Do dreams play out in real time, or is it 3 hours worth of story in the last seconds before you wake?

Question

I had a dream that ended at a very unfortunate time (let's just say it was absolutely on the edge of beginning to get very nice, like within a second in the dream) when suddenly i woke up to the phone ringing. I have heard that dreams are actually played dozens, even hundreds of times faster than real time, such that the dream that seemed like it got cut off, in its approximate 20 or 30 minutes of run-time i can remember, was actually only occurring in the real-world over 3 seconds or less. The reason i wonder, is because if the phone rang once, my brain could have interpreted that to create an ending for my dream (through a seeming 30 minutes of story) that coincided perfectly with my waking. This seems to have happened several other times, where i wake at points in a dream that are relevant, instead of the midst of things.

So do dreams play out in your head at real-time, or are they sped up to being dream minutes flashing by in reality seconds as i've heard?

Answer 1

Consider:

REM and particular brain wave patterns are associated with dreaming and they last for an extended period. When people displaying such external signs, they report having been dreaming. It is more extravagant to suppose that they always create the entire dream scenario during the final seconds and that the correlation between the duration of REM and the reported durations of dreams is a coincidence.

People often reports dreams that observers note show the influence of conversations, TV, and radio in their presence as they slept. Again, they could have incorporated something they'd heard, many minutes prior into the dream during the final seconds, but that is the more extravagant explanation.

However, I know of no argument, apart from appeals to simplicity, for rejecting the "the entire dream was just created in the final seconds before waking" supposition. But the simplicity argument supports what researchers deem the most productive course to pursue in brain research.

Answer 2

While time passes differently in dreams, I don't think it works quite like that. We dream several times during the night, at the beginning of the night our dreams tend to be shorter, lasting a few minutes or even a few seconds, toward the morning dreams get longer, up to 20 or 30 minutes....

Answer 3

Don't know for sure. I think they happen in seconds. I remember having a dream of being on a rollar coaster with friends once, but awoke to find the house shaking from an earthquake.