system
A chat on 4chan
human
Its not a new idea, in fact there have been many books and TV shows about it and in many ways the occult taps into it as well: useful dreams. The human condition is a fleeting one: we're born, we live, we die, and it all happens so fast. In a mere handful of years we live like insects upon the planet, entire civilizations come and gone in the blink of an eye...but what if we could live more?

Many visualize that the way to experiencing life's fullest potential is to extend the human lifespan so you can spend as many hours in the waking world as possible, but even if humans lived a thousand years instead of a hundred there still would not be enough time, and at present I think life expectancy is actually decreasing, not increasing, so that's more or less a dead end at present. Worth looking into, sure, but a far better path to a long fulfilling life is already within our grasp, and with the right tech could become humanity's grasp at eternity.

In a good dream you might experience an hour's worth of memory in but a tiny fraction of the time, just a minute or two. A 'Dream Machine,' as the title of this thread suggests, would be designed to put the user into a deep sleep, and force the brain to maintain a constant REM sleep, so if you go into the machine for an hour you will have experienced the course of an entire work week minus sleeping, so it would be like you were awake for maybe an entire 5 days straight. Say you slept in this machine for 8 hours a day: nothing about your normal life would change, so over the course of a year

365 days=8,760 hours
8/24 × 8,760 hours= 2,920 hours
2,920 hours × 60 = 175k minutes

At a rate of about one minute to one hour as a translation for REM real time to experienced dream time, that's 175k extra hours per year if you use the Dream Machine, or in other words what your physical body percieves as one year would feel like to you to be twenty: a healthy 80 year life span would be translated to having experienced 1,600 years.
gpt
The idea is not to live forever, but to experience reality as though it lasts for qs long as anyone could want it to. Just imagine, being awake for over a thousand years straight... there would be problems, of course: the mind might create some kind of psychosis where the dream world becomes more important than the real one, seperation issues, anxiety...every day you woke up in the real world then went back to sleep the calendar date in the dream world woupd be 5 days later. It could be disorienting.

The obvious next step, being a machine and all, is to link all the machines together in a world-wide network, so whenever you go to sleep you are integrated into a network of people all sharing the same dream, but from their own point of view. This would reduce any psychological breakages because humans are, after all, a social species. Spending an eternity alone in your own head would be torture for many, but together with everyone else it would be paradise.

Things like education could be undertaken within a matter of weeks, not decades. Imagine everyone getting their PhD by age 6.