Year Outside, Hour Inside

Alyx: I think the teleport exploded just as we were porting out.
Dr. Kleiner: Indeed it did. And the repercussions were felt far and wide... but that was over a week ago.
Alyx: What do you mean? Gordon and I were just there a minute ago.
Dr. Kleiner: ... Fascinating. We seem to have developed a very slow teleport!

— Half-Life 2

The heroes enter some kind of enchanted place, usually much smaller than an entire Magical Land — for example, a house, a castle, or an island. They spend only a few hours inside (and seemingly only age a few hours, too), but when they leave, they find that years have passed outside in the "normal" world. These places are also not only smaller but likely to be more malicious than a Magical Land, possibly designed by a villain to keep The Hero busy for a while. To that end, it might overlap with Lotus-Eater Machine. Ones that are particularly cruel are set up so that, once you pass the boundary, you wind up becoming however old you should normally be in the present. In simpler terms (and as summarized from the page quote above), time moves slower from the inside compared to the normal flow of time on the outside.

Technically, this can also apply for purpose-built time machines that use the "videocassette" or "tape" time-travel principle: i.e., they can only go forward or backward at variable speeds, but always on a singular timeline; this method was originally made famous by H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, as well as all the film adaptations thereof.

Time Dilation, an effect of traveling very close to the speed of light or being in an incredibly strong gravitational field, is a real-life version of this.

Compare Rip Van Winkle, where the pseudo Time Traveller sleeps away the years and ages accordingly (or not). Contrast Year Inside, Hour Outside, where years pass within the enchanted space but little to no time passes out in the "normal" world. While Year Inside, Hour Outside can make for a convenient way for our heroes to save the world without putting their lives on hold, Year Outside, Hour Inside tends to be a great deal more sinister, for the time lost in the real world can rarely, if ever, be gained back. At the very least, it's a great excuse for a Time Skip.

See also: TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In The Ancient Magus' Bride, Chise goes to the land of the Fae (the anthill in specific) in order to be healed from using her magic too much. She spends a few days there at best, but comes out to find that she's lost two seasons.
• The Boy and the Heron: Time inside the tower has only a tangential relationship to time outside the tower. Inside it, Mahito meets a younger version of the housekeeper Kiriko, and even his own mother Hisako. Both of them had apparently entered the tower at different points earlier on in their life and are there until they can return to their own time outside.
• In Brigadoon: Marin and Melan, this is how time passes in Brigadoon in relation to Earth. Of course, this is borrowed from the original Brigadoon musical.
• In Fairy Tail, the wizards are invited to a welcome back party in the celestial realm and party for about a day, only to return home and find that three months had passed in the real world. This is entirely Played for Laughs, as they expected it to be the other way around, so they'd have a method for fast training, but instead blew all the time they had until a Tournament Arc.
• In Fushigi Yuugi, the Universe of the Four Gods was a book and originally worked on the opposite trope for most of the Suzaku/Seiryu and part of the Suzaku arc. Horribly subverted when it turns into this after Miaka's watch, which Suzaku Seikun had chosen to reside in, was destroyed and he, having chosen to switch to her pocket messenger, has no means of knowing what the real world equivalent to the Universe's time is anymore. It results in Miaka and Taka reappearing in the real world after being about two days in the Universe but were gone for three months in the real world.
• In The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya episode "The Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody", this was the method Yuki used to bring Kyon back to his time: being unable to time-travel herself, she basically put him in stasis.
• In Koucha Ouji, time flows slower in the Tea World, so a year there is amount to 10 years in the Human World, or 2 days in Tea World is about 2 weeks of Human time. The catch is that because people that cross between the two world are still bounded by their native time so a human living in Tea World will age very fast, suffer various side-effects like exhaustion and lack of sleep, and die in about 5 years there while a tea fairy can live with their human friends for a few years but barely age themselves, and then returns to their world where maybe not even a year has passed.
• The titular Abyss of Made in Abyss acts this way, with the effect getting stronger the deeper into the cave you go. Ozen makes an offhand comment at one point about having tested this by going down to the fifth level for two weeks and found out when she returned that several months had gone by on the surface, though she admits it's not clear whether time actually passes differently in the Abyss, or its force field simply warps and breaks people's sense of time.
• Mushishi touched on the subject in one episode, noting a mushi that gathered together out to sea, and anyone caught up in it would be swept up in its altered perception of time, causing this trope. People who don't realize this and escape end up trapped inside and become merged with the mushi.
• In Negima! Magister Negi Magi, Evangeline's resort usually acts as a Day Inside/Hour Outside place. However, during the Mahora Festival Arc, due to Chao's tampering, it instead lets the protagonists out one week after when they went in, despite them only staying inside for a day.
• In PandoraHearts, Oz is trapped for a short time in the Abyss. When he leaves with Alice, he finds that 10 years have already passed in the few minutes he was gone.
• In the Ruby and Sapphire arc of Pokémon Adventures, three days pass on Mirage Island while Ruby and Sapphire were unconscious on it. Three weeks had passed during Groudon and Kyogre's fight in the outside world. According to Juan, the passage of time on the island isn't always as consistent and may even zig-zag between this trope and the other.
• Sugar Sugar Rune:In the manga, time moves faster in the human world then the witch world.
• Forms a core plot during the final stretch of Tailenders. The closer the main characters get to the Indian Terraformer, the more time starts to distort making it so that while minutes and seconds are passing for them, years or even centuries pass in the rest of the world. This is why Loser King vanished and never managed to finish the race 100 years prior. He simply hadn't reached the goal and was still racing full throttle from his point of view.
• Ulysses 31, "Chronos, Father of Time": Ulysses, his son Telemachus, and rescued friend Yumi all happen to enter the kingdom of Chronos, the Olympian god who controls the passage of time in our universe. The problem is, time is passing faster outside the kingdom (where the spaceship Odyssey is positioned), than inside, and an existential problem presents itself as Ulysses' comatose companions and crewmates are aging at a comparatively-accelerated rate. (And Shirka/Circe, the Odyssey's artificially-intelligent computer, is unable to sustain them as they grow old.)
• In Uzumaki, Kirie, Shuichi and Chie run away from the spiral-infested town, and into the spiral-infested forest. As they climb up the hills, they see Mr. Tanazaki building houses facing Dragonfly Pond, as those homes are the only ones that still stood. After Going in Circles for days, they finally arrive back at the village. However, when they return, all of the houses have been rebuilt so that they face the pond (in a spiral, no less), and Mr. Tanazaki is now much older. They finally realize just how long they've been gone when Tanazaki says, "How many years has it been? You haven't changed at all."

