I believe it's a much more fundamental difference than just the distinction between ideating and acting.

Many people occasionally experience the transition between "conencted" and "disconnected" states as a sudden jerk or loud noise just at the moment of falling asleep.

Sleep paralysis is another "failure mode" of this mechanism that reveals what's going on. (I'm not sure if there is a reverse to it, i.e. whether sleepwalking could be explained as a drastic fail-open of the same mechanism).

I dunno, I wasn't hooked up to any kind of measurement device to measure the changes in my brain. From a subjective point of view, I miss that place. I've been writing a book about my adventure there, off-and-on for years now. Maybe someday, I will finish it. If I could return, I'd do it in a heartbeat at any cost.

I _feel_ older than I am because there are a couple extra decades in my brain than in real life. Most of my time compression experiments were only a few months or weeks. That one long one changed me forever, and I've never done it on purpose since then.

I still have time compressed dreams from time to time, and when I wake up, two or three weeks have subjectively passed, but only a night has passed in the real world. There's a period of time, no more than 10-30 minutes, while the brain tries to reconcile two different and overlapping pasts. It can be a bit disorienting. My wife knows when I have these dreams because when I wake up, she says I look around surprised or confused to be there. The absolute worst is when you lay down to go to bed in the dream and wake up in the real world. Those will mess you up.

So, maybe my brain did change. Who knows? Maybe someone should study it.

In this particular case, I was in the hospital after a major motorcycle accident. So, I didn't go anywhere. To be honest, after a couple of months in the dream, I had determined I had died and found the afterlife. I had never thought it was a dream.

The trick to time compression in dreams is two things:

- being able to generate false memories

- being able to skip the passage of time

It requires acknowledgment that there is no proof you existed 5 minutes ago, only your memories of existing (and surviving the existential crisis that may cause) matching up with the current perceived reality. So, to have a time-compressed dream means to simply 'skip ahead' for a period of time and have access to the memories in-between. This last part is the part that needed the most practice for me. I was able to skip ahead, but it took years before I'd be able to create false memories with coherency. These days, it isn't uncommon to have a dream with an entire lifetime of memories that aren't mine. Luckily, these are forgotten within seconds of waking up, making it easy enough to determine which of my dreamt experiences are fake and which are real.

On a normal night, you only have a couple of hours to dream (more or less depending on sleep deprivation and need for deeper sleep). So it works kinda like a movie that covers a greater period of time, skipping ahead to the interesting parts. Then the access to the memories in-between the interesting part to make decisions and sense out of what you are experiencing.