Have you experienced time compression?

I have recently started to collect data regarding two phenomena that I call time dilation and time compression. Both are similar effects and are characterized by a person experiencing a specific period of time that is longer than the time period observed by others.

In time dilation, which many of us have experienced, the effect is subjective – it feels that the amount of time passing is much longer than that objectively recorded. Time compression is like time dilation except that there is an independent measure of the person's experience of time passing.

I first encountered this many years ago as a teenager. My friend's mother and her sister decided to drive 400 miles to attend church conference. They set out at about 9am, which I know because I was there at my friends house when she left. At about 12:30, she called my friend to let us know that they had arrived safely. We thought she was putting us on and told her so but she got quite angry and assured us that they were at the conference and they had stayed at a constant 60 miles per hour the whole way. She even commented that other drivers would tailgate them trying to get them to speed up, which she found very unnerving.

My friend's mother traveled 400 miles in 3 ½ hours. You can't do that at 60 miles an hour. We tired to point this out to her but she wasn't really math minded and was adamant that if you go 60 mph, you can easily cover 120 miles in an hour. She eventually decided that she must have taken an inadvertent short cut even though she followed the Interstate the whole way.

This is an example of time compression. There was no subjective feeling that time was passing at a different rate for them but if they were traveling at 60 miles an hour, 400 miles should have taken just over 6.6 hours, and that seems to have been compressed into 3.5 hours.

For decades, I wrote this off as my friend just having a ditzy mother until I came across this anecdote from Gregg Braden.

“What's happening?” I asked our guide. “Why have we stopped here rather than at our hotel, still an hour or so away?”

Mohammed looked at me in awe. “Something is not right,” he said, with a rare intensity to his normally playful voice. “We should not be here yet!”

“What are you saying?” I asked. This is precisely where we should be, on the way to our hotel in Giza.”

“No,” he said. “You do not understand, We cannot be here yet. It has not been long enough since our departure from St. Catherine's for us to be here in Cairo! It takes at least seven hours for us to make the drive under the Suez Canal, across the desert, and into the mountains. At least seven hours. With the checkpoint stops, we should be even later. Look at the guards. They do not believe their eyes! It has only been four hours. from “The Isaiah Effect” by Gregg Braden, Harmony Books, New York, 2000, Page 88

I have several such cases now but I would love to hear for anyone on ATS who has had a time compression event. Remember a time compression event is one where: An event happened (like a trip) in an impossibly short period of time or the duration of an event as marked by some processes or calibration, like a clock or drying of paint, happened much faster than it could or should have.

At this point I am not collecting time dilation anecdotes, but I will later on. A time dilation experience is one where you feel that much more time has passed than is objectively measured, but you do not feel any speed up or slow down effect such as the kind people report when they are in a crisis and everything seems like it is slow motion. In a time dilation experience, the passage of time feels normal to the experiencer. It is only after the event that the experiencer is aware of the temporal difference.

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Perhaps you might be interested in this book..I found it fascinating.

paranormal.about.com...

I have experienced time distortion but I always attributed it to
chemicals, if you catch my drift.

Yes, I encountered it in FF8.

Originally posted by whaaa
Perhaps you might be interested in this book..I found it fascinating.

paranormal.about.com...

I have experienced time distortion but I always attributed it to
chemicals, if you catch my drift.

Thank you for your recommendation, I will check it our. However I have found that if you actually go back and look at a number of the cases cited in these books, they tend to be highly exaggerated or confabulated. The reasons are simple, the "spookier" they are, they better they read and the higher the marketability of the book; many of these authors repeat stores from other sources without ever checking first-hand -- and we know that it is human nature to embellish in the telling and retelling

For example, a number of years ago, we decided to test this by taking a statement that was appearing in a number of fundamentalist and conspiracy publications, that people had seen stockpiles of the new currency that the government was going to use to replace the existing US currency. We identified individuals who were quoted as saying they had seen it and contacted them. In every case, they either: denied having said that; or said they never said they saw it but they just were speculating on what they thought the government was doing; or admitted that they hadn't seen it themselves but heard about it from someone else but said they saw it for one reason or another (eg. to protect the identity of their informant).