Comic Books

• Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld: Downplayed. When Amaya comes back to Earth in issue #4, it's only been a week since she left, which is about a day longer than she's been on Gemworld.
• In Black Hammer, when Joseph Weber first picked up the magical hammer that would turn him into the titular superhero, he was whisked away to New World for a short chat with Starlok and the Lightriders. Upon being sent back to Earth, he rushed home to tell his wife Lorraine about the crazy night he'd just had, only to learn that he had actually been gone for four months.
• When The Savage Dragon goes to The Void to rescue a friend's daughter, he finds her inside a gelatinous bubble. From his perspective, it only takes him a few minutes to dive in and retrieve her, but when they emerge, two years have passed outside the bubble.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), thanks to the wonders of relativity, when Sonic returned from his trip in space, he found out while it only took him a short time, a year had passed on Mobius.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye has the "slow cell", a piece of technology which causes a 1:360 time dilation bubble to form inside it to restrain prisoners who might escape. Five seconds inside the cell is equivalent to thirty minutes outside. That fact comes back to bite Chromedome in the aft when he is outmaneuvered by Overlord, who escapes the time dilation bubble without alerting anyone and so has thirty minutes to rampage before Chromedome can free himself.

Fan Works

• A Crown of Stars: Due to being out of their dimension, Shinji and Asuka spend several days in Avalon and go back to their timeline the same night that they left.
• All For Luz: Downplayed. According to All For One, 5 minutes in Luz's Mental World is equal to 50 minutes in the real world. Shigaraki wonders if that applies to his Realm compared to Luz's.
• Asylum of Doom: From Gaz's perspective, she spends at the very least several days somehow having traveled back in time and become a patient of the Burke Lunatic Asylum. When she manages to get out and return to her own time, little or no time in the real world seems to have passed at all.
• For Love of Magic: Harry's eventual plan for dealing with Voldemort is to force feed him Draught of Living Death then sealing him in a stone coffin where time passes one hundred times slower, figuring that even if they never found Voldemort's horcruxes, by the time he woke, they'd be long dead. In the epilogue, Harry awakens him after six hundred years and while showing Voldemort the magic of destiny binding them together, Voldemort tries to destroy the bond, ripping everyone present out of the universe.
• In The Eternity Effect, a few weeks in the afterlife is seven years on Oz.
• In the Steven Universe fanfic series The Gemstone Saga, a year in the Mineralis dimension equals 100 years on Earth.
• In the RealityCheck's Nyxverse story Alicornundrum, Twilight spends a week in one in order to complete a rather complex project before an international council concludes. Shortly after she leaves the time-compressed area, Pinkie Pie (Who is miles away in Ponyville) suddenly senses that her friend has gone five years without a birthday party.
• Emilie Agreste, in Spellbound (Lilafly), disappeared into the Land of Faerie on midsummer, but is expected to return safe and sound after a few weeks. Subjective weeks, that is, which may be decades or even centuries on Earth, since Faerie doesn't observe time in the same way. As half-fae, Felix and Adrien have to surround themselves with protective magic on midsummer and other significant days, to avoid a similar fate.
• The Star Trek: New Voyages episode "World Enough And Time" has Sulu and a Red Shirt specialist transported to another dimension while the Enterprise was trying to beam them out of the Romulan ship inside a multidimensional spatial anomaly that they are trapped in. Sulu and the specialist apparently spent years inside that dimension during which he had fathered a daughter through her, which explains why he appears on the Enterprise as an older man (played by the character's original actor George Takei).
• In the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon fanfic Whispers of the Abyss, all Mystery Dungeons have varying degrees of time dilation. The titular Whispering Abyss has the worst of all; several months pass in the outside world while Blot is still on the first floor.
• Thousand Shinji: Within the Black Moon time is warped and it slips away differently between two points. Shinji spent a short while taking part in a meeting, and when he exited that area to meet Asuka and Rei found that at least one week had passed.
• In Wizards Fall, Harry, Hermione, and Luna have established a colony of refugees from the dystopian hellhole the post-Voldemort magical world has become. After figuring out a way to prevent new magical births in the world outside their settlement, they take their colony outside normal reality for one hundred years local time, which is one thousand years in the real world.

Films — Live-Action

• Jake Sully in Avatar describes his long period of stasis as "15 minutes and an asskicking".
• Beetlejuice
  • The just-deceased Maitlands are trying to figure out what's happened — Adam steps out of the house to retrace their steps and finds himself in a frightful alien landscape. He's there for maybe five seconds when Barbara yanks him back inside, anxiously telling him he'd been gone for hours.
  • Later, when they go to the bureaucrats to get some help, they are told to wait, since they didn't have an appointment with their case worker, Juno. When they are sent to meet her, they are told to go through a door in the afterlife. Said door brings them back to their old house, three months after the Maitlands have "redecorated."
• In Interstellar, Cooper and the NASA team visit a planet caught in the gravitational pull of a large black hole. After roughly three hours on the planet, they return to their vessel to learn that 23 years have passed on Earth's time.
• In John Carter, Carter is on the run in a cave with a wounded Army officer at its entrance. He's whisked away via the medallion to Mars for what seems a few days. When he's forcibly sent back, Carter finds himself in a body that seems a few years older with a long beard. He calls out to that officer only to see a withered skeleton in the man's place. Carter spends over a decade finding a way back to Mars, theorizing that when he does return, only days will have passed to reunite with his love.
• Münchhausen offers a curious example. The Moon exists in some sort of time warp where time is sped up; an hour on the moon is equivalent to a year on Earth. Unfortunately, people on the Moon still age by Earth time, so after an hour on the Moon, you have physically aged a year. This is no problem for the Baron as he is immortal, never aging due to Cagliostro's magic. However, his faithful servant Kuchenreutter has no magic charm, so over the span of a few hours Kuchenreutter grows old and dies of old age.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: Generations: James T. Kirk, who was presumed killed in the accident aboard the Enterprise-B was actually alive for 78 years inside the Nexus, where time and space don't mean anything. When Captain Picard meets him inside, Jim Kirk tells him that he hadn't been here for more than a couple of minutes.
  • Star Trek (2009): In the year 2387 of the prime Trek universe, the Romulan ship Narada and Spock's Jellyfish both slip through a black hole created by the latter. The Narada exits the black hole first in the year 2233, immediately starting the "Kelvin Timeline" by attacking the USS Kelvin, while Spock does not exit into the new timeline for another 25 years. According to Spock Prime, as he saw it, it only took seconds for him to emerge from the black hole.
    Spock Prime: Nero and his crew spent the next 25 years awaiting my arrival. But what was years for Nero was only seconds for me.
• In Avengers: Endgame, it's revealed that Scott Lang, trapped in the Quantum Realm at the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp had only been in there for five hours. When he's finally freed, it's five years later.
• In Time Trap, the protagonists think it is a day outside, second inside, but it was really a year outside, second inside. In the course of the three hours or so in which they're stuck in the cave, some ten millennia pass outside...

