sometimes i dream of a familiar sound, and i spend minutes trying to find the source of it, and i awake to the alarm clock. i look at the time and i know for a fact that it could not have been ringing for that long.
what is instantaneous or momentary in the real world, the dream world can stretch and interpret generously with respect to time. a man can lie in bed and in one second of sleep somehow enact what must be several minutes of dream. this may appear to be an acceleration of the mind in its dream state. but this does not explain the sudden loss in processing power when we finally awake. to me it sounds counterintuitive that the brain speeds up when it is supposed to be resting.
i believe that the brain can write and retrieve a bajillion tons of information in an instant; it is its processing speed that limits our ability to experience all of it in the same amount of time. in order to explain time dilation in the dream state, i posit that the brain can architect an entire dream world in an instant(the rules of which it does not need to create since those rules already exist our memory); the actual happenings in this world, occurs at a much slower rate--a bottlenecked speed which we call real time. seemingly impossible things like teleportation, morphing, flight, and lightning-fast object creation occur in dreams because the brain can create ideas faster than we can perceive them.
i believe dreams are not alternate realities but ideas that we end up living out in the dream state. and because our minds are so accustomed to the slow pace of time, we end up trying to experience these ideas as life on a timeline; eg. i appear in a dark alley. a large brown furry monster materialises. it chases me. i run. it catches up to me and grabs onto my leg. i brace myself. i appear in a quiet forest.
unfortunately we cannot prevent this or have it any other way, after all in real life, everything happens on a timeline. what this implies is that dreams are created as ideas, and that creation no matter how big, can be written to the mind in no time at all. however for it to have meaning we as humans are bound by the limit of processing it, and we can only do so by experiencing that idea on a timeline. so then our dreams are set and fixed by the unconscious; we should not discount the relevance of looking at our dreams as ideas we already have rather than as events that are continuously occuring in an external world (dream world) in which we are merely an observer.
in a dream, we are the observer and the observed. and when we awake, the dream itself becomes apparent for what it is--an idea.
this is what i believe creates weight and legitimacy for dream interpretation. what i do not believe is that dreams are an open and active channel for external influence(read active mind control, realtime exchange with the cosmos etc). if there is a possibility for prophetic dreams, those visions must have already been created prior to sleep, and only self-revealed to the subject during the idea-processing activity called dreaming. upon awakening, the dream experience is further intuited upon to reproduce the same idea but in concrete form; dreaming facilitates communication between the conscious and unconscious.
people lie to themselves in real life, but the unconscious does not lie--it is the ultimate truth to self. it speaks to us in dreams and show us in no uncertain terms the ideas, people and objects that preoccupy our conscious minds in waking life. it is reinforces to you your greatest fears, your highest ambitions, your warmest loves, your coldest hates, your most irksome frustrations, your greatest wants, your strongest needs, and by virtue of only showing you what has frequently been on your mind, it is necessarily honest to you regardless of your pathological need to lie to yourself in consciousness. unconscious ideas hold within them the list of things which actually mean everything or nothing to you; a hierarchy of priorities if you will.
so when people say, "Listen to your dreams :)" i somehow feel that they dont know half of what they are even suggesting, even though they are right.
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