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Many people believe that hours worth of events and activities can be dreamed about in a matter of seconds. Despite this common belief about how we dream, time in dreams actually is not compressed.
很多人认为长达几个小时的事件或者活动，在梦里几秒、或者是十几秒钟就会一闪而过。其实不然，梦里的时间上并没有被压缩。
If you dream of an activity that would take five minutes in waking life, you probably dream about it for a full five minutes. Dream and sleep researcher William Dement conducted two studies that demonstrated that dream time was similar to real time.
如果你的梦里出现了一件生活中需要五分钟才能够完成的事件，那么在你的梦里，它其实也需要占据五分钟。睡眠与梦的研究者威廉·德门特进行了两项研究，证明梦中对时间的感知和现实中的相似。
Because dreamers' eyes move under their eyelids very rapidly while they are dreaming, Dement was able to monitor sleepers and record the length of their dreams by observing their rapid eye movement. After recording this information, Dement would wake dreamers and have them write down a description of their most recent dream.
因为做梦者在做梦的时候，眼球在眼皮下快速地转动，所以德门特能够通过观察眼球的快速转动来监视睡着的人，并来记录他们做梦的时长。记录完这些信息后，德门特便叫醒做梦者，并记录下他们对最近的梦的描述。
He assumed that longer dreams would take more words to describe than shorter ones. When he compared the number of words in each dream report with the number of minutes the dream had occurred, he found that the longer the dream, the more words the dreamer used to describe it.
他认为需要更多的文字来描述较长的梦，而较短的梦所需文字则较少。当他比较了每个梦境报告里的文字数和分钟数，发现梦越长，用来描述的文字就越多。
In another related experiment, Dement woke sleepers while they were dreaming and asked them how long they perceived their most recent dream had taken. Eighty-three percent of the time they perceived correctly whether their dreams had been going on for a long time or for a short time. With these experiments, Dement concluded that time in dreams is nearly identical to time in waking life.
在另一项相关试验中，德门特叫醒正在做梦的人，要求他们说出自己做梦的时间。不论梦境持续的时间是长还是短，83%的人对时间的把握很准确。通过这些实验，德门特总结到：梦里的时间几乎和现实中的时间一样。
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 dream it.
因此下次做梦时，无论你梦到屠龙或者从住处飞到工作场所，梦中这些事情发生的时间也许就是你做梦的时间。
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