Gamebooks

• Joe Dever's Lone Wolf and World of Lone Wolf:
  • Both Lone Wolf and Grey Star spends only a few days in the Astral Plane of Daziarn, but to find out upon their return that years have gone by on Magnamund.
  • To a lesser degree, the Plane of Darkness. Lone Wolf spends perhaps five minutes there before escaping in a hurry in one adventure, while several hours passed on his home world.

Literature

• Artemis Fowl: In The Lost Colony, the eponymous character ends up in a different dimension for a few hours on the inside, but it sadly turns out to be three years on the outside.
  • This was actually more of a case of him simply getting the return time wrong, as time in the other dimension was moving in squiggly lines.
• In the poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" ("The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy") John Keats tells of a knight meeting a beautiful Fairy who takes him home to her magic caverns, where he falls totally in love. Then one day he wakes on the barren hillside, deserted, and an assembly of ghosts and wraiths tell him that, like them, he has wasted his life away with the beautiful lady, and it has all vanished.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Although this is never actually seen to happen, the narration in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader makes clear that it very easily could.
• In The Darksword Trilogy, in Earth's Medieval past, magic-users created an impenetrable bubble in which they built their own Magocracy. Unfortunately, since time outside the bubble flowed ten times faster, once the outside world found a way to enter the bubble, their technology had advanced so far that the bubble's inhabitants, even with magic, were helpless against the invaders.
• In Dirge for Prester John, time flows differently depending which side of the Rimal you're on. Which leads to John realizing that the world he knew is pretty much gone.
• Discworld: Fairyland in The Wee Free Men; when Roland meets Tiffany he thinks he's only been there for a few days, but then worries that it's actually been a hundred years. When Tiff reassures him that it's only been a couple of years, he thinks that's worse: "If it was a hundred years, my father wouldn't thrash me when I got home!"
• In Dora Wilk Series, Katia's date with Anubis takes several days from outsiders' perspective, but she's confident only a few hours had passed.
• In Star Trek Expanded Universe novel The Buried Age, a group of aliens are trapped for over 250 million years in various structures around the galaxy but only a matter of minutes have passed for them since they got trapped inside.
• In E. D. Baker's Fairy Wings, time travels much more slowly in the fairy lands than in human ones. The clearest manifestation of this is that Tamisin is Titania and Bottom's child, and yet lived in modern day America — the pregnancy lasted from before Shakespeare's time until now.
• In Flight of a Witch by Ellis Peters, there is a hill with an associated legend about people going to visit the fairies for a short time and coming back to find it's been longer than they thought. In the present day, a young woman goes up the hill one evening and comes down again four days later professing to believe it's still the same night. In keeping with this being part of a detective series with no unambiguous supernatural elements, it turns out she actually snuck off to the city for a few days and came up with the story to avoid getting into trouble.
• In The Hands of the Emperor the Fall of Astandalas wrecked the passage of time in Zunidh: In some places, generations passed while in others, the period until the emperor stabilized the time again happened well within a single lifetime: Cliopher once tells some subordinates about his travels home shortly after the fall (around twenty years ago for him), only for one of them to recognize him as a historical figure who has since passed into legend in the subordinate's clan's history.
• In The Hazel Wood, story characters in the Hinterland are trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop where they don't recognize the passage of time or age. Meanwhile, time actually is passing in the rest of the Hinterland and everyone else ages.
• Joel Suzuki: In Secret of the Songshell, the protagonists become trapped for a few hours in Prism Valley, where the Aura behaves differently than it does everywhere else. When they get back to Spectraland, they find that several days have passed.
• The Slaver stasis field in Larry Niven's Known Space does this. It also protects anything (and anyone) inside from any possible danger. The ship used by the protagonists in Ringworld is equipped with one, automatically activating in the event of a collision or attack. While the ship's General Products hull is virtually impervious to damage, the squishy beings inside are not. The protagonists sometimes notice that time has passed by looking at objects outside the ship, as they don't perceive the activation and deactivation of the stasis field otherwise. They then have to figure out what happened that resulted in the field being activated.
• Time on Earth passes faster than in The Land of Stories, allowing the twins to meet Cinderella, etc, despite their tales being centuries old. Though due to the twins' birth the worlds have begun moving at a similar speed.
• This was the primary function of the Three Elven Rings in The Lord of the Rings and in The Silmarillion. One of the Morgoth's deeds was corrupting the essence of Arda, causing the immortal Elves to fade and the mortal Men to fear death. To prevent the fading the Elven-Smiths designed the Three Rings of Power, which would effectively stop time from flowing, keeping the three noldorin realms (Mithlond, Imladris and Lothlórien) in continuous stasis. Unfortunately, unbeknowst to the Elven-smiths, Sauron then forged the One Ring...
• In Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter, the Blue Children's silver bubble timeship works like this; while only minutes pass inside, over 200 years pass outside.
• The novelizations of the Merlin (1998) series have this happening to Merlin himself while journeying to Joyous Gard. He only spends part of one day there, plus a long trip to it and back, but six months pass back in Camelot.
• Happens in The Mists of Avalon. Morgaine gets trapped in Faerie and is so under their spell that she only vaguely notices that her horse has turned into a skeleton in what seems like a very short time.
• In Momo, the title character spends one day in the house of Master Secundus Minutius Hora, while one year passes in the outside world. The chapter where this happens is even titled "There a day and here a year", at least in the original German. This is not a case of time flowing differently, however, but of her spending a year in enchanted sleep but initially thinking she only slept one night.
• Andre Norton
  • Dread Companion: The governess protagonist and her charges escape from The Fair Folk to discover that this has happened.
  • Here Abide Monsters: You Can't Go Home Again from the Alternate Universe on the other side of the Cool Gate, in effect, and if you ever got the chance to do so, you wouldn't want to because of this trope. The gates rarely seem to flow from their world to ours, and time on one side has little discernable relationship to time on the other. The contemporary (1970s) heroes meet with World War II-era refugees for whom only four years have passed, as well as encountering medieval-era and Mongol refugees.
  • In the short story "The Long Night of Waiting", Lizzie and Matt are swept through a Cool Gate and spend, from their point of view, 11 days among The Fair Folk. They return to discover that roughly ten years have passed in our world for every day in the other world. The title comes from the stone erected by their parents on the spot where they were seen to disappear.
