Mental Time Travel: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"My machine allows your mind to inhabit a body in the past."''
|'''H.G. Wells''', ''[[Warehouse 13]]''}}
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 the time your body can function for these purposes, a few decades at most. The other disadvantage is that it doesn't make physical sense.
A common variation is that the time traveler isn't going back to their own body, but to someone else's, maybe sharing their consciousness and having mental conversations or maybe a full [[Grand Theft Me]]. This gets around the disadvantage of the destination being with a few decades of the starting point, while still avoiding some of the logical problems with paradox.
Depending on what point the writer is trying to make, [[You Can't Fight Fate|it sometimes turns out that you can't actually change anything in the past]], and are forced to live through all your mistakes again.
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[[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]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== Anime
* {{spoiler|Rika and Hanyuu}} in ''[[Higurashi no Naku Koro
** Most of the cast, actually, they just drop more memories.
* {{spoiler|Tomoya}} from ''[[Clannad (
* Combined with standard [[Time Travel]] in ''[[Katekyo Hitman Reborn]]''. {{spoiler|After the Vongola return to the past, the Arcobaleno send the memories of the future versions of the non-time travelling characters to their present versions.}}
* In Konpeki no Kantai, when Isoroku Yamamoto's plan is shot down in 1943 he wakes up in 1905 in on the cruiser Nisshin just after the Battle of Tsushima and he uses his knowledge to prevent Japan making the mistakes it made.
* The plot of ''[[Full Metal Panic!]]'' centres around "The Whispered", people with [[Psychic Powers]] that allow them to receive information from the distant future. This is how they can have various bits of supertech, most notably [[Humongous Mecha]], being built in an otherwise [[Present Day]] setting.
* ''[[Madoka Magica]]'':This is how {{spoiler|Homura's [[Groundhog Day Loop]] ability}} seems to work.
** {{spoiler|Though the fact that she wakes up with her Soul Gem in her hand shows us that her time travel isn't wholly mental, since she didn't have any such thing in the original timeline.}}
*** {{spoiler|Hard to imagine it could work without her soul coming with her.}}
* The {{spoiler|Time Leap machine}} in [[Steins
==
* In the original "Days of Future Past" storyline in ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]'', Kitty Pryde travels back in time by switching minds with her younger self.
* Alex Robinson's graphic novella ''Too Cool To Be Forgotten'' has the main character Andy Wicks relive a portion of his high school years during hypnotherapy.
* Professor Carter Nichols invented "time-travel hypnosis" in [[The Golden Age of Comic Books|Golden Age]] and [[The Silver Age of Comic Books|Silver Age]] ''Batman'' stories, although the stories were [[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane|always vague]] as to whether the subject ''actually''
* Dr. Manhattan of ''[[Watchmen]]'' perceives all moments of his life simultaneously, though his ability to comprehend the full story they form seems to be limited. He also claims that he can't change the events he observes: "I'm just a puppet who can see the strings."
==
* ''[[Star Wars]]'' fics involving [
*
** There is one fic where Shinji discovers that not only the other pilots are parts of the rewinds too (humorously shown when he and Rei abuse the rewinds for training while Asuka ends up face first in a door every time a rewind occurs), he can rewind at any time by ''killing himself''. It eventually desensitizes him to the prospect of death so much that even Asuka is freaked out.
** Similarly, ''[https://archiveofourown.org/works/5671597 Doing It Right This Time]'' by JakeGrey features not just the pilots getting a [[Peggy Sue]] due to Mental Time Travel, but practically ''everyone else'' as well. Unlike most fics, we see the mechanism used to send their minds/memories back in time after Third Impact -- and [[Your Head Asplode|what it does to their post-Impact selves]] is [[Played for Laughs]]. Kinda.
* A remarkably high percentage of AU fics for ''[[Harry Potter]]'' are like this. Usually it's Harry that does the rewind, sometimes the 'Golden Trio', occasionally Ginny to mix things up, and at least once it was the Trio, Ginny, Neville, Luna, Sirius, and Lupin, and maybe a few more in addition.
