Progress!

The Picard Maneuver@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1297 points –
218

Can they just sort out the housing price and cost of living so we're not forced to break the law to survive and get their thousand year sentence? Or nah?

I don't think you understand how the system works.

No of course, if people could understand the system, we wouldn't need the system.

I think it was Confucius that said that society is best when the laws are simple and people understand the laws.

I mean what do we need with 5,000-year-old Chinese mysticism when we've got Elon musk shoving metal pellets into your medulla oblongata that can play ads at you in your dreams?

I'm pretty sure crimes like murder etc. are the ones that should be getting thousands year sentences. Has nothing to do with cost of living and housing price imo. I'm open to an explanation.

People can't afford rent and food, shouldn't energies be put toward fixing that instead of whatever the hell problem this is aimed at?

There's a Black Mirror episode about that!

There's a Deep Space 9 episode about that!

Which was never brought up again. Poor O’Brien

.

Hey, Keiko has a name you know.

We just saw the episode where the wraith took over Kinko's body and threatened to kill her if O'Brien didn't reconfigure the comm relays. I thought, "Here's your way out, Miles!"

It's why he sabotaged the plan though (OK, I don't remember the episode anymore...)

I am in S05 of DS9 (first watch) and saw this one recently in S04. We really enjoyed it.

Do they ever bring up that O'Brien isn't the original O'Brien they knew, but rather the future O'Brien that swapped places? ... I didn't think so.

I'm in the same season in my first watch too. Having a blast.

Nope.

I’m glad that O’Brien got so much focus on DS9 after being a side character on TNG, but man did they ever fuck with him.

But then if they did acknowledge all the shit the writers put him through they would have one seriously messed up officer who should probably be discharged.

We have to assume that 24th century mental health services are much better than either Troi or Ezri makes it appear.

Hahaha well with those two as our sample it’s going to take a lot of rigging to suspend my disbelief.

That Black Mirror episode still affects me to this day shudder

I had to give up on The Black Mirror after that episode where they have to exercise to earn credits and are forced to watch advertising. Then that girl thought she could make it out by singing but had to do porn instead. Couldn't watch anymore after that.

That episode got darker after the porn part.

Oh yeah, I finished the episode. I couldn't do the rest of the show after that.

I mean wasn't season 1 episode 1 where we all watched a guy fuck a pig? Like if that wasn't enough to get you to stop then you probably should go ahead and watch the rest of the series.

Ya, I watched that one too and thought it was funny. Then for some reason the workout thing really got to me hard too. I was working at a bank as a manager that was literally scamming people out of their money/ homes and hated my life. Living in a shoebox and barely able to afford my apartment. I hated my life. It really hit me hard.

ah yes s1e2. you almost gave it a shot

Was it really episode 2? I guess I watched it a bit more than that, because I can remember a few more episodes. But many though, maybe another 2 or 3.

FWIW, I think that episode is one of the weakest early season episodes. It's somehow both too explicit and not explicit enough, because their world doesn't make any sense beyond simply "capitalism". The rest are a lot more in the realm of existential horror and questioning the morality of things. Black mirror just isn't a good medium for an explanation of why capitalism is evil.

Also a Carey Elwes documentary about assholes with six fingers

2 I think, though I don't remember the other one that's not White Christmas.

I know it’s a shitpost, but the idea behind something like this is counter to the point of rehabilitation. Civilization should move towards rehabilitation instead of punishment as the idea is that you want to integrate someone back into society. I am not sure inducing trauma and mental damage is conducive to rehabilitation.

Technology like this could actually be used to help the rehabilitation process by dilating time, and allowing the offender to be rehabilitated without actually wasting much of their actual life.

It would most likely be used for harsh punishment in this universe, but its nice to imagine living in a better one, sometimes.

I'm like 99% sure it would just make the time feel longer without any benefit of consciousness. Kind of like certain drugs make everything feel like it's slow motion, but you still don't get superhuman reflexes from them.

