nightmares remind us that if the gears jam, the traveler is trapped inside.
The Future of Dream Science
Neuroscience is edging closer to charting the dream frontier.
Electrodes hum, scanners thrum, and suddenly you’re watching blood flow paint strange patterns on a screen while someone’s mind drifts through an imagined city.
In some labs, trained lucid dreamers already send signals back…a darting eye here, a twitch of a finger there…proof that the sleeper is half aware and reaching out, like a diver tugging on the rope to the surface.
Researchers talk about recording dreams as if they were films, not hazy stories muttered over breakfast.
Picture it: pouring coffee while a monitor replays the dream you just left.
Would it unravel in clean order, or skip and warp like an old reel?
Would you sit through the strangeness of watching yourself live a decade in sixty minutes?
Would I actually want to see mine?
If that day comes, time itself gets slippery. Our clocks and calendars could not be the rulers we thought they were, only clumsy markers for something far more elastic. I’ll have to ask…if a life lived in a dream can be replayed on a screen, is it any less real than the one we stumble through while awake or than the scenes we film on tv?
The alarm drags us back no matter how much we might want to stay in our dream world, blunt as a hammer.
6:30 a.m., Tuesday, a grocery list, a trip to the store, maybe a double shift you have to get to. Either way, it’s still something mundane and not as much fun.
The body obeys honestly, but my mind hesitates. Half-asleep, it still clings to another place: the echo of a conversation, the weight of years lived in a handful of minutes, and for a breath, you can almost feel the glass bending around you, the trick of time still holding. Then it slips again when the sun rises in the sky and the clock reasserts itself. Work calls in the most annoying of ways (bills still need to be paid), inboxes swell with more emails than you could even answer if you could freeze time, and deadlines march on like soldiers.
I think the residue of night doesn’t vanish completely.
It sort of lingers like mist, proof that, at least for a few hours, you broke free.
Sleep was never just escape from our tragic lives, but a workshop. Dreams are experiments in what reality might be if time weren’t a leash but a river that forks, bends, loops back on itself.
So tonight, when the stars swing across the window and you finally sink down into darkness, remember, you’re not just resting, you’re traveling and stretching hours into lifetimes. If you’re lucky and your dreams are sweet, you’ll return at dawn carrying fragments of those other worlds, souvenirs from a voyage through time.
Reads You Might Enjoy:
Your Brain Is Lying to You: Everyday Ways Your Mind Betrays You (And How to Outsmart It)
Dream Hackers: The Science of Lucid Dreaming and the Tech Trying to Control Our Sleep
Are Our Emotions Stored in Water? The Quiet Science (and Wonder) Behind It
Plants Can Sense the Dead? What Science Says About Flora and Human Remains
The Weird Link Between Happiness and Sleep: Why Sadness Makes You Want to Stay in Bed
Sources:
Blagrove, Mark, et al. “Lucid Dreaming: Associations with Internal Locus of Control, Need for Cognition and Creativity.” Imagination, Cognition and Personality, vol. 25, no. 4, 2006, pp. 293–300.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Kubla Khan: Or, a Vision in a Dream. 1816.
Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and General Theory. Crown Publishing, 1961.
Hobson, J. Allan. Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. Oxford University Press, 2002.
LaBerge, Stephen. “Lucid Dreaming: Evidence that REM Sleep Can Support Metacognition.” Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 9, no. 4, 2000, pp. 493–503.
Nir, Yuval, and Giulio Tononi. “Dreaming and the Brain: From Phenomenology to Neurophysiology.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 14, no. 2, 2010, pp. 88–100.
Stickgold, Robert. “Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation.” Nature, vol. 437, 2005, pp. 1272–1278.
van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2015.
Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Scribner, 2017.
