History Main / OutOfTimeOutOfMind

* [[CrossChannel CROSS†CHANNEL]] averts this. [[spoiler:Although humanity has apparently been annihilated, Miki is [[GenkiGirl bright and cheerful]] as always. After she decides to "reset" along with everything else, we see a more fragile side of her.]]

* How true this is in '''Fanfic/TheInfiniteLoops''' varies widely. Some characters act pretty much the same as their baseline selves, while some are dramatically different for [[HeelFaceTurn better]] or [[SanitySlippage worse]].

* In the ''Comicbook/XMen'' comics, Scott Summers and Jean Grey get sent to the future in different bodies to raise Cable. Despite having lived for 20 years together in this future, they don't change. And yet, Wolverine noticed just by looking at Jean that something was different about her, saying something to the affect that her eyes looked like they'd seen a lifetime of pain as opposed to a few weeks in the Bahamas. And aside from a now-new psychic rapport with Cable, nothing else changed.

* In ''VisualNovel/HigurashiNoNakuKoroNi'', after a century of being caught in a GroundhogDayLoop that nobody else remembers, [[spoiler: Rika Furude]] has a lot of practice [[DeliberatelyCuteChild acting like a child]], [[CreepyChild occasionally]] slipping into an emphatically different tone of voice and giving the kind of serious advice you'd expect from someone with a hundred years of experience, and sometimes falling into a bout of [[TheFatalist depression]] and [[DeterminedDefeatist frustration]] that peeks through the façade.

* Subverted with ''VisualNovel/HigurashiNoNakuKoroNi''. [[spoiler:[[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld Rika]]]] [[ImmortalImmaturity behaves like a child]], but it's revealed to be an [[DeliberatelyCuteChild act]] so as not to freak anyone out.

* Played with in Uncanny Avengers. During the course of the Apocalypse Twins storyline, Earth gets destroyed, all the mutants are relocated to a new homeworld, Planet X, and the five remaining Avengers are scattered. Thor tries for years to find a way to undo the destrution, Havok and Wasp get married and have a daughter on Planet X, and Wolverine and Sunfire are imprisoned by the villians, with Sunfire forced to constantly burn Wolverine. After 5 years, all five Avengers get their consciousnesses sent back a-la Days of Future Past via Kang, and save the world. The reactions afterward are mixed. Thor and Wolverine are fine, the latter brushing off the years of torture because he's Wolverine. In the course of saving the world, Sunfire was transformed into an energy form resembling his look from the Age of Apocalypse, and says he feels more disconnected, but doesn't talk about his years as a captive, aside from asking Wolverine how he's doing. Wasp went on a personal retreat for several weeks, and Havok

* In ''Uncanny X-Force'', Psylocke engages in a duel of minds with the Shadow King. While only a few minutes pass in the real world, the two battle endlessly for centuries on a psychic plane. After the duel ends, Psylocke seems immediately contacts her team to resume their mission. She brushes the whole ordeal off and never speaks of it again.

* ''Inception'' is a borderline case, since you don't see what Dom was like "before", but you'd never guess from watching him that [[spoiler: he and Mal had been trapped in limbo for 50 years and grown old together.]]

* Averted in ''The Jaunt'', a short story by Creator/StephenKing, in which [[spoiler: the method of interplanetary travel, which is harmless if undertaken while unconscious, takes eons to the waking mind. Every human who has done the latter either died from shock upon returning, or was driven incurably insane.]]

* Averted in WilliamSleator's ''Literature/{{Singularity}}''. The protagonist spends about a year inside a timewarp, which is about an hour outside. Changing his personality was his goal going in, and it works, especially because the timewarp is only about 8 feet across, and he's the only person in it.

