I dreamed I was living with a group of aliens. I was trying to figure out their language so I could understand them. Every time I figured it out, they changed the language.
Or when they knew I learned it, they would start talking far faster than I could keep up.

There was a language based on numbers. Each sound, or phonetic was a number. I really didn't understand this one when they started rattling it off.

Another was based on what looked like english letters. However it seemed like each word was a letter and when I got close to understanding it they switched to a single letter meaning an entire act or event. If one of them left the room it was described in one letter such as 'Z'.

Dream Two :: Stopping Time
date: December '00

I had a dream this morning that I figured out how to stop time.  I was able to do it twice.  The only problem is that I could not experience what was happening while time was stopped.  I could feel time stopping and the effects of stopping time on my body.  I could also feel time restarting and those effects on my body as well.  Unfortunately I could feel nothing in between.  I would go almost instantly from fading into time stopping to fading out of stopped time.  The effects I could feel going in were my body freezing up (not being able to move), my breathingand heart stopping and everything going totally black. I had my eyes shut, but you know how you can still sense some light though your eyelids.  Well it went from general closed eye ambient light to absolute nothing.  Coming back out I could feel everything restart.  Body could move, heart started beating, breathing restarted (but it wasn't like holding my breath; I didn't have to catch up on my oxygen supply) and the faint light came back.  It was like coming back up to the surface from under water after being down for a long time, except I wasn't out of breath.

As I said, I did it twice. Both times were the same; no experience of anything happening during the period time stopped.  I tried to do it again later when I was in the shower, but I couldn't do it.  I think I was trying too hard.  I was wondering though why I couldn't sense anything while time was stopped.  I figured if you look at the Newtonian physics equation for WORK, I think that you have to divide by time.  If time is zero then WORK is undefined.  If this holds for EXPERIENCE as well, then maybe EXPERIENCE is also undefined as time stops.  Just a theory.

Chris replied: Perhaps you did have "out of time experiences" and there are a couple of reasons why you may not know about them. First: Your brain may not be able to process out of time experiences or Second: your brain may only be able to process them when you are "out of time" and therefore when you return you are not able to process this information. If you are thinking of doing something sinister "out of time" please don't hurt me. Mark H replied: I have felt this same phenomenon. At the instant when just after falling into the water after a bad wipeout on waterskis. The moment when you are no longer sinking into the water nor are you rising. The feeling of suspension. Unconsciousness. Conscious thought just prior to the fall and just after the feeling of suspension subsides, is very clear. As to what it actually feels like to be in this state of suspension is unclear. A void. Nothingness as if time had stopped. Kurt replied: Thanks for the e-mail. I received a couple of the replies from other people you sent the original e-mail to & the general response sounds a lot like what Einstein's collegues used to tell him in his early years: "Lay off the pipe Al!" Those people had little or no imagination, they're all dead now & very few people remember that they ever existed. Fortunately Al didn't listen to them but instead kept dreaming. Al claimed that your best thinking is done right after you fall asleep. He used to go to sleep thinking about a problem while holding a rock on the edge of the bed. As soon as he fell asleep his grip on the rock would relax & the rock would fall to the floor & wake him up. He would then write down any ideas he had as quickly as possible. As far as your dream, my guess is there was a snooze button involved. I have had the same experience many times before but never really thought much about it. It is interesting though how you can hit the snooze button, feel yourself falling asleep & then the alarm seems to go off again instantaneously but 10 minutes has actually passed. If you could experience what was happening during that time then time wouldn't have stopped because you would have the experience as a reference to measure time from. Time is funny that way. It's like traveling through empty space. It is impossible to tell how fast you're traveling unless you have a point of reference to measure how fast you're moving away from or towards that point. Try to get some sleep & let me know how that rock trick works for you. Jeremy replied: When the human mind dreams, it's actually going through a period known as REM sleep or Rapid Eye Movement sleep. The brain produces sensations simular to those we experience while awake. The INTERACTION of all the areas of the brain resonsible for sensations create the "oddity" of the dreamstate. But, the periods of the dreamstates come in intervals of 10-20 seconds with about 8-10 seconds of "rest". This is well documented. See for yourself: If you ever see a mammal who's sleeping, but their eyes seem to be "twitching" back and forth, they are dreaming. And you'll notice the eye movements are in intervals of about a dozen or so seconds. So, either your "moment at the speed of light" was due to the lag time between intervals... or you need to lay off the crack, man. John replied: Sounds like you should share whatever drugs your on with your Association member buddies!!! When time stops however, WORK equals zero, as does EXPERIENCE. This makes perfect sense, albeit arguably because the equation would technically be 'undefined'. I don't buy that in this application. Your experience makes perfect sense though. You cannot stop time. If you could (in theory or dream) you would find that everything time effects would stop. The light might be explained through the light source. Stopping time would stop the light also, but there would be a slight after effect (dependent on the distance from the source & the known speed of light). Did you have any audible sensations? FS: I don't recall any audible sensations. Vida forwarded it to Laura: Laura, you gotta read this. I really think Frank's lost it! Laura replied to Vida: Your right, Frank has lost it. That mind of his is pretty scary sometimes. And you can tell him I said so. Mark D simply replied: You're on drugs...got any more??