  • Sorceress of the Witch World: The elder Tregarths discover that this is the case after the family escapes from the world in which they and Hilarion were trapped; when Simon left, their children were babies, but when they escaped, his daughter was the grown titular character. Hilarion, having been there longer, faces an even worse discrepency.
• In the novel Once Upon A Summer Day by Dennis L. McKiernan the main character Borel must enter the Fairy King's domain in order to gain his help in his quest to rescue the Damsel in Distress. He is warned before hand that time doesn't flow the same. He ends up playing a chess game against the King, which takes a few hours. But when he leaves (having won and gained the aid he needed) he finds that in the real world a few weeks have passed—meaning he is only a day or two before his deadline of saving the girl.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians:
  • In The Lightning Thief, Percy, Annabeth and Grover enter the Lotus Hotel and Casino, and seem to spend only a few hours in there, but by the time they leave, five days have passed. The Titan's Curse reveals that Bianca and Nico di Angelo spent what they thought was a month in the Lotus Hotel, but didn't come out until 70 years later.
  • The Battle of the Labyrinth: When Percy and Annabeth first discover the Labyrinth, they spend maybe five minutes in it, and when they come back everyone says they've been gone for an hour and what exactly were they doing down there?
• In the original Planet of the Apes novel, the astronauts go to Betelgeuse at near-light speed. On board, it takes a couple of years, but by Earth's standards, it takes hundreds of years.
• Realm of the Elderlings: Happens to Fitz at the end of Fool's Fate, as he travels through a skill-pillar: he gets lost on the other side, feels at most a few hours have passed, but when he finds his way through, he discovers it'd actually been over a month.
• In Rose Daughter, Beauty stays at the Beast's castle for only a week, but learns when she reunites with her sisters that for every day she spent in the enchanted castle, a month passed by for them in the town where magic is unable to take root.
• The House of Foryx in Septimus Heap, where Nicko and Snorri wait out after having been stuck in the past.
• In Craig Shaw Gardner's Slaves Of The Volcano God Roger spends two days in the Cineverse. When he calls his mother after returning home, she complains that he's been missing for two weeks.
• The Snow Queen: Gerda spends a few days in an enchanted garden (with a chaser of Lotus-Eater Machine added by an old sorceress) where it's always summer, but when she manages to come to her senses and escape, the world beyond its walls has gone from spring to autumn. The story even implies that she remained in the garden for many years.
• The plot of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin begins when something mysteriously covers the entirety of Earth in a field that causes this effect.
  • When they protagonists realize the latter, it doesn't take them long to figure out the implications: in about a generation, the Sun will reach the end of its lifespan as a yellow dwarf and expand to consume Earth. NASA confirms this by regularly sending probes to look outside the bubble and come back after a week (a split-second for those in the bubble). The probes definitely show that the Sun is bigger in every picture.
  • It's also determined that the effect of blocking out the stars and creating an artificial Sun effect are there to protect life on Earth. After all, if one second inside equals 3 years outside, an unprotected Earth would be subjected to 3 years' worth of solar and cosmic radiation every second, destroying everything on the surface.
• Played with in The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World. Jim returns from his Timey-Wimey Ball adventure to find his children have grown up somewhat in the meantime. Fortunately their Dark Action Girl mother has educated them the criminal arts in the absence of their dad, so all is well.
• In Clive Barker's The Thief of Always, for every day you spend in the Holiday House, a year passes in the real world. In the end, by destroying Mr. Hood and the Holiday House, Harvey Swick gains back the years that he lost, and the trapped children are returned to the world to live out their lives, even if they were taken decades ago in the past.
• In Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions, the fairies try to lure Holger into the elf hill to keep him out of the way. Alianora comes to warn him, and he has to fight his way free.
• In Tunnel in the Sky Rod's father is diagnosed with an incurable disease, so he and his wife go into a Ramsbotham field where two weeks to them will equate to twenty years in the real world. They will stay in the field until a cure for the disease is found.
• Warhammer 40,000: In Ahriman: Sorcerer, the Prodigal Sons devastate the planet Vohal, then retreat into the Warp to wait for the Inquisition to set up a base on the ruined planet as Ahriman has foreseen. Thanks to the Warp’s timey-wimey nature, only two years pass from the Prodigal Sons’ perspective; from the Inquisition’s perspective, Vohal has been a dead world for hundreds if not thousands of years by the time they set up shop there
• Happens in the story "Determinism and the Martian War, with Relativistic Corrections" from the anthology novel War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches. When Albert Einstein investigates one of the Martians tripods, he activates an emergency mechanism that seals off the dome and causes time inside to be slowed down. When he finally manages to turn it off again after 7 hours, two and a half weeks have passed outside the tripod.
• Wax and Wayne: In The Alloy of Law, Cadmium Mistings, known as Sliders, can create a bubble of slow time about the size of a small room. It is centered wherever they were when they create it, and pops if the Slider leaves it.
• Wonder Woman: Warbringer: Downplayed - while Diana spends a couple weeks in the mortal world, only a few hours have passed on Themyscira, allowing her to come back without being missed.
• Ultimately the solution to the problems humanity faces in Roger Allen's Chronicles Of Solace trilogy. Terraforming a stable environment, it seems, is far harder than one might imagine. The resulting ecologies will invariably suffer cascade failures, resulting in a desolate, uninhabitable planet. Spending more time on the terraforming merely delays the inevitable. But if you wrap the entire star system in a time warp, such that thousands of years pass by on the inside, then you can spend tens of thousands of years terraforming, vastly increasing the chances that it'll 'stick', and still get an Earth-like planet in a matter of months.
• The Other Side (another dimension that appears to be the afterlife, accessed from a portal at the bottom of the Clyde) in the Past Doctor Adventures novel Empire of Death. When Lt Kempshall explores it in a diving suit, the soldiers running the airpump think he's been down for most of a day, but when they pull him up, he protests that he only made it through the rift for a moment. The real James Lees has been there for years, but for him it's only been a few days.
• In the Bounders series, time in the spacetime rift passes roughly 2,700 times more slowly. The lost aeronauts from Bounding Base 51 who were presumed dead for 15 years weren't actually killed, but were trapped in the rift for what felt to them like two days. Jasper and Mira become trapped there as well when they unsuccessfully attempt to bound away from Alkalinia. The Youli rescue them and the other aeronauts after a few hours, by which point a year has passed for everyone else.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Time flows very differently in Persepos compared with everywhere else. While there, people experience only a couple years. However, six years passed elsewhere.