* Captain Picard, in the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "The Inner Light", lives an entire lifetime in twenty minutes. (Well, okay, not an entire lifetime, but they probably didn't want to deal with the weirdness of Picard waking up as a newborn baby.) The only major difference is that he now plays the flute, and one reference in a later episode where he admits it caused him to (somewhat) rethink his priorities about what he gave up in his personal life to advance his career. In the later episode "Lessons", Picard describes his memories of the experience as dreamlike, in an apparent bit of retroactive justification. Ronald D. Moore later commented on this:

* In ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'', Chief O'Brien served out an illusionary twenty-year prison sentence lasting only a few hours of real time. ''Slightly'' averted, because the actual episode was about him dealing with readjusting to society and coming to terms with what he did when he was a prisoner, but (uncharacteristically for [=DS9=]) it still didn't have any noticeable long-term effect.

* In the ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'' episode "Exit Wounds", [[spoiler:Jack is taken back in time to 27AD and buried alive, spends most of the next ''two millennia'' repeatedly dying and reviving, is dug up in 1901 and put into cryo-storage so he won't meet his past self, and finally wakes up in the present day. So this one incident has accounted for most of his life so far, yet once the other characters have found him they seem to assume he can just pick up where he left off -- as it seems he can.]] It's too early to tell whether this incident will ever be referred to again. \\

** In the Season 6 episode "After Life," Spike informs the newly-resurrected Buffy that she was dead for "147 days." He asks her, "How long was it for you...where you were?" To which Buffy responds vaguely: "A lot longer." It screwed up her life for some time afterwards, and she never ''quite'' got back to her old self. [[spoiler: She was in a Heaven dimension, and rather unceremoniously ripped out of it to end up in a coffin where she had to dig her way out and then find herself in a Sunnydale temporarily overrun by demons]].

** In the episode "Window of Opportunity", Teal'c and O'Neil are stuck in a time loop for at least 3 months, 10 hours at a time. During the episode they, among other things, learn how to juggle and a good amount of the Ancient language. There's not much evidence that any of the changes are permanent.

* Averted in ''Series/TheXFiles'' in the Groundhog Day scenario episode ''Monday'' where a single day keeps repeating itself with only one person being aware of the loop. She realises something needs to be done to break the loop, and her numerous attempts to do so leave her visibly drained and frustrated from the constant repetitions.

** In the episode "Roswell That Ends Well" Bender gets left in the past and picked up again in the future, much like Marvin in ''The Hitchhiker's Guide'' mentioned above. Bender's reaction is quite different from Marvin's. When asked what it was like being buried in a hole for a thousand years, Bender replies "I was enjoying it until you guys showed up."
** "Bender's Big Score":

* Averted in the ''SuzumiyaHaruhi'' novels, where being [[GroundhogDayLoop trapped in a time loop]] for ''thousands'' of repetitions is a likely contributing factor to [[spoiler:Yuki's later breakdown]] in the fourth novel (no one else retained conscious memory of the loops).
** So it’s also played straight as regards everyone else, though [[JustifiedTrope justified]] by their memory loss.

* In the ''Comicbook/{{X-Men}}'' comics, Scott Summers and Jean Grey get sent to the future in different bodies to raise Cable. Despite having lived for 20 years together in this future, they don't change.
** And yet, Wolverine noticed just by looking at Jean that something was different about her, saying something to the affect that her eyes looked like they'd seen a lifetime of pain as opposed to a few weeks in the Bahamas. And aside from a now-new psychic rapport with Cable, nothing else changed.

** [[JustifiedTrope Justified]]- Strange agreed to fight in that war on the explicit condition that afterwards he wouldn't rember any of it. Which might have been a ''bad'' thing in the sense that you'd expect him to be [[LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards ridiculously overpowered]] after 5,000 years practicing his magical craft, and since his usual opponents are {{Eldritch Abomination}}s, [[GodOfEvil Gods of Evil]] and the LegionsOfHell, several of whom are universal threats at the very least, you'd think remembering that kind of stuff would be useful (though he may have been understandably worried that millenia of war would give him a bad and dangerous case of MoralDissonance).

** The original script had him being stuck in time, improving himself each day, for ten ''thousand'' years (3,652,425 repetitions of the same day).

