How much time can be put in an hour?

Many people fall into the state of a daydream every once in a while. That state where you create your own world and what is happening. Or perhaps they fall into a state where they ponder the future or look to the past. Lets define dreamtime as the time that passes in those dreams or moments. How much dreamtime can be covered per unit of standard time?

Daydreams are often very complex. You can control how fast or how slow things happen. The dreamtime is often based on how detailed the daydream. When creating a more detailed world it may take more standard time per unit of dreamtime because how much time it takes to create a world. On the other hand when thinking and creating events to happen in a dream it can be much faster depending on what perspective you’re following. If one chooses to they can make several events or even make time-skips in daydreams, which would cause dreamtime to move faster than standard time.

Pondering the future is similar to daydreaming. This is because you are still creating events, though you may be looking at people you know or events that are going to happen. Which brings us to the main difference between daydreaming and pondering the future. Daydreams are purely created and don’t have to take root in reality at all, while pondering the future has the same logical bounds as the real world. For example you can’t ponder the future in which you will sprout wings and fly, but you can daydream about it.

This leaves us with our last dreamtime, reflection of the past. At least for me it’s the most complex. Lets take for example in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, As Clarissa walks through town she is able to think of the past. If we count reflecting the past as an event it looks as though Clarissa never has a moments rest. Her walk is no longer perceived as a long boring walk through town, but also a walk through her memories. Like Clarissa I often find myself reflecting on the past. There are two ways in which you can reflect on the past either multi-event or single event.

In multi-event one can look to see all the events that happened in a certain period of time. Thus dreamtime of multi-event is moving much faster than standard time. On the other side single-event is more detailed reflection of one event. For example you can analyze anything that happened in one night. Looking at any particular detail to try to figure out the ‘whole story’. I often am analyzing important events between close friends and me. I will look at every word, every sentence, facial expressions, and body language and analyzing that much detail causes dreamtime to move much slower than standard time.

How much dreamtime can we place in an hour of standard time? It seems it depends on what we are doing at the moment. Reflections seem to move slower than standard time, while summaries seem to move much faster. It seems that how much we fit into an hour of standard time is based on how much we want to fit into an hour of standard time.


Woolf, Virginia. “Mrs Dalloway.” Oxford University Press. 2009. Print.