What like inception? Like you experienced 9 years and then woke up and went to work??

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.