Time
This is a slight break from my usual content. I want to introduce my thoughts pertaining to time and what it is.
I lucid dream every night and I have a consistent, day to day dream life, and obviously my "waking" life as it's known to dreamers like me. In my dream, I fell asleep during a car ride while I was lucid. I woke up in the dream after what I could internally perceive as a microsecond. It's the same feeling as when you wake up after being asleep.
When you wake up, it feels like time went by quickly, yet we understand we have likely been sleeping for hours. In my lucid dream, it felt very similar however, I knew hours had not passed, and it was truly a microsecond. I didn't dream within my dream. It was just black and then I woke up at my destination and continued to lucid dream.
It occurred to me that time as we know it seems to only apply when we are awake but in sleep, the concept disappears entirely. This further supports that time is a concept we only understand to the best of our ability, thus time works in ways that we can't understand with our current systems.
We only understand it to the best of our abilities because anyone that knows anything knows we are limited due to our status as beings in a world that is governed by physics.
If our systems measuring time are based solely on a perception of what constitutes time, that means it is not a static element but rather something that change3s while experiencing external stimuli.
For example, measuring time in the environment involves many layers, but say the position of the sun had not been the focal point of marking the passage of time. Ancient tribes likely marked time by the temperature or by animal activity like migrations. Using the sun to mark time is as arbitrary as any other method, basing the passing of time on an environmental value like the position of the sun.
When people have been kept in captivity without any influence from the external environment, they report losing track of time. People who have died and come back to life can't report accurately how long they've been "dead" for (not processing external stimuli). Since the beginning of time, people have reported feeling like experiences involving external stimuli feel like they last "seconds" or "hours". One of the tests used to assess someone's sobriety is to ask them to count 30 seconds. Ultimately this means that time is dependent on the perception of external stimuli and is truly unmeasurable.
What we've done is create a system to track time that's still in place because the way we have chosen to mark time is a pillar for society's functioning as we know it but that doesn't necessarily mean it accurately tells us anything. It's only accurate because we don't know anything else.
-thebadsocialworker
