Time

Time and time riddles can be a difficult element of dream interpretation. Since dreams come to us as phantasmagoria, only a few signs can be used to judge how exactly time is perceived in a dream. A single dream may appear to continue in real time—for example, twenty minutes of REM sleep events; another may unfold as a series of edited scenes that take place over days, weeks, years, or an immeasurably long period; and still another dream may not have any time reference at all.

One of the ways to determine the movement of time in a dream is simply to imagine scenes of situations and try to establish some chronological changes. Another way is to think about numbered objects in a dream and connect their numbers with the time frame of your life.

If the clock in your dream shows 5:15, it can be a time, a date, or the time that has passed between two ages; in the latter case, perhaps five and fifteen years.

Sometimes temporary mysteries are upsetting and surprising, sometimes they are full of deep meaning: you can easily observe the cyclical structure of life that repeats itself periodically, remember the time when maturity and self-awareness appeared, how long the transition period took. Many things can be understood in this way. Sometimes the temporal aspect can affect the emotional environment of sleep; it is likely that a dream in "real time" will have a different emotional background than a dream in "different time".