I think you're exactly right. I'm not in any way qualified to make this statement but, if I'm right, you can't just make the brain "go faster" and get more useful time without time actually passing. Processes need to happen in the brain for thoughts to occur, and you'd have to somehow speed those up... I mean there are chemical reactions happening in your nerve endings, how are those going to speed up? Especially by a factor of >1000 as implied by the OOP!

Processes need to happen in the brain for thoughts to occur

I disagree. I’ve had experiences far longer than their real life counterparts in dreams.

It sucks that it would never be used for speed rehab and instead for eternal torture.

I don't think so. It probably just screws with the perception of time, I doubt it actually speeds anything up. If it did, we'd be able to use it for way more things than punishment, like for example, doing a deep delve into a subject in a matter of hours.

Theoretically, if you had such technology, maybe you could use it to rehabilitate instead of punish. Being able to undergo months or years of therapy in a matter of hours could be extremely beneficial.

i'm not sure how this could really work. good therapy requires the person of the therapist, and it additionally takes place within the context of a client's living. are there therapists willing to give up subjective years over and over and over? how does the client try new things, gain understanding without the feedback of their life between sessions? also - therapists seek information and process their work with clients between sessions.

on top of all this, i'm not yet convinced this would be psychologically healthy for either.

I think that the therapist(s) in this case would have to be AI. The person could be in their own little simulation, experiencing a reality tailored to addressing whatever psychological problems they might have. It's all science fiction, anyhow. There's no theoretical, let alone practical basis for this technology afaik.

There is though, it’s called time hallucinations and it fucking sucks when you’re sober. I occasionally get them. It’s not like everything is slow motion it’s more like you’re bored and this meeting is taking forever, but exaggerated and it takes normal activities and makes them that kind of boring.

if someone could actually get new information and insight under something like this, why would we use it in a prison instead of putting people to study the whole of human knowledge and create demi-god wizards?

I mean, setting aside the danger inherent in creating demi-god wizards, there's no reason they couldn't do both.

So I was on a jury pool in December.

After the attorneys for both sides finished their dog and pony show, the judge himself made each of us answer the following question:

What is the purpose of criminal incarceration?

A - Punishment

B - Deterrence

C - Rehabilitation

After all seventy five of us had answered, all of us who responded with anything other than punishment were dismissed. Even those who answered a combination of the choices. Nope. Punishment was the only correct answer.

To my amusement, this barely left enough people available to fill the jury box.

I followed the case. Guy robbed a convenience store. No death. No injury. Got fifty nine years.

That’s just emblematic of a broken justice system. We have to examine what is “justice” for any one case individually, and sometimes punishment may make sense, but even then its severity is determined by humane and ethical considerations. Justice systems can be reformed, the will to do so must be there—even if that means protesting till an objective is achieved.

I know it’s a shitpost, but the idea behind something like this is counter to the point of rehabilitation.

Its counter to our understanding of entropy. Brains simply don't work like this.

Can you elaborate?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211233934.htm

Even though participants remembered their own falls as having taken one-third longer than those of the other study participants, they were not able to see more events in time. Instead, the longer duration was a trick of their memory, not an actual slow-motion experience.

Your memory is imperfect. But your actual capacity to perceive time is still limited by the facilities you use for that prescription.

One experimental result does not define the entire domain of consciousness.

You are essentially making a statement of the form “X does not and cannot exist”, which is always a logical fallacy.

You are essentially making a statement of the form “X does not and cannot exist”

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is a Family Guy meme.

It's not complete horseshit. The application might be, but the idea isn't.

I remember a Slavoj Zizek anecdote about it.

Can I use this to make my 48 hour weekend feel like a 480 hour weekend? I really don't want to be back at work.

No, sorry. Ethically, this technology can only be used for torture.

Can I use this to make my 48 hour weekend feel like a 480 hour weekend?

No, because its a technological fantasy.

People can "lose time" such that they don't realize how long they've been unconscious. But they can't "gain time". That's not how brains work. You can't get an extra six weeks to study for an exam an hour before the test. Nothing will let you do that. Its pure wizard-tier shit.