** After the seventh book there were fanfics with Snape going back to the "Snape's Worst Memory" scene right after his death. Usually with the purpose of him [[Loser Gets the Girl|getting the girl]].
* A 97-year-old Xander unintentionally sends his mind and soul back in time to permanently replace his 17-year-old self in ''[[I Am What I Am (fanfic)|I Am What I Am]]'', a ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' fic by M. McGregor.
== Films ==
* ''[[
* ''[[The Butterfly Effect]]''
* ''[[Click]]'', traveling into the future instead of the past.
* ''[[
* ''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]]''. Also done at the end of its [[Spiritual Successor]] ''[[Zathura]]'', though less notable because in the latter case the game was finished on the same day it began.
* ''[[13 Going
* ''In His Father's Shoes'' features a pair of magical shoes from a gypsy, which allow Clay Crosby to go back in
* 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. A.J. Knowlton's time travel method? {{spoiler|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....
** This was a Feature Films for Families movie which was published on VHS in 1992,it was based on a short story published by a high school student in 1990 which was later adapted into this film.
* ''Somewhere in Time''
* ''[[La Jetee]]'' employs a form of this, with the time travellers going to periods on their memories (but they don't go to their past bodies).
* The titular ''[[
* In the movie ''[[Next]]'', Nicholas Cage's character has a power somewhat like this. He has two minute long precognition, but what he sees are merely possible futures. It's difficult to explain but a few examples should do a trick. He 'tried out' different approaches when hitting on a girl. He saw that casually beating up the girl's stalker ex boyfriend (who was present at the time) would prompt the girl to just walk away, but letting the guy punch him in the face would win the girl's sympathy, so he let this happen. He can also dodge bullets or search a huge area in almost no time using his ability.
* In the movie ''[[Source Code]]'', Jake Gyllenhaal's character performs a virtual version of this, taking over the body of an anonymous, doomed man in a simulation of the minutes before his death in an attempt to find out who planted the bomb that doomed him.
* ''[[Santo
* In "Trancers" both the bad guy and the cop chasing him go back in time, but must inhabit the bodies of distant ancestors. This movie also has people killed in the past with their "present day" descendants vanishing - but are still remembered.
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== Literature ==
* ''[[Slaughterhouse-Five]]'', by Kurt Vonnegut
* ''Timequake'', also by Vonnegut, features the ''entire world''
* ''[[
* ''The Time of Achamoth'' by M.K. Joseph.
* ''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
* [[
* ''[[Time and Again]]'' by Jack Finney, and its sequel ''Time After Time''. [[Born in
* 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).
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* "Unsound Variations", a short story by [[A Song of Ice and Fire|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 fetid anthill, but turns out to be his home city of Oxford through the ages...
* The book ''[[
* [[H. Beam Piper]]'s first published story (1947), "Time and Time Again" (no relation to Jack Finney's book): The main character, dying in [[World War III]] in 1975, awoke in his thirteen-year-old body in 1945. Being a trained chemist with the scientific knowledge of 1975, he'd have an advantage going into the chemical industry; he also had quite a good memory for horse-race winners. He planned to build a fortune and use it to prevent the war he'd died in by, among other things, getting his father elected president in 1960. Two of Piper's later stories, set in the '60s, imply that he was successful in that part, at least.
{{quote|
* In the ''[[Suzumiya Haruhi]]'' novels, this is true for Yuki Nagato and ''only'' for Yuki Nagato. In the [[Groundhog Day Loop]] short story ''Endless Eight'', everyone's {{spoiler|memories get reset, although they start experiencing déjà vu. Apparently, Yuki is not affected by this because time is not an obstacle for her}}.