No matter how far we went back in the chain of "Well. I heard it from..." we never found anyone who actually saw it. And we talked to a lot of people. So the problem is that a lot of these stories in the popular books prove to be urban myths when you take the time to look carefully, but I am interested in those that do prove out. Your recommendation will be a good starting point.

As for the time distortion. you don't really need drugs for that -- as one of my friends commented "I spend two weeks in Fargo one night."



[edit on 13-7-2008 by metamagic]

I collect such data, too.

I think it would be useful if I included here the link to a thread you or anyone reading this might find interesting:

Time Slips

And there was such an incident described in this thread:

Out of Time and Out of Place

Originally posted by Vanitas


I collect such data, too.

I think it would be useful if I included here the link to a thread you or anyone reading this might find interesting:

Time Slips

And there was such an incident described in this thread:

Out of Time and Out of Place

Thanks for the heads up, but most of these from what I can see are not time compressions, but are related types of phenomena. But all input is greatly appreciated and welcomed.

The missing time events are always interesting, but are difficult to assess on a second hand basis since there are a number of possible prosaic explanations, for example we do know that some people can doze off for some time and when they wake up, not be aware they were asleep and then feel that some time is missing. What I call time dilation also has this possible etiology in some cases; a person falls asleep reading and dreams they are reading, but subjective dream time is not always the same as subjective waking time. When they awake, unaware they have been asleep, the dream memories provide the illusion of a longer time span than actually occurred.

Cases where the subject is aware that the passage of time is normal but but they feel out of sync with it is what I call time distortion; it is well attested to and a normal cognitive experience (read the work by the Psychologist Csíkszentmihályi on what he calls "Flow")

Why I separate out the events that I call dilation (from the experiencer's point of view, time dilated or got longer) and compression (from the external point of view, an event from the experiencer point of view is compressed into a shorter objective span than should be possible) is that during the event, time seems to be passing at a normal rate for everyone, and only after the event is the discrepancy apparent.

Since dilation is a subjective event, while it is really interesting, it's harder to work with from a research point of view. But with compression, since it involves something that non-subjectively marks the passage of time (like distance traveled at constant speed) we do have a more concrete phenomenon to work with.

So far, a number of these cases do seem to share some common factors, which have nothing to do with swirling mists, UFOs or mysterious lights but are more psychological in nature.






[edit on 13-7-2008 by metamagic]

reply to post by metamagic

But all input is greatly appreciated and welcomed.

Can you experience time compression, while staring at a clock?
This is probably not what you want to hear.
I had this happen to me for a week, then my clock stopped.
I was doing an intricate paint by number (DaVinci's Last Supper) and nothing else, and I had a clock on the wall directly in front of me, in a very small hospital room.
I was focused on my work, mixing the paint, constantly, while I brushed it on, to get good consistent color.
Whenever I looked at the clock, the minute hand seemed to move almost as if it was a second hand.
I was in there for two months and I was looking for something to do to pass the time and it did pass, in a very odd sort of way.
My tv had died and they never replaced it and then, later, the clock died too.
There was nothing wrong with the clock, while it worked, because I could check it against a clock in the Nurse's station, that I could see if I looked out the door.(not so easy to do, but it could be done)
I was only sleeping for five minutes a day and I always woke up wet, from sweat.


[edit on 13-7-2008 by jmdewey60]

OK I have two time compressions. One that cannot be accurately meaured and another event that was recorded on 4 distinct timepieces. This is not a third person, or embellished tory. In fact I will leave out anything on this story that does not involve time compression.

I would have to work hard to come up with the date for this one, but I would suppose summer of 1992 (give or take a year). We made the drive to Clayton Lake, NM from the main highway. As I recall, it is about 12 miles and takes around 20 minutes. On our return trip to the highway, we came over a hill and were suddenly back at the highway. We have no definitive time measurement, but it was truly little more than 3 or 4 minutes. Asking my wife what she saw and remebered of the entire trp was the same as what I remembered. We turned right (south) out of the parking lot and drove to a large hill about 3/4 of a mile south. The road angled up to the right (West) around this hill and we came down at the place where we left the highway. Weird, but we all agreed it happened.

