In Continuum.

I am familiar with the idea that time travels at a different pace in our dreams as compared to reality. That is to say, two hours of activities in your dreams could merely mean two minutes of your waking life, and time is really just a relative term in that sense. I was first introduced to this concept from the movie Waking Life, when the characters Celine and Jesse talked about how your dreams move at a different pace from you waking life. I got what they were trying to say, and have in some points experienced that for myself. But it has become more prominent in the past week, that I simply cannot put my mind to rest in regards to the issue. You see, I have been experiencing that phenomenon in my dreams at night, the whole time disparity in my head as oppose to reality. I have been dreaming about long drawn events happening in my head that lasts for days and days, only to realize that I have only been asleep for about three hours or so. The events of the dream certainly spanned for more than a day, maybe even a week in a particular one. I woke up thinking that a week has passed, and then I'd grab the clock next to my bed, only to realize that it is the same day, only a few hours after I have fallen asleep. It got me thinking about the possibilities of being stuck in a dream, in one infinite loop. Oh, the horrors. 

The first dream was about me being in the army, just an ordinary week spent in camp with my friends. I remember it being a rather lazy week, truth be told, not many activities went on while I was dreaming. I remember booking into camp with my civilian shirt, then changing into my army t-shirt before going to sleep. Then I remember falling in to go for breakfast on the first day, the bunch of us sitting around and doing nothing for the rest of the day, then breakfast the very next morning. The same monotonous activities repeated itself a few times, and I remember thinking to myself that it'd be one more day before book out day (Friday). On the last day, we had to do area cleaning, as usual, and all of us grabbed dustpans and brooms and started cleaning our bunks and the corridors. It felt like an ordinary day in camp, just the bunch of us going through the same old routines. Of course, the normal rules of a dream applied here, with the distortions of little details and distant sceneries. Other than that, everything else felt normal and real, though it's not like I could tell the difference at that time. Lucid dreams don't happen very often, and I tend to get too excited before I could gain control. 

Then the dream came to an end when I booked out, a week passed in my dreams and I woke up in my bed. It was half past eleven in the morning, and I have only been asleep for eight hours at that point. It was really strange, as I laid there and thought about what happened in the past week, in my head. I didn't care about it too much, though. It was just another dream, of course, and the point was that I actually woke up from it, no problem. I thought about what Celine and Jesse said in the movie, about how our lives may just be the flashing back of memories experienced by the older versions of ourselves as we are just about to die. And because our brain functions at a different speed than reality, we are just looking back at our past as we are slowly dying away. It is said to occur between the seven to twelve minutes of brain activity that we all have after our hearts have stopped. Who knows what that seven to twelve minutes could equate to in our heads, anyway. It could be weeks, months, or even years! That is why our lives right now could merely be the older versions of ourselves looking back, and everything is happening within the span of that seven to twelve minutes. Yes, it is very existential. 

I had a similar dream yesterday night that lasted for days on end, when in actual fact it lasted for just a little over three hours. It involved me going over to the States for my studies, and it started with me preparing to go over. I packed my things, took a cab to the airport, met a few friends there, took a long haul flight to New York, and from there we made our way to the main campus. I remember settling into the apartment, checking out the rooms of my friends, unpacking my things and then making phone calls back home. Then I remember my parents visiting after some time, and in between I had classes in school and everything. It felt like a very long time, and I even remember myself missing my loved ones back home in that dream. Then, of course, I woke up, and it was only a quarter past eight in the morning. So that was what got me thinking about the possibilities of being trapped inside a dream. Suddenly, the dreams felt a little too real for comfort, especially when you cannot draw the lines between the facts and the fictions. 

Imagine yourself living a life in your head, going through what you'd normally do in a day and then repeat that ad infinitum. You could be doing the same thing for years in your head and not know it. Since everything works differently, you wouldn't feel it in real life at all. Five years in your head could be just ten hours of sleeping. The problem, then, is the possibility of not breaking away from the routine, not being able to wake up at all. It is scary how vulnerable our body is, it really only takes a malfunction of the "waking button" for us to be trapped in a dream forever. A nerve or our brain short circuits, and we could be stuck in a loop forever and ever, until the end of time. The scariest part is, what if we are actually in a dream right now, and we just don't know it? Maybe we were involved in a horrid car accident, causing us to be in a comatose state somehow. We could be in the hospital right now, and we are merely trapped in our dreams, the memories of the past. If you are dreaming, please get out of this repetitive nightmare and wake up right now! If I am dreaming and you are currently reading this, please find every way possible to wake me up. Please, I don't want to be stuck in a dream forever.