the mechanism is the same as in Jacobs Ladder + Owl Creek
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kaysild — 12 years ago(August 28, 2013 08:05 AM)
You really shouldn't write spoilers of other movies IN YOUR TITLE!! I think it's fine on a discussion board to discuss the movie on which board you're on!! But to add other movie plots is pretty rude, I've been wanting to see Jacobs ladder for awhile now and has to you it's ruined. Jeez you should be a little more considerate
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kylopod — 9 years ago(September 11, 2016 12:35 AM)
And just like regular dreams, in death dreams time itself will be distorted. In a mere second, you can have a dream that feels like it lasts a lifetime. We live entire lives in a single dream that lasts a mere second. So too will our death dream last a long time, subjectively.
What you've just described is a popular folk belief that goes back a long way, and it's found its way into a lot of science fiction (e.g. the movie
Inception
, among others).
The problem? Scientific research has totally failed to back up this belief. Starting with the famous studies on REM sleep in the 1950s, all the evidence has indicated that people dream in "real time." The scientists did all sorts of experiments corroborating this theory. (For example, they found a positive correlation between the length of the REM period detected on the EEG and the length of the dream reported by the sleeper right after being awoken. They also did stuff to test the effects of outside stimuli on sleepers. In one case I remember reading about, they dripped water down a sleeper's back. When the sleeper awoke about a half-minute later, the person reported having had a dream about singing at an opera, and near the end of the dream, molten wax started falling from the ceiling.) While people have long made anecdotal claims about dreams that seemed to last a long time while very little time passed in the real world, none of these has ever been detected in sleep labs.
All this applies to normal REM sleep. It may or may not apply to what you call a "death dream," or what has come to be called a near-death experience, a phenomenon that has yet to be explained by science.