- Basic Trope: A character is asleep or unconscious, and one or more others try to convince them that they've been asleep for years.
- Straight: Alice slips on some maple syrup while working at a cafe and is knocked unconscious. She wakes up in Bob's house, where Bob tells her that she was unconscious for six years. It turns out, however, that he was lying and she was only unconscious for two hours.
- Exaggerated: Bob tries to convince Alice that she has been, not just unconscious, but in suspended animation, for a thousand years and builds elaborate technology just for the sake of making her think it's the 31st century.
- Downplayed:
- "Alice? It's been six years! Just kidding!"
- Bob plays a prank on Alice, who he lives with (maybe she's his sister, wife, girlfriend, daughter, or flatmate) to make it seem like she's been asleep for two days.
- Alice was actually unconscious for three years, not six years like Bob claimed.
- Justified:
- Inverted: Alice has indeed been unconscious for six years, but Bob tries to convince her that it has only been two hours.
- Subverted:
- Bob tells Alice that it has been six years, but it turns out that he was lying... it's actually been ten years.
- Maria, the character Alice plays, has slept for ten years, but Alice can't tell reality from fiction at the moment.
- Double Subverted: Whoops, Carol said, "ten years" but it was a slip of the tongue. She meant to say, "ten hours".
- Parodied:
- Zigzagged: Alice wakes up from being unconscious, but it's unclear how long it's been. Bob claims it's six years, Carol claims it's two hours, Dave claims it's three days, and Emily claims it's a thousand years, and there's evidence towards all four possibilities: a newspaper is dated six years from "now", but a road that was going to be opened on the very day Alice fell unconscious is still closed, a parade that was scheduled for three days after the accident is happening, and there is technology lying around that doesn't look like anything from this time period and could well be from a thousand years from "now".
- Averted:
- Alice does not fall unconscious after tripping on the maple syrup.
- Alice does fall unconscious, but Bob tells the truth about how long it was.
- Alice explicitly was unconscious for six years, and there is no doubt about it.
- Enforced: A writer wants there to be a Rip Van Winkle situation, but that would change the status quo too much.
- Lampshaded: "Guess I wasn't unconscious for six years after all."
- Invoked: "Let's trick Alice into thinking she's been unconscious for six years!"
- Exploited:
- Defied:
- Discussed: "Alice is so gullible that if I woke her up in the morning and told her it had been six years, she'd probably believe it."
- Conversed: "I'm looking forward to the next episode— the last one ended before we could find out if Alice was really unconscious for six years or not."
- Implied:
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- Played for Laughs: Bob convinces Alice that it has been six years as a Practical Joke.
- Played for Drama: It's set up to appear like it's been centuries and Alice's friends are all dead.
- Played for Horror: It's set up to appear like it's been decades and it's now the Second Coming.
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