In May of 1994 we were getting a late dinner at the McDonalds just before entering a turnpike. Our daughter was just learning to tell time on her new Mickey Mouse Watch. As a result we were chekcing the time just as my wife got in the car. As we were leaving, we laughed about the fact 4 timepieces showed different times. The clock in the car showed 10:28; my Tag Heauer was a couple of minutes behind the clock; my daughters was 1 minute behind and my wife's was three minutes ahead.

We pulled on to the hgihway, joining the iturnpike in a couple of miles. Shortly into the drive we crested a hill and saw bright lights in the distance. My wife assumed it was an accident, but I knew it for what is was. We had reached the halfway point on the turnpike (48 miles or so from where we started). My wife stated the obvious that this was impossible. This brought us immediately back to the time check leaving the parking lot. Suffice it to say that I paid my toll 48 miles from the McDonalds at 10:44 in the evening only 16 minutes prior to embarking 48 miles earlier (and no I didn't drive 180 miles per hour). We checked all the timepieces and found the same variances as before. Impossible or not, we had just traveled 48 miles in 16 minutes on 4 separate timepieces.

As an afternote, the remainder of each trip 1992 and 1994 seemed to take an interminably long time (although in the case of 1994 where we had definitie time markers, it took the normal time taken to drive the final 48 miles, but it felt like it was three hours). We also noted that we did not remember passing a single car in either direction for the last 44 miles.

This was submitted to an investigatory group thataskewd questions which I answered and I never heard another thing. I also submitted it to Stanton Friedman who declined to answer. Since then I have seen reference to this on a UFO site that claimed we had been abducted, etc. etc. etc. none of which is true.

A weird, weird night that continues to bother us to certain extent to this day.

Well, I must admit that until I read this post I had never really thought about this as being unusual. I have often experienced the impossibly short travel time events like you mention here. I just never thought that much of them. I just accepted them as normal somehow as it's happened all of my life.
There have been instances where I've done a 6 hour drive in a couple of hours. Usually it's if I am very relaxed and enjoying a carefree drive, not speeding and I am fully aware of every moment.
In contrast to the relaxed drives, I recently I got a call to say that my Uncle was dying in a town 3 hours drive from me if I sat on the 100Km speed limit all the way. I left for the hospital within 10 minutes of the call. I was anxious to see him and to be there for him and my cousins. I arrived at the front door of the hospital one hour and 5 minutes later. No I did not drive my LandCruiser at 300Km an hour. The poor old thing would fly apart if I took it over 110!
I can't explain these things, and as I said, I never saw it as being particularly unusual. I've always just thought of it as a handy time saving thing that I can usually tap into when I want to.
Just a footnote... I have always found I arrive very relaxed and calm within my self after experiencing this.

reply to post by Anonymous ATS


OK guys, I need to proof read my stuff a little better. We left the McDonald's at 10:28pm and arrived at the halfway point 48 miles later at 10:44pm. It took us a total of 1`6 minutes to make the drive.

In my post I said we arrived 16 minutes prior to departure which was incorrect. It did, however, take only 16 minutes to cover 48+ miles on a turnpike (in an older car as well).

Sorry for any confusion, but it is still a time compression worthy of serious note. While I can't always type that well, I can tell time, and all three people in the car along with all 4 time pieces told the same tale.

In reality; Time... and space are simply the one truncated projection of the mind.
As the brain and body are the perceptions of the egoic mind which have produced this Holographic dream matrix to make a reality in which there is a projection of a reality of matter and substance in physicallity which seems real and absolute in solidity in all form for all intents and purposes for the forgetting of ones true right minded self.
The Shapeshifter knows this and uses it wisely in each moment.

Originally posted by Epsillion70
In reality; Time... and space are simply the one truncated projection of the mind.
As the brain and body are the perceptions of the egoic mind which have produced this Holographic dream matrix to make a reality in which there is a projection of a reality of matter and substance in physicallity which seems real and absolute in solidity in all form for all intents and purposes for the forgetting of ones true right minded self.
The Shapeshifter knows this and uses it wisely in each moment.

HUH?
Can I have that in English?
I'm not saying you're not right, in fact I have no idea what you're saying at all. It sounds good though.