Unstuck in Time: Difference between revisions

 

A form of [[Mental Time Travel|Mental]] [[Time Travel]],

 

Compare [[Anachronic Order|Non Linear Storytelling]].

* [[Philip K. Dick]]'s ''Now Wait For Last Year'' is an example of this. The main character's wife obtains an illegal drug from an alien society. The aliens supposedly use the drug to hallucinate, re-living past happy experiences. When she takes the drug she finds out that the drug [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|works as described]], except that you aren't hallucinating... You should probably stop taking the drug so that you don't mess with the timeline, but {{spoiler|the drug is highly addictive so no matter how hard you try to stop you'll keep feeling compelled to go back to further mess up your own past}}.

* Old Mother Dismass in the ''[[Discworld]]'' books has "a detached retina in her second sight." From the perspective of the other characters she's on the correct timeline and seems fine apart from a tendency to talk in non sequiturs. From ''her'' perspective however, she's experiencing exactly what the trope describes.

* The Clayr in the ''[[Old Kingdom]]'' have this as a form of clairvoyance. As they grow older their visions become smaller and more frequent until they are unable to function independently. All Clayr have a fragment of the sight but at any given time 49 of them are on duty as the "Nine Day Watch". When trying see somethng that eludes them, they will call a gathering of up to 1538, almost all the Awakened Clayr.

* The short story "Searching for January," from W.P. Kinsella's book ''The Dixon Cornbelt League,'' is about a man who finds baseball star Roberto Clemente rowing up to a beach in 1987, 14 years after he was [http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0818.html lost in a plane crash.] At the end {{spoiler|Roberto decides to keep rowing on, to search for January 2, 1973}}

* Henry from ''[[The Time Travellers Wife|The Time Traveller's Wife]]''.

 

 

* Illyria in the ''[[Angel]]'' episode "Time Bomb" is like this. In the ''After The Fall'' comics, {{spoiler|whenever Angel gets near Illyria, he gets like this, going back and forth in his own life}}.

* Samuel Beckett in ''[[Quantum Leap]]''.

** Unstuck in timelines?

* Miles O'Brien in the episode "Visionary" of ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]''.

** In the beginning of the fifth season, {{spoiler|the survivors left on the island begin to jump through time}}.

** Most time travel on ''[[Lost]]'' is physical teleportation, but Desmond's is mental.

* Happens to [[Unfazed Everyman|Crichton]] in ''[[Farscape]]'' after he accidentally touched the containment shield on a homemade quantum singularity, allowing him to pick out the only timeline that didn't end with him dead, [[Living Ship|Moya]] disintegrated, or the singularity's power in the hands of the Scorvians.

* Captain Sheridan of ''[[Babylon 5]]'', as explained by Zathras.

* In ''[[Guilty Gear]]'' Axl Low keeps travelling back in time, apparently due to there being another version of him, so the universe tries to force [[Never the Selves Shall Meet|the two from existing at the same time]].

** [[Jossed]]. Axl keeps travelling in time because has a parallel self, Raven (who is actually a sadomasochistic viking of some kind). Raven willingly moves through dimensions, and this has the side-effect of causing Axl to slip through time. [[Mind Screw|We don't fully understand it, either]].