There are stories of people experiencing whole lifetimes within dreams, especially within comas, as well as hallucinogenic trips that seem to last many years.

The human brain is a lot weirder than we know.

And it should be deeply troubling that if we ever learn to manipulate this kind of time perception that some people want to turn it towards torture, and they could get state backing to do so.

If those situations can create strong memories about things that didn’t physically happen, then it seems like almost anything can appear to have happened from that individual’s perspective.

From the individual’s standpoint, once they are awake they can’t really tell the difference between having experienced X and having vivid false memories of experiencing X.

Maybe some kind of real time brain scanning/monitoring could help tell the difference.

There are stories of people experiencing whole lifetimes within dreams

There are anecdotes about people claiming to remember living whole lifetimes within dreams.

Even taking this utterly impossible to prove claim at face value, there's no way to replicate anything like that in practice.

And it should be deeply troubling

I'm about as concerned with this as the possibility someone might try to reverse my gravity or Frankenstein my head into someone else's torso.

I once had a dream like that, maybe 20 years ago. When I woke up, I was like:

"Oh, this is my old room. But how..? It was just a dream! Now I get to live it."

It was a wonderful feeling. People would be hooked on it if it would be reproducible.

I also have memories of what happened in there, but I'm fully aware that my brain could be projecting.

The plural of "anecdote" is "data", and this is a fairly commonly reproduced story. I don't know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports. If we refused to listen to anybody about their personal stories, we'd know next to nothing about the human mind, and there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans.

this is a fairly commonly reproduced story

The "falling dream" is a fairly common reproduced story. But "we're going to invent a device that gives you the falling dream" is a big claim and "we're going to give you a heart attack in your sleep by inflicting the falling dream on you" is an even bigger one.

I don’t know if you understand just how much of psychology and medicine in general is literally just self-reports.

Self-reports substantiated with medical data to correlate the symptoms with real physical conditions.

You don't rush a guy with chest pains into the ER, then skip the EKG.

And if the guy with the chest pains says "These pains feel like they've been happening forever", you don't put "forever" on his medical record under "onset of symptoms".

there are absolutely ways to correlate certain states of mind to external measures like FMRI scans

States of mind are very different than conditions of physiology. And even they have their limits. The title card is pure fiction. And trying to tie it back to "a feeling I had when I woke up from a dream" isn't any kind of evidence-based analysis.

Unless you have a point then there's nothing here to respond to.

I really wish people would learn to say what they mean.

Don't say that, now some CEO is yelling at his staff to figure it out.

Not only that would be super cruel, it would also be pretty stupid, because how are you supposed to rehabilitate someone by basically just torturing them? And also, one of the good sides of prisons is keeping dangerous people away from their (potential) victims. Imagine if someone tried to murder you, went to jail, and then they got back out in 8 hours.

But now they got a plan to kill you which they has planned on for 1000 years.

I'm sure the cartel would like this technology. Or their big brother the US government.

The potential future horrors of the world can make suicide seem like a good idea.

I think it would rely more on fear factor. Like they put someone under for what feels like 2 months, so they are on the brink of giving up hope, then pull em out and go "alright now we'll assess you're status and determine whether to put you back in for 10 years"

I speculate it wouldn't work on a variety of people though, as their brain could already be adjusted to altered time perception through the use of drugs. Even without hard drugs or Adderall, you can still fuck with your time perception using only weed and sugar (the food-- as in drink four cans of cola and get super baked immediately, then set 15 minute timers and get lost in your own head, see how long each of those 15 minutes feel)

Studies have shown that in most cases that you'd care most about, extreme punishment does not serve as an effective deterrent to bad behavior. Creating the Torment Nexus as a way to enhance prison sentences serves only to increase the degree of cruelty involved in our already vengeance-oriented justice system.