Dream Three :: Secret Control Clock
date: early morning, '96

It looked like the middle of nowhere at first. Miles of flat grassland with low rolling hills in the distance and a single road down the middle. My friend Tom and I were sitting in a truck on the side of the road waiting for our other friend Mark to show up so we could follow him to his new house. I assume that we were facing north sitting in the truck along side the road that stretched to both the northern and southern horizons.

An instant before Mark drove up a couple helicopters flew over heading to the northwest.

Mark pulled up in his truck, waved and then lead us up the road into the hills to the north. We turned into a neighborhood on the east side of the road. Marks new home was situated on a hill in this neighborhood and we could see all of the low grasslands and the road below to the south.

Two more helicopters flew low across the grasslands towards the northwest. Suddenly I noticed a column of tanks and armored personnel carriers cutting across the grasslands heading in the same direction as the helicopters. They didn't travel on the road, but just simply crossed it with little to no regard for it even being there. They were in a hurry to get to where they were going. When I turned to see where they might be going I could see to the west that they were all gathering around a radio tower sitting atop the next hill. The helicopters were swirling, tanks and trucks were sliding to a dusty halt, even police cars now were racing up to the scene. Soldiers and police officers scrambled around retrieving equipment and taking cover. And from all sides, the focus of everyone's attention was on a tiny building at the base of the radio tower.

The sound of an alarm faded into my brain. Without a thought I reached over to the source of the sound and silenced the alarm. I knew it was vital to the situation on the other hill.

The tiny building at the base of the radio tower was surrounded by police and soldiers. Commanders were trying to communicate with whoever was in the structure. It was a type of building almost always seen by a radio tower; small, spartan, flat roofed, one door, one window and a multitude of cables running out a wall to the base of the tower and up to antennae mounted high above.

We learned that someone was trying to take control of the radio tower. They wanted to commandeer the airwaves to send out their own message. Locked inside the tiny building at the base of the tower they tried to patch in their own equipment to broadcast their message. There was also rumor that they had a nuclear weapon and were threatening to detonate it if they were not given control of the radio tower.

The sound of an alarm faded into my brain again. I silenced it quickly knowing that if I didn't it could set off a disastrous chain of events.

We stood watching the activity from the next hill. If the rumor about the nuclear bomb were true we knew we couldn't get far enough away not to be consumed by the explosion. We watched anxiously as the events on the next hill stagnated. Helicopters swirled, soldiers and police scurried, someone speaking from a bullhorn could be heard, as well as an occasional shout from the door of the tiny building. Tension was running high.

The sound of an alarm erupted into my brain this time. "Shut that thing off!" my brain screamed as I leapt to silence it once again. They can't know it's here.

All was silent again. Was I quick enough? Did they hear it? Would they figure out their error? Would the people trying to take control of the tower set off the bomb? From a distance the standoff did not seem to change. Soldiers and police took aim on phantoms in the tiny buildings window, both sides called for the other to surrender and inside fanatics continued to try to patch into the radio tower controls while threatening to detonate their nuclear bomb. Would they figure out that all the controls in that building were fake? That the real controls were in a little black box on a table in Marks home? The only way to keep them from finding out was to keep the alarm quiet.

The alarm suddenly went off again! "They're trying to patch in again! I must stop the alarm before they discover our secret and blow us all to kingdom come!" I leapt off the bed and banged my knee on the dresser reaching for my alarm clock.

Dresser? Bed?

Oh crap! It's morning again.

Dream Four :: Crashing the Stunt Pillow
date: early morning, '04

I was a stuntman in Hollywood and I was going to jump my pillow across the bed just before the end of the movie. I did the first take of the jump but when I came down I broke the pillow. I wanted to stop the take but the music started coming up and the director wouldn't stop. Then I realized the music was my alarm clock. I got up and hit snooze for twenty minutes and I was back in bed and the dream restarted. I knew I had broke the pillow on the first take and the mechanics tried to repair it so I could do another take. On the next take thought the pillow wasn't steering correctly and I missed my marks and I wanted them to stop again, but then the music came up again. My alarm. Snooze. Back in the dream. It happened all three times I snoozed the alarm.

Now all I have is a broken pillow.