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A form of Time Travel where you don't physically go back in time. Instead, your body goes back to where it was in the state that it was, but you keep your memories from the future. The advantage is that, if done correctly, it neatly sidesteps many of the logical conundrums and paradoxes associated with time travel. The disadvantage is that your range of times to travel to is limited to a few decades at most.
Depending on what point the writer is trying to make, it sometimes turns out that you can't actually change anything in the past, and are forced to live through all your mistakes again.
Groundhog Day Loop stories often (but not always) use this mechanism. Also see Peggy Sue fanfic.
Unstuck In Time is usually a version of this.
Contrast with Intangible Time Travel.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
Comics
- In the original "Days of Future Past" storyline in X-Men, Kitty Pryde travels back in time by switching minds with her younger self.
Films
- Groundhog Day
- The Butterfly Effect
- Click, travelling into the future instead of the past.
- Galaxy Quest featured the Omega 13, a machine that sets the universe back 13 seconds ("just enough time to correct one mistake") while allowing a particular person to keep his or her memories.
- Retroactive has a machine that reverses time for a set period up to an hour while allowing one or more people to keep their memories. It also preserves the video on a VHS tape at one point.
- Peggy Sue Got Married
- The ending of Jumanji.
- Thirteen Going On Thirty
- In His Father's Shoes features a pair of magical shoes from a gypsy, which allow Clay Crosby to go back in time — and briefly experience life as his father, Frank, when he was Clay's age.
- Similar to Quantum Leap, the girl in the film Split Infinity doesn't go back to a younger or older version of herself, but to a different person, her late great aunt. Her time travel method? She fell out of a hayloft to go back to 1929, and rode a homemade amusement park to get back to 1992. One that a bunch of kids had ridden earlier. One may assume that Sam prefers the technological route....
Literature
- Time And Again by Jack Finney is probably the most well-known example of an actual time travel story centered around this trope. This Troper is surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet...
- Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
- Timequake, also by Vonnegut, features the entire world — and, it's implied, the entire universe — being mentally sent back 10 years and completely unable to change anything until that period is over.
- Replay, by Ken Grimwood.
- The Power of Un: A boy meets a mysterious stranger who hands him a giant calculator-like thing and says it's for going back in time and making sure that — wait, dang it, the guy disappeared before he quite finished the instructions. And the boy isn't impressed by the odd machine. But his flippant attitude turns serious when his little sister ends up getting hit by a truck, and he figures out how to use the device to replay the day so he can save her. Of course, it's not that easy...
- HP Lovecraft's The Shadow Out of Time twists this trope by combining it with Grand Theft Me in a very Fridge Logic-appeasing way.
- The Year Inside Hour Outside component of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe has elements of this, as the protagonists return to their children bodies. This makes it one of The Oldest Ones in the Book.
- This may not really be an example, since it's implied that they return to their child-like mentalities, too. It takes them some time to remember how to be adult when they return to Narnia. Then again, it's also implied (in The Last Battle) that you can't even get to Narnia unless your thoughts are sufficiently childlike in the first place.
- The plot of R.L. Stine's Goosebumps novel The Cuckoo Clock of Doom is based around a cuckoo clock which causes this to happen to the protagonist.
- in Eric Nylund's A Game of Universe, Germain possesses a powerful bit of magic that can rewind time, but only for seven seconds (and it can only be used once).
- Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time has an entire species who use this ability regularly: "The Yeti is able to save its time at a certain point, and then venture forth knowing that if it dies, it can just resume its life from the point it saved at with the knowledge it acquired before death. It is effectively a highly evolved, albeit slightly painful form of foretelling." This is, in all likelihood, a direct reference to saving in video games.
- This is how Charles Wallace time travels in A Swiftly Tilting Planet: he is able to enter the minds of people in the past and, though he has very little control over what they do, he still influences them in tiny ways. The fact that he has a time-traveling unicorn helps a lot.
- "Unsound Variations", a short story by George R.R. Martin has an antagonist who utilises this repeatedly and obsessively to wreck/steal the successes of his former college buddies.
- Used by Tolkien in The Notion Club Papers, combined with mental space travel (astral projection). The effects of time passing at a much more rapid rate means that the traveller in question looks down on what he initially thinks to be some sort of foetid anthill, but turns out to be his home city of Oxford through the ages...
- The book A Gift of Magic by Lois Duncan has the main character who has (among other things) to look into the future. It comes in handy, because her grandmother had the exact same set of powers, and left the main character a message on the day she died.
- (I heard this on a radio program, but it was probably adapted from a short story:) A soldier from WW 2 or maybe the Korean War is mentally sent back to his childhood, possibly due to being in a coma à la Life On Mars. Once he convinces his dad this isn't just a kid being overly imaginative or brain-damaged, the son plans for their future by picking stock options and things to bet on, as well as preparing for the war ahead. The son reverts back to being a child when the soldier comes out of his coma or dies, and the father has a safe full of sure things.
- I've read the story. It was part of an anthology... somewhere.
- In the Suzumiya Haruhi novels, this is true for Yuki Nagato and only for Yuki Nagato. In the Groundhog Day Loop, everyone's memories get reset, although they start experiencing deja vus. Apparently, Yuki is not affected by this because time is not an obstacle for her.
Live Action TV
- Tru Calling
- Do Over, a short-lived 2002 sitcom about a man reliving his school years.
- That Was Then, a short-lived 2002 drama about a man reliving his school years.
- Odyssey 5, a short-lived 2002 (notice a pattern?) sci-fi series about a group of astronauts who witness the Earth exploding while on a mission, and are sent back 5 years by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien in order to prevent it.
- The time travel mechanism in Quantum Leap is weird and complicated, but has elements of Mental Time Travel.
- The Eureka season 1 finale, and the first half of the Groundhog Day Loop episode "I Do Again."
- Star Trek The Next Generation, "All Good Things"
- Lost has a few characters that become Unstuck In Time. The most notable example is Desmond, whose consciousness keeps jumping back and forth between 1996 and 2004.
- And then all of the survivors on the island become unstuck. Good for them.
- Canadian comedy Being Erica is about a woman offered the chance by a supposed therapist to go back and change a long list of bad decisions that have led to her life being a dead end.
- Similarly, Medium's protagonist will occasionally have this.
Tabletop Games
Theatre
Video Games
- The second Prince of Persia trilogy allows you to rewind up to ten seconds.
- In Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link can use the Master Sword to travel back and forth between his child and adult selves.
- In Final Fantasy VIII, Ellone has the power to make people mentally time travel into other people's bodies. It happens to the playable characters a few times in the game.
- When the party goes to Shion's ruined home planet Miltia in the third episode of Xenosaga, it is revealed that the recurrence of the disaster is entirely mental and similar to an encephalon dive.
Web Comics
- Narbonic had "Dave Davenport Is Unstuck In Time" (a Shout Out to Slaughterhouse Five), with Dave bouncing between childhood, middle age, and his teenage years. At first, it seems like he wasn't able to change anything; he angsts, and decides to have a cigarette. Then Mell asks, "Since when do you smoke?"
- Bob And George, "All Good Things" (a Shout Out to the Star Trek episode).
Western Animation
- Code Lyoko's Returns to the Past.
- Although Jérémie retaining a picture taken before one of them caused massive speculation among the fanbase.
- South Park lampshades this with Eric trying to induce a temporal coma so he can travel back into the past and learn about the founding fathers. By dropping weights onto his head.
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