I'll need to find these studies and review them. Intuitively, the little I know about psychology suggests that that an extreme enough negative punishment will almost certainly cause a trauma deterring the afflicted individual from repeating the targeted behavior. This is, obviously, an unethical practice that no licensed practitioner of any form would employ and certainly qualifies as Cruel and Unusual Punishment. I am not promoting it's use by any means, but suggesting that to the best of my inadequate knowledge that it's supposedly effective. Then again, some may argue that capital punishment was meant to be an effective deterrent, which was proven false.

Any studies you care to share? No worries if not, just thought I should ask before I go venturing. Appreciate the discourse!

It's been many years since I read them, so I don't know them off the top of my head. That said, as I recall the explanation was that:

  • most violent crimes are crimes of passion, and since they tend to occur in the heat of the moment people aren't thinking about consequences
  • a significant amount of property crimes are acts of economic desperation and/or crimes of opportunity, where the consequences of being caught are either unimportant compared to the more immediate survival needs of the perpetrator, or not fully considered when presented with a tempting opportunity for quick gain

and as such, most of what people think of when they think of criminal activity isn't well controlled by draconian punishment, and is instead better addressed by improving the general welfare of the most at-risk populations, and focusing incarceration on rehabilitating offenders so as to be able to safely reintegrate into society.

If I recall correctly, white collar crime is one of the few exceptions, since it tends to require quite a lot of planning and forethought to carry out... and if I'm perfectly honest, I'm fine with a billionaire CEO being sentenced to one hour in the Torment Nexus for every hour of stolen wages his company profited from, but alas, that's not the world we live in.

7 more...

In my experience, the best way to make 8 hours feel like a thousand years is to get a job in IT.

Yes, Let them single step using the same input data for a couple of weeks that will teach them!

Isn’t this just a Black Mirror episode?

and a Star Trek episode

And an Australian sci fi film.

Would Demolition Man count, due to the subliminal programming while frozen, or would the "put in cryostasis for 500 years" part kinda be the antethis of OP?

1 more...

Soo… since OP is a jackass, here’s the link: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10697529/Prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-eight-hours.html

The gist (emphasis mine):

Philosopher Rebecca Roache […] said, […] “you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence”

I can’t fathom why this is report-worthy. Was April 2014 such a boring month?

I wouldn't call OP a jackass for not providing the source for a shitpost.

providing source is good form in every context

Sure, the source would have been nice. They're not a jackass for not providing it though. Do you send the source every time you show a friend a meme?

Yes, I do. In this case I think it’s vital to link to the source, since the meme make it look like this garbage was a real thing.

Maybe they didn't have the source. Again, we're on the shitpost community. I think it's unreasonable to call someone a jackass because they don't research the sources for every meme that they find and shitpost. Especially when they're a power-user like OP and post 30-some times a day.

It’s older than that if you want to cite fiction

Which someone saying “maybe one day we can” is

This philosopher hack has also written about eugenic BS aimed at sculpting humanity to have a smaller carbon footprint. I'm ok with op not actually linking to her crap.

lol and its only a few paragraphs long. Coulda tried harder, Rhiannon Williams...

As others have said, the rehabilitation aspect is dubious. It depends on what the person "experiences" for that length of time. If there's therapy in time-dilation-space then sure go right ahead and sign me up as well. I'll just Goku-it up in my chamber of time and space and work some shit out in time for my morning shit. But you and I both know it ain't going to work that way. Prisoners will just be trapped in an empty void with only their own thoughts to keep them company, most likely rendering them insane. An infinite solitary confinement is just plain torture.

Edit: so I googled the article and its laughable how easily the author slides right in to dystopian fanfic. "This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time." Obviously.

One day Steve said: You know what? Keeping a prisoner a life for a thousand years is fucking expensive. What if we didn't have to?

And from that conversation our company was born. Little did we know that death sentence is still a thing or that humans don't even live that long. But boy did we scam some investors.

Naturally, this is the type of thing in sci-fi where we assume it'll be used to generate massive amounts of income to benefit society in a magnificently short amount of time, and then some bastard comes around and says, "What if we incarcerate people for millenia?"