Live-Action TV

• This gem from 30 Rock, after Frank playtests Tracy's pornographic video game:
  Frank: [walks into Tracy's dressing room with a comically-long beard] Hey, Tracy. I tried out your game. It's alright, I guess.
  Tracy: Frank! You've been in your office for three months!
  Frank: [looks into mirror] WHAAAAT?!!
• The pilot for Andromeda has the Andromeda Ascendant and its captain try to slingshot from the Nietzschean armada using a black hole only for the pilot to be shot by The Mole during the maneuver. The Andromeda ends up stuck at the event horizon for 300 years with barely a second passing inside the ship.
• In the Season 2 finale of Charmed, Leo takes a curious Piper "up there" to meet the Elders for the first time. They return to Earth during the Season 3 premiere, which takes place a month later. Piper, however, thinks she's only been gone for only one day.
• Doctor Who:
  • When Rose joins the Ninth Doctor, they're gone for two episodes that for her take just a few days. In the next episode he returns her home, but a year has passed and she's been "missing". In the meantime her mother has become nearly desperate, thinking she's dead, and her ex-boyfriend has been accused of murdering her...
  • "The Girl in the Fireplace": Time portals link to different points in Madame de Pompadour's Life. While not a straight example, it means that anything from a couple seconds to a few minutes on a spaceship could be weeks or years for the historical figure. After fighting robots who want to steal her brain (about a day for the Doctor, most of her life for the lady), the Doctor invites her to travel with him... only to step back into a time after she's passed away.
  • "The Eleventh Hour":
    • After promising little Amelia that she could come travelling with him, the Doctor steps into his TARDIS for a few minutes just to stop her from exploding... and lands in Amy's garden 12 years later. All-grown-up Amy Pond is not happy. Said incident earned her the nickname "The Girl Who Waited".
    • At the end, the Doctor leaves for what seems like a few minutes. He comes back... and two more years have passed for Amy. Naturally she's pissed off, but agrees to go with him... even though she's to be married the next day.
  • "The Doctor's Wife": A malevolent entity called House takes over the TARDIS and keeps Amy and Rory hostage, while playing cruel games with them. Amy keeps losing track of Rory and, when she finds him, he tells her that years have passed for him. Eventually, she finds his skeleton. Of course, it's all an illusion.
  • "The Girl Who Waited": Amy gets trapped in a facility for 37 years, while only about 5 minutes have passed for her husband Rory and the Doctor. Rory is forced to choose between his young or old wife.
  • "Into the Dalek": When the 12th Doctor returns to Clara with the coffee he told her he'd get last episode, she reveals he has been gone for three weeks.
  • "The Eaters of Light": The dimension where the Eaters come from works like this. The Doctor steps inside the portal for a few seconds and emerges to find he's been gone for three days. At the end of the episode, this is exploited when the portal's defenders enact Sealed Evil in a Duel to close the portal until the end of the universe.
• Farscape: Moya flies into a "center halo", a space mist where time doesn't exist. When Aeryn, and later Crichton, leave the mist, they age years on a planet below while those onboard Moya experience the passage of mere days. Eventually, the crew figures out how to exit the mist and get back to a time a few minutes before they entered it, negating the aging effects on Crichton and Aeryn.
• In the Haven, season 3 finale, Duke jumps into the barn right before it explodes and disappears. In the season 4 premiere he appears in an aquarium in Boston. For him it felt like a few minutes, however it actually was 6 months.
• Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story: Time in the land at the top of the beanstalk passes at a rate of one day for every year on Earth, with the result that only a year has passed in the giants' country while almost four hundred have passed back on Earth.
• The Palace of the Prophets in Legend of the Seeker is enchanted so that time in it passes 10 times slower than for the outside world. The Sisters of the Light want to keep Richard there for several years, while the world is literally going to Hell. In a later episode, Richard is stuck in a nightmare where this does happen, and he finds out that Kahlan is with someone else now, not to mention that there have been two Seekers after him who failed.
• Parodied in a MADtv (1995) sketch that aired during its final days, where a child wanders into a magical land and has a day of fun and adventure. In the "real" world, the boy has been missing for several days and his father is accused of kidnapping him and becomes the subject of a media frenzy. When the boy finally returns home, he enters the house looking for his father, only for the camera to pan up and reveal he hung himself.
• The basis of the series Manifest has a plane leaving Jamaica in 2013 for a three hour and 19 minute flight to New York. When they land, the passengers and crew are rocked to discover it's now 2018.
• In a mini-series based on The Odyssey, after spending a five-day vacation on Circe's island, Odysseus bids her farewell and heads for his ship, only to find that five years have passed and his ship is now rotted and partially buried in the sand.
• Once Upon a Time in Wonderland:
  • It's implied at the beginning that Wonderland's time is faster than Alice's homeworld since she had been out of sight for a long time. This was more or less confirmed by "Who's Alice?", where Alice returns to London after Cyrus's apparent death only to find she's been gone long enough to have a stepmother and a half-sister.
  • Also evident with Will and Anastasia who lived in the pre-curse Enchanted Forest alongside the characters from the main show 28 years ago. The main show characters did not age due to either the curse or Cora's time bubble, but Will and Anastasia are the same ages in the present despite being in Wonderland the whole time.
• The Orville
  • The season 1 finale has the planet Kandar 1, which is locked in a multiphasic orbit where it spends 11 days in our universe and 11 days in another universe before coming back. Except that in the other universe, 700 years pass for the planet. Within a couple of months of our time, the planet advances from a Bronze Age-esque civilization to one more advanced than the Planetary Union. By season 3's "Mortality Paradox", two more years have passed in our universe, but for the Kandarians it's been 50,000 years!
  • The Season 2 finale features the group (or at least an alternate reality version of themselves where the Kaylon have nearly wiped out all organic life in the galaxy) trying to escape a group of them. To do so they hide within a black hole's gravity well, and they watch as the Kaylon search for them until giving up after two days, of the Kaylon's time, but for the group it was only for about a minute.
• The season 2 premiere of Quantum Leap ends with the reveal of one of these. From Ben's point of view, only about 12 hours have passed since he last heard from Project Quantum Leap, during which time he had to figure out his latest leap on his own without holographic assistance. When Ian finally makes contact, they reveal it has been three years and everyone had given Ben up for dead after he failed to leap home.
• Red Dwarf has the Stasis Booth, which time cannot penetrate. The end result is that no time inside passes for however long it's turned on. Lister spends 3 million years in one in the first episode, and in the books it's explained that Rimmer has been spending weekends in one so that he'll age slower.
• Stargate Atlantis:
  • An episode the team discovers a caldera where an Ancient device sped up time within several times. Col. Shepard was trapped in there for several months while the others spent hours trying to rescue him.
• Star Trek: Voyager episode "Blink of an Eye" sees the ship trapped in orbit of a planet where time moves much faster than the space around it. Over the course of a few days, their presence as a new light in the sky becomes the focus of religion, then of rational speculation as technology advances, until finally the people on the planet are able to observe it, attempt to communicate with it, and then send astronauts in an Apollo-like capsule to explore it.
• This happens to Sookie in True Blood - she goes to the fairy land for what seems like a few minutes, only to come back to find a year has passed in Bon Temps. Also happened to her grandfather. He was there for what seemed like a couple hours to him when it had been twenty years.
• In one episode of The Twilight Zone (1959), an astronaut meets a woman just before he takes off on a long journey. During his trip, he's supposed to be in suspended animation, but the thought of returning to Earth as a young man and finding the woman he loved to be an old woman is something that he can't live with (never mind that she might have married or died or just didn't like him any more), so he turns off the suspended animation so he'll age the same as she did on Earth, but the real kicker is that the woman did love him, so she had herself suspended so that she would be young when he returned, causing a real downer ending.
• In the fourth season of Wynonna Earp, Wynonna, Waverly and Doc are trapped in an other-dimensional "Garden" for what, to them, is less than an hour. When they get back, Wynonna and Doc make their way to Purgatory to find the town in shambles with corpses hanging from buildings. Waverly gets home to find lover Nicole, who shows no signs of the terribly broken leg she'd had when Wynonna left her to enter the garden. After a (very) steamy reunion, Waverly finally notices Nicole's longer hair and asks when she had time to put in extensions with a confused Nicole replying she just grew it out. When Waverly asks how Nicole could have grown her hair that long in just a couple of hours, a stunned Nicole relates that the trio have been gone for eighteen months.