* This arguably happens to Libby in ''DoubleJeopardy''. She serves a six-year prison sentence in the story but, when she leaves the prison, it seems like she had only been in it for a day or two.
* In ''{{Jumanji}}'', when the kids return to their normal ages, they apparently remember all of it.
** Sort of. The "kids" that are adults for most of the movie remember everything. The kids who start up the game the second time, having apparently regressed to never being born when the game undoes everything, remember nothing.
*** Not so. In the final scene, during the Christmas party to which the older players have invited the family of the younger players, they clearly know each other, judging by the expressions on the younger players' faces.

* Played with at the end of BillAndTedsBogusJourney. Literally as they're going on stage for the big battle of the bands, the titular dimwit duo suddenly realizes that they ''still'' don't know how to play very well. Then the realize they have a time machine. The two, [[ItMakesSenseInContext their Medieval princess girlfriends, the Grim Reaper, and the alien/aliens known as Station]] take a year long break to learn how to rock out, Bill & Ted marry their girlfriends, go back to the Medieval era for their honeymoon, have kids, and grow epic beards that would make ZZ-Top proud. The time machine pops back all of a tenth of a second after it took off, and despite these radical changes their speech patterns, attitudes and physical appearances haven't changed at all (save for said epic beards).

* In ''[[{{Narnia}} The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe]]'' the four Pevensie children spend some fifteen years living in Narnia as kings and queens, before coming back to our world not a day older... and with no trouble at all in adjusting to their old lives as children in our world. In fact, by the end of the final book Susan doesn't believe in the existence of Narnia any more despite the fact that she's lived there almost half her life. There's a piece of FridgeLogic that doesn't always occur to everyone, although there are a couple of one-off lines indicating their memories of adulthood faded unnaturally quickly.
** Slightly averted in the new Prince Caspian movie, where the fact that they were "adults once" is actually a bit of a plot point/arc for the characters.
*** Indeed, in the book they soon realize, on arriving back in Narnia, that they used to be highly skilled adults there, and while they have reverted to child bodies, their skills are still intact. Edmund impresses the dwarf Trumpkin by beating him in a sword-fight, and Peter is later confident enough to challenge Miraz the usurper, and Susan is still an excellent archer.
** The books don’t really cover much of the time in between the Pevensies’ trips to Narnia, so it isn’t really fair to say that canon plays this trope straight. There’s ''plenty'' of fanfiction that averts it, however, usually covering either the children’s personal struggles with having to relive adolescence/be ordinary schoolchildren after fifteen years as kings and queens, or the perspectives of supporting characters who notice something is “off” about the children.
* Averted in the ''{{Nightside}}'' novels. When John Taylor encounters or psychically views his closest friends as they exist in the future, not only has their behavior and demeanor changed over time, but [[spoiler: it turns out ''they're'' the ones who've been trying to kill him ever since he was a little kid, because they blame him for causing TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt.]]

** If I remember correctly, there is a bit of oddness in the fact that the protagonist [[spoiler: exits as an physically aged child. "Hair white with shock, corneas yellowed with age". Now, let's skip the fact that "Hair white with shock" is Hollywood bad science: it's not an instantaneous change, much less the yellow eyes.]] So... ?