DS9 already did it.

And showed why it was a bad idea. Just another instance of the 'painsphere'.

This just sounds like straight up torture with extra steps.

No rehabilitation, no isolation of dangerous individuals from the general population. I'm decidedly anti-incarceration but at least there are arguments for it in place of something functional and just.

This just doesn't solve any problems and adds some new ones. It sounds unbelievably cruel.

As long as it's a cheaper alternative, the massive unstoppable psychopath violence machine will develop and use options like this. But yeah let's continue to give corporations more rights than humans and feed them actual energy and love too because what the fuck do i know, nobody has of course found a better alternative than hyper capitalism ever it's not like I live in a country where tax and systems have made some of these horrors less or anything

That's exactly what I was thinking. It feels like anyone advocating for this only cares about punishing people and not actually solving any problems.

What do you propose instead of incarceration?

There it is. One of the most disturbing episodes in all Star Trek, and it's exactly this. That and Inner Light, genuinely dark shit.

O'Brien exists to suffer haha.

I want that so much, get 10 university degrees, learn to play the guitar, become a master craftsman, all in a day.

While that would indeed be awesome, that's not the route they proposed. It's more about slowing down the perception of time, rather than being able to actually do something peoductive during that.

Philosopher Rebecca Roache, who leads a team of scholars, explains two methods to this madness. The first involves psychotic drugs that distort a person’s sense of time.

With a simple pill or injection, prisoners may believe they’ve been incarcerated for much longer than any natural human life could allow.

The second approach Roach explains is a bit more complex. Option number two involves uploading human minds to computers (da f*ck?), and speeding up the rate at which the brain functions. On her blog, Roach writes: "[...] This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time.”
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/new-technology-could-make-inmates-feel-like-theyre-serving-a-1000-year-sentence-in-8-hours-scrol/

Despite thinking, "wow that's a disgusting way to see and treat humans", and some obvious moral concerns (like, social isolation for what feels like 1000 years, which will fuck up most people badly), which make this feel like a black mirror episode, the mind-upload issue is technically extremely tricky. Even if we had the technology to "upload" the human mind, it will be a copy, a clone, not you individually. And if we don't have an option to download the copy back into your brain, it will just be a waste of energy.

More importantly, an intriguing question is raised: After such a download, will this be you? Or just a copy of a copy and thereby another being which just replaces another one.

Another thing I find important to ask here: what's the point of penalties? These suggestions seem to me like psychological torture rather than measures to "correct" social behaviour. In no way resocialisation seems to matter here. So we just fuck people up by that and unleash them onto society afterwards. Doesn't sound good to me.

Sorry for not keeping my reply focused on your idea. I had some time to spare and this kept me busy.

The technology required to do any of this would allow for so much stuff, and their first idea is how to use it to imprison people? What the actual fuck?

With all the productivity increases over last 100 years, the ruling class finally realised that they don't need as big a society as before in order to serve their needs.

As a result, they tried hiring Thanos. When that failed, they had an idea: enlarge the prisons.

These are the stories of these poor souls

Dum dum (in SVU opening style)

Many peopke do believe the goal of criminal justice system is punishment. So this is great for them, it stream lines the process

3 more...
3 more...
3 more...

Zero rehabilitative potential, but they could basically do this now by putting a prisoner in restraints and sending them on a nutmeg trip. Guaranteed horror with a complete loss of time perception. If purgatory were real, it would be a nutmeg trip.

What

I tried it more than once and never got this, did they rip me off at grocery store?

It contains myristicin. Disclaimer up front that the best-case scenario is you don't experience the trip and just get dry mouth and an upset stomach. It takes a lot of nutmeg, there's a chance of poisoning since you likely won't know the potency to begin with, and the Erowid vault is full of horrible experiences. Interesting to read though: https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Nutmeg.shtml

It's super unpleasant both in the delivery (eating a sufficient amount of nutmeg for the effects is hard to do without vomiting), and also in experience. Buuut my experience was basically like a fever dream -- really bad but not torture-level bad.