Music

• Momus's "Christmas On Earth" is also based on a space traveller experiencing relativistic effects. It's a bit of a tearjerker.
• The Queen song "39" is about a crew of astronauts who go to find a new, liveable world when Earth appears to be dying. They return triumphant, but due to travelling at near-lightspeed only a year has passed for them but a century has passed in earth years and their beloved ones has died. The song ends with the line "For my life still ahead, pity me". This song is said to be "the most painless introduction to relativistic physics". Shown Their Work - Brian May has Ph. D. in astronomy.

Myths & Religion

• In the context of Old-Earth Creationism, this is how the "seven days" mentioned in The Bible as the time it took for the Earth to be created are interpreted: it was seven days for God, but 13.8 billion years for the mortal plane. This interpretation uses 2 Peter 3:8 as backing, which says that the end of the world will be impossible to predict, because no matter what "clues" one may find, time is utterly meaningless in Heaven.
  "But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
• This is a recurring trope in most Chinese fairytales and children's tales: a day in the celestial plane (or the underworld in some) is about a year in the land of the living. Examples:
  • Two young boys went up a mountain and saw two old men playing chess, with a rabbit behind them jumping up and down. Every time the rabbit jumped, the world changed from sunny, to leaves turning brown, to snowy, to flowery, to sunny again. By the time the boys left, they returned to their village to find that hundreds of years had passed, and were punished angrily by members of the village for claiming to be their ancestors. (Not literally. To the villagers they were ancestors (despite the villagers not being the children's descendants) because the people of the village viewed everyone who had lived there in the past as ancestors of the community.)
  • Another ancient legend of China retold is the story of a fisherman who finds himself in the Chinese Faerie kingdom and marries the queen there. After about 50 years of staying with the Queen, he returns to the real world... and finds out that 200 years had passed since then. Talk about time flying...
  • In the realm of the Dragon Kings, beneath the sea, a day is equal to a year in our world.
• Occurs in the legends of the Czech mountain Blaník, e.g. a blacksmith who worked for the sleeping knights for a day found out after returning that a year has passed.
• This nasty trick is often encountered in fairy tales or legends involving the The Fair Folk. Usually, the hero is lured into the fairy mound, where he dances the night away. When he emerges from the mound, he finds that many years have passed (from 10 to 100). Sometimes he instantly ages or dies.
  • In the legend of True Thomas, also known as Thomas the Rhymer, the hero must serve in the Fairy Queen's realm for seven years. When he comes back out to his side of the veil, everyone he ever knew is long dead.
• Hindu Mythology: According to the Mahabharata and other texts, a certain king Kakudmi a.k.a. Raivata once went to Brahma himself with his daughter Revati, to ask for advice on to whom he should marry Revati. After waiting a short time while the gandharvas^note Hindu equivalent of angels were playing music for Brahma, Kakudmi pleaded his request to Brahma. Brahma laughed, informing him that while the gandharvas had played, 108 yugas^note Depending on the authority you accept, this equals either 324,000 or 116,640,000 mortal years. had passed on Earth, and all the suitors that Kakudmi had considered as suitable son-in-laws were long dead and forgotten. Kakudmi and Revati experienced no ill effects upon returning to Earth.
• Irish Mythology:
  • The Voyage of Bran mac Febail tells how Bran sails to the island of Emain, a paradisical land in the western ocean. When he returns to Ireland after one year in Emain, he finds out that hundreds of years have passed there. When Bran's companion Nechtan jumps onto the shore despite the warning of the Queen of Emain, he instantly crumbles into a heap of ashes.
  • Oisín is taken to the land of Tir na nÓg (literally, the Land of the Young) by a blond fairy, Niamh with the Golden Hair, on a magic horse where they marry and have two children. After three years, Oisín gets a little homesick and wishes to see Ireland again, but Niamh warns him not to get off the magic horse and touch the ground. When he returns to Ireland, he finds that 300 years have passed and isn't very happy about it. He meets two men lifting a stone onto a wagon and offers his help. He promptly falls off the horse and ages 300 years instantly upon hitting the ground, and the horse runs back to the Land of Faerie and leaves him to die.
  • Saint Brendan is said to have landed on a mysterious island in 512 AD with 14 monks. They stayed 15 days and celebrated a Mass, but when they returned to their ships, the sailors onboard said it had been a year, and the island was completely concealed by mist during that time.
• Japanese Mythology: A tragic legend that can be traced to the 8th century tells how the fisherman Urashima Tarō saved the Daughter of the Dragon God Ryūjin (who was disguised as a small turtle) from a bunch of children, and was invited to stay at the divine palace of Ryūgū-jō as his reward. After three days, he wished to return to his homeland, and received a certain box as a present, but was warned not to open it. When he arrived in his village, he found out that 300 years had passed since he came to Ryūgū-jō (i.e. 1 day in Ryūgū-jō = 100 years in Japan). Overwhelmed by the realization that his home, family, and friends were gone, he opened the box. The box was the force that kept him from aging, and when he opened it, he aged three hundred years at once and died.