* ''For King And Country'', by Robert Asprin and Linda Evans, features {{spoiler|what seems to be}} a [[Terminator Twosome]] of an IRA agent traveling back to Arthurian times to change history in Ireland's favor or simply punish England, and a British soldier trying to stop it. They go all the way back to around 500 AD or so and share the bodies of people close to King Arthur. It seems like a [[Stable Time Loop]] and/or [[Tricked-Out Time]], but the ending is a little ambiguous. [[Meanwhile in
* In ''Cube with Faceted Edges'', this is the only possible method of [[Time Travel]]. Originally used exclusively by the special forces-like Harders with brain implants called Iscapes, which throw their consciousness back a few seconds at the moment of death (how death is determined is not clear). To an outsider, it looks like a Harder is impossible to kill, as they look like they can dodge bullets and have a sixth sense. In reality, the Harders are just using the foreknowledge to avoid the same deadly outcome. Later on, a rival organization obtains an Iscape and builds a similar-functioning device that works by thinking of the time you want to go back to. This is one-way, however, as the timeline is changed by this action. They then start selling the devices to the general public and eliminating anyone who tries to investigate them (easy when you can always go back to fix a mistake). The knowledge of the original timeline quickly fades if any changes are made.
** The protagonist (a Harder) starts suspecting the existence of these bootleg devices when a space liner explodes. While it looks like a typical malfunction (and it is), he does find it strange that a full third of the passengers have cancelled their tickets several days before boarding. It turns out they all have these devices.
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* ''We Are Tam'' by Patricia Bernard features a form of mental time travel that allows a person to visit other times if somebody in that time period is their genetic double.
* Sherman Alexie's novel ''Flight'' has the protagonist inhabiting various people's bodies, ranging in time from the Indian wars to present day.
* In Eric Norden's novella ''The Primal Solution'', an elderly Jewish scientist - a Holocaust survivor who had lost his entire family - discovers a means of mental time travel, which enables him to project his mind into the past and take over the body of the young [[Adolf Hitler]] in the Vienna of the early 1910s. Resolved to force Hitler into suicide, the vengeful professor can't resist humiliating him first and forcing him to drink sewer water in front of surprised passersby, before making him jump into the Danube - but in the moment before drowning, Hitler regains control of his body and returns home shaken. The Professor is trapped inside Hitler's mind, but is able to "hear" him think "The Jews? Why did the Jews do this to me? I have never harmed them!". Able to access Hitler's memories, the trapped Professor suddenly realizes that until this moment the young Hitler had not at all been an anti-Semite and was in fact on good terms with some Jews. Only because something inexplicable had entered Hitler's mind - something which totally hated him and was implacably bent on his destruction, and which identified itself as being Jewish and acting on behalf of all Jews - did he become the genocidal Hitler known to history. Never daring to tell anybody of this presence in his mind, for fear of being considered insane, Hitler would gradually develop the idea that only by killing all Jews would he be free of that haunting presence. In short, the very act intended to avert the Holocaust ends up being its direct cause.
* Used by [[Allan Quatermain]] to visit past lives in ''The Ancient Allan'' and ''Allan and the Ice Gods''.
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* The ''[[Eureka]]'' season 1 finale, and the first half of the [[Groundhog Day Loop]] episode "I Do Again."
** Later one, they introduce physical time travel.
* ''[[Star Trek:
** Also "Tapestry".
* ''[[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.
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** And then all of the survivors on the island become [[Unstuck in Time|unstuck]]. Good for them. However, this version was physical time travel, not mental.
*** Except for Charlotte before {{spoiler|she dies. Her last words to Daniel are her first words to him when she met him as a little girl. [[Mind Screw|Yeah, I know]]}}.
{{quote|
* Canadian comedy ''[[
* Similarly, ''[[Medium]]'''s protagonist will occasionally have this.
* Though ''
* [[Star Trek: Voyager]] has an episode where Kes starts at the end of her life with no memories and progressively hops backwards through her life. The only consequence of this is to help the then present day Voyager avoid a deadly enemy. Other than that, its a giant [[Snap Back]] and [[Reset Button]].
** It also foreshadowed the upcoming "Year of Hell" storyline (which, at the time, was planned to last a full season.) Of course, Kes wasn't around when that storyline actually arrived in 2-parter form.