I remember mixing it with datura? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura Seeds.

Overall I am glad I don’t do such stupid things anymore. Can’t remember the effects but I didn’t feel super good overall for the next months even iirc. Tachykardia i think it was and generally fucked up psyche for months

I still feel like vomiting when thinking about it, 10 years later so it must have been pretty bad

All species of Datura are extremely poisonous and psychoactive, especially their seeds and flowers, which can cause respiratory depression, arrhythmias, fever, delirium, hallucinations, anticholinergic syndrome, psychosis, and death if taken internally.

Yeah well shit we didn’t have Wikipedia back then I guess. Psychosis and delirium that sounds kinda it.

Omg I am reading the article and this stuff is right out of the Witcher Trial of the Grasses. Basically kinda lottery if the seeds will kill you or not because their toxicity depends on age of the plant.

Who is researching this topic without losing sleep, and who reports on this crap in such a blasé manner lol.

Without knowing more about the research, my gut tells me that it has been a tad sensationalized. Very little research is actually directed towards a specific goal in mind from the get-go. Normally, there are people researching a specific topic, reporting their findings, and then speculating on potential applications.

So if I had to guess, there's some company/institution/organization researching neural interfacing pathways or brain augments or something like that, a hypothesis that introducing X, Y, and Z conditions can alter one's perception of time, and then under potential applications they list "accelerated prison sentences" as one such possibility. Then suddenly you have sensationalist news articles about how researchers are developing a dystopian system to make 1000 years pass in 8 hours for prisoners.

This is likely going to end up in the same manner as the dozens of "Scientists may have discovered a cure for cancer" articles that turn up every year.

There's a whole horrifying episode of Deep Space Nine about something like this.

Probably the best "O'Brien Must Suffer" episode.

A similar premise was used in an episode of the 90's revival of The Outer Limits. Had David Hyde Pierce in it.

There's also a book by iain M banks called Surface Detail, part of the culture series. It was an entertaining albeit troubling read.

That's one way to mind break somebody into becoming a slave with no willpower to fight back

Or would they be so filled with rage when they come back to reality that they go on a rampage? I would find whoever created the tech and kill them then kill myself so they couldn't torment nexus me again.

Nice so instead of locking somebody up for 20 years for murder, we can make it feel closer to 22 million years.

That'll fucking teach 'em!

You're not supposed to take every single piece of star trek tech and make.it a Reality and hurry up with my replicator, I'm sick of buying food.

I have my doubts this is a technology even close to being achieved or that anyone would be interested in funding it.

Theres an episode of black mirror that explores this concept

Heroes did it.

Also Inception, kind of.

And Interstellar.

Star Trek. It's a whole plotline with O'Brien

Showing my age here, but there's a great Improvised Star Trek episode about this exact topic, if you like improv: Time & Punishment 🤣

Picard got a wonderful lifetime experiencing a peaceful culture in which he was a musician and scientist with a loving family beamed into his head.

Obrien got the memory of decades of imprisonment in which he killed his only friend.

"Black Mirror: White Christmas" has entered the chat

One of my favourite episodes. I need to hold my right hand with my left to prevent myself from watching it too many times.

so they trap you inside of the tsukuyomi from naurto, not the infinite one, but the one Itatchi had in one eye. Where you get trapped in a mind-prison and he tortures you for over 1000 years in the span of 1 or 2 seconds outside of that.

We should be using technology to make life easier for everyone, but instead billionaires are advancing technology to cause even more suffering and strife.

As I said before. Billionaires are going straight to the boiler room of hell for all the suffering they caused and continue to cause.

No the billionaires are expendables. This is just the pure work of the system

The corporations are automatons and every human inside them is expendable

They are psychopath murder machines spanning internationally and with no laws or governance hindering their rampage of death

I agree billionaire bad but they're not funding this, there are no billionaires funding this, there aren't any billion dollar companies researching this either, nor is any state funding going to this from any recognized country. So far all the research on this has been carried out by journalists and screenplay writers, none of it as yet has been entered for peer review or clinical trials.