  • In another version, the box contained a mirror, and Taro only believed that he was in the future when he saw his reflection for the first time since he'd gone to the palace and sees that he's gone from young man to wrinkled ancestor.
• In one variation of The Wild Hunt myth, King Herla of the Britons. attends the wedding of a friend among the dwarves, and he returns to his homeland after a three day banquet, only to find that his land has been ruled by Saxons for over 200 years. The time he spent among the dwarves amounted to 300 years in the real world, and everything he ever knew is long dead. As if that wasn't enough, one of his companions jump off his horse in shock and immediately crumbles to dust upon aging 300 years. With no way of leaving his horse, forced to ride eternally, Herla Cyning became the lord of The Wild Hunt.

Tabletop Games

• Adventures In Fantasy. Each day that passes in the Faerry realm, 100 years pass on the material plane. If a person spends a day or more in the Faerry realm and then returns to the material plane, the total passage of time catches up to them. They suffer Rapid Aging and die of old age.
• Champions adventure The Coriolis Effect. The time Doctor Arcane spent in Ch'andarra's realm seemed but a prolonged instant. When he returned to Earth, he found that five years had passed.
• In Changeling: The Lost, time flows in strange ways in Arcadia, the land of the Fae. Sometimes the kidnapped finds out that even if he thought he was trapped there for nothing more than an hour, and his body has not grown at all, he was absent from the real world for years. Usually there is a Fetch, a substitute (in this case much older than the original), who lived his life in his place. Or he's just declared dead. (Naturally, time can also flow at a much quicker pace, but that's Year Inside, Hour Outside, so...)
• SPI's Dragon Quest supplement The Enchanted Wood. The PCs can encounter a Faerie Ring with this effect. If they spend any time inside the ring, when they leave a variable amount of time (up to ten years) will have passed outside.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • 2nd Edition AD&D Planescape supplement A Guide to the Astral Plane. On the Astral Plane, time does not exist. Non-natives do not need to eat, sleep, or breathe while there, and do not age. When they return to the Material Plane, however, all the "skipped" time comes back in a rush.
  • Module UK3 Beyond the Crystal Cavern. In Porpherio's Garden time passes at a rate 730 times slower than in the outside world. If someone enters the Garden, spends a hour there and then leaves again, they will find that a month has passed outside. If they spend a day there, two years will pass outside.
  • 2nd Edition AD&D Monstrous Compendium Annual III. On nights with a full moon, the Faerie Fiddler can play a tune that forces anyone in a fairy circle to dance. For each hour the victim spends dancing, a year passes in the outside world.
  • In Eberron there is Thelanis (The Faerie Court), where an hour spent there equals a week spent on the Material Plane. What's dangerous about it is that the lost time catches up with you when you return to the Material Plane, meaning that at best you'll be ravenous from hunger (since you haven't eaten in weeks) and at worst you'll immediately die of old age.
  • From the Ashes boxed set, "Atlas of the Flanaess" booklet. One of the places of mystery in the Greyhawk setting is the Moonarch of Sehanine. An elf may pass through the arch and enter another plane of existence where the elven deities test their wisdom, mercy, strength, courage and morality. Although the time spent on the other plane only seems to be a few weeks, once the elf returns through the Moonarch they find that a considerably longer time has passed in Greyhawk, up to several years.
  • Dragon magazine
    • Issue #201 article "The City of Lofty Pillars", Al-Qadim campaign setting. For each year that a person spends inside the city of Iram, ten years pass outside in Zakhara, the Land of Fate.
    • Issue #206 article "Dragon's Bestiary". The Faerie Fiddler can play a tune that distorts time. For each hour a person spends dancing to the music, one year passes in the outside world.
  • Dungeon magazine
    • Issue #42 adventure "Legacy of the Liosalfar". Each hour spent in the Faerie Realm equals 24 hours passing in the mortal world.
    • Issue #64 adventure "Bzallin's Blacksphere". For each hour spent inside a magical Coffin of Timelessness, one day passes in the outside world.
• Hollow Earth Expedition. There is a time dilation effect inside the Hollow Earth that causes time to pass at a slower rate than in the surface world. Because of this, dinosaurs that became extinct on the surface millions of years ago still exist in the Hollow Earth.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • During 5th Edition, the Necron Cryptek Orikan the Diviner carried a Temporal Snare, a rare device of the Chronomancy school capable of warping space-time to trap the enemy in a bubble of slow-time. In-game terms this forced the entire opposition army to move at a far slower rate in their first turn. The device hasn't been mentioned in any subsequent editions however.
  • The way the Warp works, it's entirely possible to emerge after a five-month trip to find that two weeks have passed, or nine centuries. And that's assuming you come out after you came in (one ship created a Stable Time Loop by answering a distress call, getting ambushed, and sending out a distress call that was answered by its past self.

