Mental Time Travel: Difference between revisions

* 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.

* [[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.

* 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 the Future]], their bodies remain in a comatose state while they are in the past.

** 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]]}}.

* 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.

** 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."

* ''[[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."