Where else could the money be coming from? Why else would they do something like this?

What non-profit would work on drugs to do that for that purpose if it wasn't some kind of think tank or hedge fund putting money into a study like that?

They don't, profit just makes this, the idea that serving 1,000 years in 8 hours is profits.. It's not any human along the way that has a choice. They will just be replaced in the machine. The machine with the only goal of making money. Nobody even uses the money. The money is used to make the killing machine bigger and span more lands

Yes where could the money be coming from? let's look - yep zero is from billionaires, I guess that is 100% so we're both right....

I just read Junji Itos Long Dream Manga, this reminded me of that. It's a good read if you have the time.

Wait this could maybe be good if used very responsibly. When I had my last shroom trip, i was gone so long that I had to meet every single one of my friends again, but i had so much time to learn and think in that time span (it was also horrible). Dangerous concept for sure though lol

I once had a dream lasting months, ultra vivid.m, ending in a futuristic battle scene in which everyone around me was massacred and then I was killed last. Woke up, and three minutes had passed since I last looked at my phone.

Like for real months, like 30 days, 24 hours? Or the dream skipped through that timespan?

You’ve seen Total Recall right? I don’t know.

I remember a long period of wandering the countryside. Long conversations with farmers over dinner, them letting me bed down in their barns or guest rooms. Doing a little chores for each one. I remember the feeling of excitement slowly growing as I got closer to the man I was tracking.

But maybe it was just memories that appeared in my head.

The battle scene alone was well over three minutes, and it was just the very end of the dream.

But you never know.

I do remember I woke up in a literal cold sweat. As in my skin was cold to the touch, and I was covered in sweat, and my heart was racing, and I was full of adrenaline and terrified. I’ve never woken up like that, and never had a cold sweat in my life outside of that.

This actually happens often for me now. I find that afterward it's almost like coming down from a real psychedelic trip, for the entire day. And i have the clarity to recall memories from my childhood that i once thought lost, lasting the whole day

In my case it happened during the last weeks of my mother’s life. I was staying with her and taking care of her.

I was really bitter about it. I was in denial that it was the end, and I just saw it as I didn’t get to be with my friends and my new life in the city I’d moved to just out of college.

So I did a meditation, where I was doing something with my heart chakra, trying to remind myself to be grateful for my mother and this chance to see her, and trying to remind myself she was dying.

Uber driver, gotta go, upvote and ask me for more if you want rest of story.

I agree - figuring out how to take advantage of time dilation for therapeutic purposes would be very cool, and potentially quite useful. This is kind of what I hope comes from renewed research into psychedelics, being able to pick out the mechanisms for all the different effects and developing techniques to cherrypick just a few with therapeutic benefit with a much reduced risk of freak out. We may already be there re:time dilation alone with TCMS or something, idk.

But real talk - which do you see getting funded for wider use first, 5 year retreat in an hour, or psychic prison?

(Actually, saying it at loud it might be even odds, depending on the price tag folks can assign to the retreat)

I'm also kinda scrambled now though

It's ok to be a little scrambled. You may have gained insight into a better way to exist that conflicts with the way your society is organized.

Of all the eldritch horrors the cosmos has to offer none have more potential than some mortal apes on a random planet.

I'd rather just kill em than trap them in a thousand years of darkness

So, we can do what a bunch of aliens did to O'Brien when they tried, convicted and incarcerated him for 20 years and it was 20 minutes in real time.

Iain M. Banks - Surface Detail has a really fucked up version of that concept in it.

I wouldn't want to see how someone would react after going through something like that. Sounds like a supervillain origin story or some shit. "Jokes on you, it was a simulation! Now grab your stuff, you are free to go!"

The movie "Other life" demonstrates how this could go wrong.

If it's used on the likes of Putin or Netanyahu, I won't complain.