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Travel between different universes can be a tricky thing. Sometimes, time passes more quickly in your home universe, so that when you return from a trip to another one, everyone you know is dead. Other times, you can spend weeks, months, or even years in another world and come back only a short time after you left.
Sometimes, however, the relative movement of time isn't that consistent. You might be able to re-enter your universe at any point you choose, effectively combining dimensional travel with Time Travel. Other times, the relative flow of time between the two universes is out of your control: you might return at the exact moment you left, hundreds of years in the past or future, or anywhere in between. And the next time you make the same trip, the results might be radically different. These time jumps could be random, or they might be revealed to serve some higher purpose or destiny.
This is Narnia Time, when the relative flow of time between two or more different universes changes to serve the needs of the plot.
May include or contrast with Year Inside, Hour Outside and Year Outside, Hour Inside. Can also cause Time Travel Tense Trouble. See also Timey Wimey Ball. Compare with San Dimas Time where time passing in the "home" universe is equal to that experienced by the time travelers.
Examples
Anime & Manga
- In Vision of Escaflowne, the relative flow of time between Gaia and Earth seemingly follows no logic whatsoever. At first, time seems to move at roughly the same speed in both worlds, and traveler Hitomi is even able to receive a page on Gaia at the exact same time it was sent on Earth. Then, time seems to be moving faster on Earth when it's revealed that Hitomi's grandmother traveled there as a girl at least thirty years ago Earth time, but only enough time had passed on Gaia for Allen to age from a youth to a young man (perhaps ten years max). Then, when Hitomi returns to Earth, she is transported to a point before she even left, which is about where you stop worrying about it.
- There's evidence that it has something to do with the connection between Hitomi and Van. When they're on different worlds, the time moves at the same rate. When they're on the same world (such as when Van went to pick her up when she got sent back in time a bit), things get complicated. In the aforementioned example, Hitomi and Van were only on the same world for about ten seconds before they jumped back—but at least a few hours, maybe days, had passed on the world Van had just left.
- Yuu Watase has gone on record as saying this is how the time difference between the real world, and world of The Universe of the Four Gods works in Fushigi Yuugi works. Basically the relative time difference depends on the text in the book, meaning that time doesn't move at a fixed rate - a few paragraphs could cover minutes, days, or months. So if the sentence "And a year passed." appeared, people inside will have lived a year in less than a second outside.
- The second season of Corrector Yui had the Com-Net marching at 256 times the speed of real time, allowing people to do tasks that would normally last days (or months) into a few hours. This is mentioned in a certain episode when Yui is required to finish up a self-published manga (which, Yui being what she is, forgets to do so).
- In Digimon Adventure, time originally passed very quickly in the Digital World meaning that the gang could spend several decades (or maybe centuries, Izzy calculated it in the last episode) in the Digital World while only a month or two would pass in our world. However, time in the two worlds were synchronized after the final boss was destroyed.
- Catnapped features a world, Banipal Witt, where an entire day there (measured in a series of balls and grains, manually reset, in a complex hourglass) is equivalent to three minutes in the human world. However, the time passing is inconsistent in the movie itself, so there's no real knowing if that correlation is correct.
Film
- In Star Trek: Generations, Picard, Kirk, and Guinan all meet inside the Nexus within hours after arriving, even though Kirk and Guinan entered (and Guinan left) decades before Picard got there. Picard and Kirk also both exit the Nexus shortly before Picard entered in "real" time.
- The animated Peter Pan and its sequel. Time moves slowly in Neverland, hence why Peter never grows old... but then how can a couple of Neverland days last only a few hours in England?
- Likewise in Hook. Peter promises to visit Wendy every spring, but his visits clearly don't occur at regular intervals.
- This is averted in the book. While Neverland has no seasons, and sunrises and such come and go whenever they feel like it, the relative time for people inside and outside is the same, and the children really are gone for months. While Peter's 'springtime' visits don't come at regular intervals, it's because he doesn't know/care how much time is passing, not because it isn't.
- Inception takes it to extremely complicated levels: in a dream, time flows slower than it does in the real world. Go to a dream within that dream, and it goes even slower. Dream within a dream within a dream? Even slower. It's turned into Nightmare Fuel since you can end up spending years in a dream by doing that, thus losing your perception of reality. It happened to Mal, at any rate...
- Which works pretty logically if you think about it, you can get distracted from one dream to another or have lots of dreams that don't take a long amount of time.
- Except not really, since the given reason for the time-dilation is that "your brain works more/faster when you sleep". Mathematically the times would exponentially scale up as they do in the film, but surely the biology of the human brain provides an upper limit for how fast it can think? Convincingly living 50 years when your brain has only an hour of actual time to think necessitates some ridiculously powerful neurology.
- The above is only true to a point. Lucid dreamers and people who recall their dreams clearly (two different things) could say that they felt that time passed on scale of anywhere between a few minutes (driving an expensive car and crashing it) to marrying, having a baby, and watching the baby grow.
- and then there's the guy who wrote a book about lucid dreaming for a thousand years
- The more dream-time is compressed (i.e. the lengthier the dream seems in the same real-time period), the lower the data resolution becomes... but we don't often notice. Short dreams can have huge focus on details, but in longer dreams the focus on the bigger picture tends to distracts from the details that aren't actually there.
Literature
Live-Action TV
Myth and Legend
- Folk and Fairy tales in general. Usually time passes more quickly in 'fairyland' and the visitor returns to our world centuries later and falls to dust but there are other stories where no time at all passes and some in which 'fairyland' and the Real World are on the same schedule. This of course makes this trope Older Than They Think.
Tabletop Games
- This is how time in Arcadia works in Changeling The Lost Two children might be kidnapped on the same day. One spends 30 years in Arcadia, and returns to find that it's only the next day. Another only spends a week in Arcadia, but comes back after 60 years in the real world. This is one of the major obstacles the Lost face when trying to regain their lives.
- Warhammer 40,000 example: As if The Warp wasn't bad enough, there have been stories of heroes being imprisoned in places the Warp bleeds through into reality, and finding that they'd been missing for hundreds of years when they escape. On the other side of things, ships that come to the aid of distress signals occasionally find themselves under attack and sending the signal they'd followed in the first place.
Video Games
Webcomics
- In The Dreamland Chronicles, the Dream Land operates on Narnia Time. When Alex falls asleep he goes to Dreamland, and when he wakes up some time passes in dreamland before he falls asleep again. However the amount of time that passes in that time is explicitly declared as random. Sometimes nearly no time passes like when he is falling with Felicity on his back, wheras sometimes several hours passes. The general amount of time that passes must average out though, because at the beginning of the story when Alex hasn't been to Dreamland in years, a similar number of years have passed for the inhabitants.
- In xkcd at the very bottom left.
- 9th Elsewhere: The first 120 pages take place over at least several days in Carmen's Mental World, but only about 15 minutes in the real world.
Western Animation
- In Danny Phantom, portals between the Ghost Zone and the real world occur naturally, opening and closing at random, and are capable of leading to anywhere or anywhen. The only exceptions are the two artificial portals, which are generated and held open through technological means.
Real Life
- Relativistic Mechanics explains phenomena based on this trope. In the referential point of an object that travels almost as fast as light, time flows normally while the external referential systems have time flowing much faster in comparison.
- Dreams. They take a very short time, from seconds to a few minutes, but are perceived as much longer by the dreamer.
- Some have observed the opposite as well, perceiving that they have only been asleep for a few moments when they actually sleep through the whole night.
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