時差N小時:夢里的時間是怎么推移的?

Many people believe that hours worth of events andactivities can be dreamed about in a matter ofseconds. Despite this common belief about how wedream, time in dreams actually is not compressed.

很多人認為長達幾個小時的事件或者活動，在夢里幾秒、或者是十幾秒鐘就會一閃而過。其實不然，夢里的時間上并沒有被壓縮。

If you dream of an activity that would take fiveminutes in waking life, you probably dream about itfor a full five minutes. Dream and sleep researcherWilliam Dement conducted two studies thatdemonstrated that dream time was similar to real time.

如果你的夢里出現(xiàn)了一件生活中需要五分鐘才能夠完成的事件，那么在你的夢里，它其實也需要占據(jù)五分鐘。睡眠與夢的研究者威廉·德門特進行了兩項研究，證明夢中對時間的感知和現(xiàn)實中的相似。

Because dreamers' eyes move under their eyelids very rapidly while they are dreaming, Dementwas able to monitor sleepers and record the length of their dreams by observing their rapid eyemovement. After recording this information, Dement would wake dreamers and have themwrite down a description of their most recent dream.

因為做夢者在做夢的時候，眼球在眼皮下快速地轉(zhuǎn)動，所以德門特能夠通過觀察眼球的快速轉(zhuǎn)動來監(jiān)視睡著的人，并來記錄他們做夢的時長。記錄完這些信息后，德門特便叫醒做夢者，并記錄下他們對最近的夢的描述。

He assumed that longer dreams would take more words to describe than shorter ones. Whenhe compared the number of words in each dream report with the number of minutes thedream had occurred, he found that the longer the dream, the more words the dreamer used todescribe it.

他認為需要更多的文字來描述較長的夢，而較短的夢所需文字則較少。當他比較了每個夢境報告里的文字數(shù)和分鐘數(shù)，發(fā)現(xiàn)夢越長，用來描述的文字就越多。

In another related experiment, Dement woke sleepers while they were dreaming and askedthem how long they perceived their most recent dream had taken. Eighty-three percent of thetime they perceived correctly whether their dreams had been going on for a long time or for ashort time. With these experiments, Dement concluded that time in dreams is nearly identicalto time in waking life.

在另一項相關試驗中，德門特叫醒正在做夢的人，要求他們說出自己做夢的時間。不論夢境持續(xù)的時間是長還是短，83%的人對時間的把握很準確。通過這些實驗，德門特總結(jié)到：夢里的時間幾乎和現(xiàn)實中的時間一樣。

So the next time in your dreams you slay a dragon or fly from your house to your workplace,the amount of time it seemed to take is probably just about how long it actually took to dreamit.

因此下次做夢時，無論你夢到屠龍或者從住處飛到工作場所，夢中這些事情發(fā)生的時間也許就是你做夢的時間。