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 ni]]'', though they're not always able to keep ''all'' of their memories.
** Most of the cast, actually, they just drop more memories.
* {{spoiler|Tomoya}} from ''[[Clannad (visual novel)|Clannad]]'' seems to undergo this.
* 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.
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==
* 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.
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* 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 on 30|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
* 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.
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== Literature ==
* ''[[Slaughterhouse-Five]]'', by Kurt Vonnegut
* ''Timequake'', also by Vonnegut, features the ''entire world''
* ''[[Replay]]'', by Ken Grimwood.
* ''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
* [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s ''The Shadow Out of Time'' twists this trope by combining it with [[Grand Theft Me]] in a very [[Fridge Logic]]-appeasing way.
* ''[[Time and Again]]'' by Jack Finney, and its sequel ''Time After Time''. [[Born in the Wrong Century]], the protagonist goes back in time mentally by imagining himself to be in [[The Gay Nineties]] and surrounding himself with items from that period until he becomes temporally dislocated. Partly averted in that he does not travel back into his own memories, but that of an alternate self.
* 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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* ''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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* 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.
* 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]]'', [[H. G. Wells]]'s [[Time Machine]] is a pair of armchairs with headbands and some electrical contraption. It works by sending the (up to 2) users' consciousness back in time into specific bodies for no more than 22 hours 10 minutes, during which time the owners of the bodies in the past black out. Helena mentions that the machine makes use of the gestalt phenomenon. Also, since changing the past is virtually impossible, time travel poses no risk to the body owners (unless they were meant to die during this time). The time travelers, however, run the risk of being lost in the ether, never finding their way back. The machine was only used three times. In fact, all uses happened due to [[Stable Time Loop
* Curtis' power in ''[[Misfits]]'' is to mentally travel back to before something he feels guilty about. While this is problematic when he's trying to break up with his girlfriend and keeps feeling guilty about it, it's certainly one of the more useful powers.
* ''[[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]].
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== 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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* ''[[Braid]]'''s rewind feature.
* ''[[Radiant Historia]]'' involves you jumping through time to points where you already existed. While your body technically still ages as you go through time, you replace the "you" that would've been in that moment of time, so that paradoxes are avoided.
* 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|Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors]],'' {{spoiler|June/Akane Kurashiki has this ability, and can in fact explore multiple possibilities. All the game's [[Multiple Endings]] are essentially just her [[Save Scumming]] in the future, trying to find the sequence of events that leads to her own life being saved in the past/present.}}
* The astral projection ability in ''[[The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police|Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse]]'' could be explained this way.
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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|'''[[It Makes Sense in Context|Blavius the Talking Sea Otter]]:''' Don't worry, my son. When you return to your time you will merge with your other self. It's all very Zen.}}
* ''[[The Batman]]'' features Francis Grey, who discovers he can [[Save Scumming|"turn back the clock" 20 seconds]], allowing him to relive his past and relearn his mistakes. [[Charles Atlas Superpower|He discovered this power]] [[90% of Your Brain|through his obsession with time]]
* 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]]
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