* Captain Picard, in the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "The Inner Light", lives an entire lifetime in twenty minutes. (Well, okay, not an entire lifetime, but they probably didn't want to deal with the weirdness of Picard waking up as a newborn baby.) The only major difference is that he now plays the flute, and one reference in a later episode where he admits it caused him to (somewhat) rethink his priorities about what he gave up in his personal life to advance his career.
** In the later episode, Picard describes his memories of the experience as dreamlike, in an apparent bit of retroactive justification.
*** Ronald D. Moore later commented on this:
---> '''Ronald D. Moore''': I've always felt that the experience in "Inner Light" would've been the most profound experience in Picard's life and changed him irrevocably. However, that wasn't our intention when we were creating the episode. We were after a good hour of TV, and the larger implications of how this would really screw somebody up didn't hit home with us until later (that's sometimes a danger in TV – you're so focused on just getting the show produced every week that sometimes you suffer from the "can't see the forest for the trees" syndrome). We never intended the show to completely upend his character and force a radical change in the series, so we contented ourselves with a single follow-up in "Lessons".
* A similar thing happened to O'Brien in ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'', where he served out an illusionary twenty-year prison sentence lasting only a few hours of real time. ''Slightly'' averted, because the actual episode was about him dealing with readjusting to society and coming to terms with what he did when he was a prisoner, but (uncharacteristically for [=DS9=]) it still didn't have any noticeable long-term effect.
* Happened in ''Series/RedDwarf'' several times, including one episode where Rimmer spent over 600 years in a society of his own clones, who have kept him in a dungeon for most of that time. At the end of the episode, they get back to their ship using a teleporter which, it's been established, has a slightly unreliable time component, so they arrive to find their other selves already there. Lister assumes they've landed in the past and starts giving dark hints to the other Rimmer about what's about to happen to him. The other Rimmer replies, "Rimmerworld was weeks ago," with a casual air.

* Justified in the second season of ''{{Eureka}}'', where the main character does remember everything and acts differently. He is forward and way too personal with his future wife and forgets that his daughter isn't old enough to drive. Eventually his mind is [[LaserGuidedAmnesia wiped of future events]] and he returns to normal. [[spoiler:The other time traveler does not, but that's a plot point. And he's a lot better at faking it.]]

* Averted by ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' and ''Series/{{Angel}}'', whose mythos establish that in the "hell dimensions," years and years and years pass before any noticeable length of time has gone by on Earth. So when Angel is sent to one after the season two finale, he spends the following four or five months before his return enduring what Giles describes as basically being ''centuries'' of unimaginably horrible torture. Sure enough, he arrives back on Earth completely feral and seemingly with no memory. It takes him several weeks of rehabilitation with Buffy before he's functional around other people again, and he's never the same as he was in the first two seasons.

* In the ''Series/StargateSG1'' episode "Window of Opportunity", Teal'c and O'Neil are stuck in a time loop for at least 3 months, 10 hours at a time. During the episode they, among other things, learn how to juggle and a good amount of the Ancient language. There's not much evidence that any of the changes are permanent.
** The last episode of SG-1 has Teal'c traveling back in time after spending 50 years or so on the Daedalus. In the subsequent movies and on Stargate Atlantis, all he has to show for it is a goatee. This is despite the fact that he should be older than Bra'tac was at the start of the series (he was 101 years old in season 4, while Bra'tac was 134).
*** He does seem a little wiser when he shows up in ''Series/StargateAtlantis'' to coach Ronon. That is until they start a slugfest with neither being the victor. As far as his white hair, he could've easily dyed it.

** [[spoiler: He's now (supposedly) older than The Doctor, at least as far as experienced time is concerned.]]
** It is worth noting that [[spoiler:Rory]] also mentions that it comes and goes. Sometimes he remembers it all, sometimes he doesn't. Though, in keeping with the trope, this isn't exactly touched upon further.
** He has [[TookALevelInBadass changed a little]], especially when [[spoiler:Amy is kidnapped]].
--> WHERE. IS. MY. WIFE?

* In the ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' episode "Roswell That Ends Well" Bender gets left in the past and picked up again in the future, much like Marvin in ''The Hitchhiker's Guide'' mentioned above. Bender's reaction is quite different from Marvin's. When asked what it was like being buried in a hole for a thousand years, Bender replies "I was enjoying it until you guys showed up."
** In the movie - ''Bender's Big Score'', Bender does this about 20-30 times with no noticeable change, although that might be explained by the fact that he spent most of that time doing nothing in a limestone cavern. Then again, after [[spoiler: killing Fry, he shows up in the future, acting as if he had just killed Fry yesterday, even after spending 988 years alone grieving about it.]]
*** Also subverted in ''Bender's Big Score'' when [[spoiler: a time-duplicate of Fry becomes significantly more mature and different looking after 12 years. The fire that burnt up his hair and screwed up his voice helped.]]