* In ''[[Warehouse 13]]'', [[
* Curtis' power in ''[[
* ''[[Kamen Rider Double]]'' gives an interesting twist on this with the Yesterday [[Monster of the Week|Dopant]], whose power causes people to do whatever they were doing exactly 24 hours ago because they think they're doing it right now. This is demonstrated first when it causes a man to leap to his death by making him think he's diving into his swimming pool; later on, it [[Evil Plan|sets up a fight with the hero so that his actions can be used to attack someone the Dopant wants to murder]].
* An episode of ''[[
** An earlier episode had Phoebe switching places with her past self, an evil witch in the 1920s.
== Tabletop Games ==
* Most time-travel abilities in ''[[
* A LARP game called ''Nepenthe'' featured time-travellers with the "jump into someone else's body" variant. They came from a [[After the End|post-apocalyptic future]] destroyed by the mysterious Nepenthe, and jumped back to early in its creation, ending up in the bodies of [[Self Referential Humour|a bunch of D&D players]] at [[Mind Screw|the gaming convention at which the LARP was sent]]. Nepenthe turned out to be a highly-addictive [[Virtual Reality]] game.
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** Ten seconds? Right before the end, the Prince {{spoiler|rewinds time all the way to prior the start of the game}}.
** ''Warrior Within'' also has physical time travel.
* In ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
** It's also pretty much the whole point of ''[[The Legend of Zelda:
* In ''[[
* When the party goes to Shion's ruined home planet Miltia in the third episode of ''[[
* Many modern racing games have a Rewind feature that similar to the Dagger of Time in the ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' series, allows you to rewind time for a few seconds to correct a crash or bad turn and thus be less punishing on the player.
* In ''[[Second Sight]]'', there are moments where the psychic player character, John Vattic has flashbacks that allow him to change events in the past which in turn alter the present (for example, saving the life of someone who had died). {{spoiler|Brilliantly subverted when it is revealed that you're not traveling to the past at all. The "past" is actually the ''present'' and the "present" is actually Vattic seeing into the future.}}
* ''[[
* ''[[
* One ending of ''[[Shadow Hearts]]: Covenant'' sends Yuri back to the beginning of the first game looking exactly like he did in the original's opening cinematic, but apparently with all his memories of the future, while the other heroes are shuffled through time the regular way.
* In the Visual Novel ''[[Yo-Jin-Bo]]'', the protagonist ended up traveling through time via a magical pendant and put her in a body of a princess.
* In ''[[Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
* The astral projection ability in ''[[The Adventures of Sam
== Web Comics ==
* ''[[Narbonic]]'' has "Dave Davenport Is Unstuck on Time" (a [[Shout-Out]] to ''[[Slaughterhouse
* ''[[Bob and George]]'', "All Good Things" (a [[Shout-Out]] to the ''Star Trek'' episode).
* The "rewind device" in ''[[City of Reality]]'' uses this method to allow characters, in the story, to retry their actions until they get them right.
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== Web Original ==
* In [[
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** Also the fact that it can't retcon out someone's death.
* ''[[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.
** Notably, this [[Averted Trope|averts]] the limit to one's own life; apparently, a Cartman-body just magically generated in the past when Cartman's mind needed it. (Or it was [[All Just a Dream]], the episode was [[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane|kind of ambiguous]].)
** This is also how the "Go God Go!" two-parter ended, with Cartman (having been stuck in the far future) being transferred back in time to "fuse with his past self."
{{quote|
* ''[[
* Inverted in ''[[Rugrats]]'', during the [[Poorly-Disguised Pilot]] for the spinoff, ''[[All Grown Up!]]''. Granted, there is no logical reason why what they did should have worked, suggesting that it may have been [[All Just a Dream]], but it was way too consistent with the actual plot to discount. At the end, the babies emerge from the closet they fled into at the beginning of the episode (apparently only moments later), and Tommy says, "Well guys, only ten more years until Angelica is nice to us."
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]
[[Category:
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