THE DREAM-CONSCIOUS STATE: A PERSONAL JOURNAL OF INNER EXPLORATION
Bruce G. MarcotJOURNALS -- PART TWO (1986-present)
No Time Like Whatever Time It Is Now
For years I have had a unique sense of the passage of time. My wife can attest to this. I can awaken at some dark hour of the night, and after some pondering I can often predict the current time, usually to within 10 or 15 minutes, and sometimes absolutely right on the button to the minute.
It's weird. This happens rather regularly; I can do it most every night. I can be asleep for many hours yet awaken, not consult the clock (which I have to physically pick up and press a light button in order to see the time anyhow), and still come up with the nearly-perfectly correct time. It doesn't happen a full 100% of the instances; in some cases I am off by 40 minutes or more. But in the vast majority of cases I am startlingly close to the correct time.
When I pause to "sense" the correct time, I am not calculating anything. Rather, I am feeling how long the duration seems to have lasted since I last knew the time, even if I have been asleep, and from that I can sense the current time. I don't count hours from the last look at the clock, nor do I use obvious visual clues such as the sun rising or other external stimuli.
It seems I can do this regardless if I have had vivid dreams, or if I cannot recall any dreams. And I can do this whether the duration is very short or very long.
But I have yet to try this within a lucid dream. That could be an interesting experiment. I wonder if the part of my mind and brain that I am "accessing" when I sense the correct time still operates when asleep and dreaming. And if it does not, why not, and how can it "reset" when I awaken? Maybe that would take me a step closer to better understanding my wakeful time-sense, and to better refine my dream time-sense.