** Also, in one of the books, Lister is trapped on a destroyed Earth for the the better part of his life with nothing but giant cockroaches for company. He's mostly the same as he was before he left the Dwarf.

* Averted in ''FrequentlyAskedQuestionsAboutTimeTravel''. The three protagonists are randomly skipping through time whenever they enter the men's room of a pub. One character goes back into the bathroom alone, then appears a few seconds later with a big beard and stories implying that, from his perspective, he had been trapped in a BadFuture for about three years. He spends the rest of the movie slightly feral and kinda... off.

** In the Season 6 episode "After Life," Spike informs the newly-resurrected Buffy that she was dead for "147 days." He asks her, "How long was it for you...where you were?" To which Buffy responds vaguely: "A lot longer." It screwed up her life for some time afterwards, and she never ''quite'' got back to her old self. [[spoiler: She was in a Heaven dimension, and rather unceremoniously ripped out of it to end up in a coffin where she had to dug her way out and then find herself in a Sunnydale temporarily overrun by demons]].

* In ''Uncanny X-Force'', Psylocke engages in a duel of minds with the Shadow King. While only a few minutes pass in the real world, the two battle endlessly for centuries on the psychic plain. After the duel ends, Psylocke seems to brush it off as if not much at all had just taken place.

* In ''Comicbook/Uncanny X-Force'', Psylocke engages in a duel of minds with the Shadow King. While only a few minutes pass in the real world, the two battle endlessly for centuries on the psychic plain. After the duel ends, Psylocke seems to brush it off as if not much at all had just taken place.

* In ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger'', there's a side quest where you leave Robo in the past, and zip ahead to find (and repair) him in the future. He's turned what would be a desert into a forest. No, his personality is in no way altered by this. Also, despite have spend centuries in a world where you can't cross the street without getting in a fight with monsters, [[GameplayandStorySegregation he doesn't level up either.]]

* PlasticMan spends about three thousand years as a disembodied consciousness spread over thousands of miles of ocean. By the time he reforms himself, he admits that he'd suffered unspeakable agony, gotten used to it, gone insane, then gone sane. Mildly averted in that he does change somewhat (leaving the JusticeLeagueOfAmerica to be a better father to his kid) but not entirely.

* Averted in ''{{The X-Files}}'' in the Groundhog Day scenario episode ''Monday'' where a single day keeps repeating itself with only one person being aware of the loop. She realises something needs to be done to break the loop, and her numerous attempts to do so leave her visibly drained and frustrated from the constant repetitions.
* There was an episode of ''{{Sliders}}'' where Quinn and Maggie were transported to a "bubble universe," where they lived out their entire lives as a married couple, then returned to the "real" world, no time having passed. They briefly talk about the experience of having just spent an entire lifetime together, but it has no lasting effect on their personalities or their relationship to one another.

** Averted in ''So Long and Thanks for All the Fish'': Arthur Dent, having hitchhiked around the galaxy a few times, finds himself returning to an Earth set after he left, but not as far after as he actually spent bumming around (more than ten years have passed by his clock, a few months by Earth's clock). He [[HandWave explains it all]] by saying he went to Southern California and had a "face drop", supposedly all the rage there: his friends don't believe him, but they can't figure out how he's changed so much.

** It is worth noting that Rory also mentions that it comes and goes. Sometimes he remembers it all, sometimes he doesn't. Though, in keeping with the trope, this isn't exactly touched upon further.

* ZigZagged in ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica''. To the rest of Mitakihara, Homura is a cold and condescending person all the time. [[spoiler:Originally she wasn't this way. Fighting the scheme of an EldritchAbomination over and over again in a GroundhogDayLoop did that to her.]]

* In ChronoTrigger there's a side quest where you leave robo in the past, and zip ahead to find (and repair) him in the future. He's turned what would be a desert into a forest. No, his personality is in no way altered by this. Also, despite have spend centuries in a world where you can't cross the street without getting in a fight with monsters, [[GameplayandStorySegregation he doesn't level up either.]]