JOURNALS -- PART TWO (1986-present)
No Time Like Whatever Time It Is Now
For years I have had a unique sense of the
passage of time. My wife can attest to this. I can awaken at
some dark hour of the night, and after some pondering I can often predict
the current time, usually to within 10 or 15 minutes, and sometimes absolutely
right on the button to the minute.
It's weird. This happens rather regularly;
I can do it most every night. I can be asleep for many hours yet
awaken, not consult the clock (which I have to physically pick up and press
a light button in order to see the time anyhow), and still come up with
the nearly-perfectly correct time. It doesn't happen a full 100%
of the instances; in some cases I am off by 40 minutes or more. But
in the vast majority of cases I am startlingly close to the correct time.
When I pause to "sense" the correct time,
I am not calculating anything. Rather, I am feeling how long the duration
seems to have lasted since I last knew the time, even if I have been asleep,
and from that I can sense the current time. I don't count hours from the
last look at the clock, nor do I use obvious visual clues such as the sun
rising or other external stimuli.
It seems I can do this regardless if I have
had vivid dreams, or if I cannot recall any dreams. And I can do
this whether the duration is very short or very long.
But I have yet to try this within a lucid
dream. That could be an interesting experiment. I wonder if
the part of my mind and brain that I am "accessing" when I sense the correct
time still operates when asleep and dreaming. And if it does not,
why not, and how can it "reset" when I awaken? Maybe that would take
me a step closer to better understanding my wakeful time-sense, and to
better refine my dream time-sense.
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