Famous urban legends

[jeffnc]

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The how come I can have like a full-on vivid dream with lots of plot twists in like 30 seconds? (I've fallen asleep watching TV and woken up knowing it was only 30 sec. later.) Hmmmm? I think our brain slows down and partially shuts down during conscious hours to keep us from going insane.

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I'm sure that my brain has concocted dreams that supposedly lasted about 5 minutes, in about 5-10 seconds. This sometimes occurs when your alarm goes off, and it just so happens that the noise coincides with something that happens at the end of a 10 minute dream. It's too coincidental for that too happen, so I conclude my brain retro-manufactured a dream that concludes with an alarm durign the several seconds it took for me to awake.

I'm not sure my brain worked at super high speed though. It might have just given me the impression that it was a 10 minute dream. Time might not "play" the same way necessarily as in real life. It's possible that a sequence of events could be encoded as a single "snapshot".