Theatre

• Carousel:
  Starkeeper: You got to get used to a new way of tellin' time, Billy. A year on earth is just a minute up here.
• In Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol Marley finds that seven years have passed on Earth while he's been in the afterlife for what feels like a few hours.
• In The Soldiers Tale, the Soldier falls victim to this after unknowingly concluding a Deal with the Devil.
  "It wasn't three days, three years have passed!"

Video Games

• The Quickling Tree in Ancient Domains of Mystery. Several hundred turns inside (with a turn being as much as needed to attack once or drink something, five turns are enough to eat many items), several days outside. What is a problem, since after ninety days pass in-game, the background corruption radiation rate increases, speeding up the transformations...
• In Azrael's Tear, the Temple of Aeternis seems to warp time in such a way as to cause this. The effect is more pronounced the deeper one goes inside. It's not clear whether the cause is grailstone or some Lost Technology of the Precursors who used to live in the place. In any case, the protagonist enters in early December 2012, spends a few hours or days inside, and then leaves... in December 2015!
• In Gravity Rush, the world beneath the void in Heksville does this, when Kat fell into it, what seemed like a few days for her was actually a full year passed when she returned. This also happened to Sachya, also known as Raven who spent a few weeks there, only to discover 50 years passed when returned above.
• Half-Life 2: Dr. Kleiner and his team developed a teleporter, but it's unreliable. The first time it works without a hitch, but the second time it goes haywire because Kleiner's pet headcrab Lamarr jumps into it mid-operation. The third time, Gordon and Alyx spent nearly a week real-time in transit, but only a couple seconds at most pass for them.
• This seems to be the case with the Realm of Darkness in Kingdom Hearts, as Aqua hasn't changed at all despite being trapped inside it for eleven years. Kingdom Hearts 0.2: Birth by Sleep -A fragmentary passage- confirms this, with the character saying that "there is no time here", and one segment involves locally reversing time after it inexplicably jumped ahead five hours.
  • During Dream Drop Distance, Yen Sid briefly mentions that Merlin and the three Good Fairies created a space like this so Lea could learn to use a Keyblade.
• The backstory of Lulu in League of Legends is that she was lured by a Fae folk named Pix, who would later become her companion, into the realm called 'The Glade'. After a few years playing there and feeling like at home there, she realized that she had a life in her old home at Bandle City. When she returned, centuries have already passed in Runeterra, though Lulu didn't suffer rapid aging.
• In Persona 3, Akihiko theorizes this with regards to Tartarus. When Fuuka gets trapped inside before getting recruited, she's been missing for several days in the real world, yet when they find her she claims she's been in there for only a few hours.
  • Which would also explain why the Dark Hour lasts for, well, an hour in the real world but indefinitely in Tartarus. It is theoretically possible to go all the way through Tartarus in one night (At least 10 hours of gameplay), assuming you manage to defeat the Full Moon bosses without going into Tartarus at all.
• Time seems to stand completely still while inside the title location of Secret of Evermore; thirty real-world years have passed, but none of the four humans who went inside of the virtual reality are even a day older.
• In El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, a few minutes in Heaven is literally years in earth time. Explains why the angels are so old-fashioned.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV: The effect Masakado has on the entire city of Tokyo as the Firmament, which coupled with the Yamato Perpetual Reactor, allows the residents to endure the effects of a hail of nukes and emerge into a healed world. While twenty-five years have passed within the sealed bubble of the city, outside it's been fifteen centuries. In Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse, Shesha smashing a massive hole in the Firmament causes the effect to end, allowing both sides to move through time as one once again.
• The Twilight Cage in Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. And boy, has the world changed when Sonic gets back...
• Dragon Quest V: After breaking out of his sealing jar, the demon Bjørn seems to think he has only remained imprisoned for some few days instead of one hundred fifty years.
• Escape Velocity Classic: This is how hyperspatial travel works^note as a Thematic Series, it doesn't apply to the sequels — Override doesn't indicate either way, and it explicitly does not apply to Nova — from the perspective of the traveller, a hyperspace jump is instantaneous, while from an outside perspective it takes a day or more (depending on the size of the ship).

Webcomics

• Blindsprings has this in the titular Blindsprings (still spelled with a capital "B").
• In Girl Genius, it turns out mixing time-freezing technology with a Portal Door results in this. Martellus kidnaps Agatha through a hidden teleporter just as Klaus sets off his "Take Five" bomb, and they spill out of the receiving end two and a half years later. In other words, Time Skip.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: In chapter 68, "Neither", Annie enters Gillitie Wood to speak with Loup, the Fusion Dance of Coyote and Ysengrin. On the first page of the chapter, she hears some booming noises overhead. After she's persuaded Loup to stand down his attack for the moment, they go to the edge of the Forest and he reveals that she's actually been gone for months, and the booming noises were the Court looking for her. He explains that the reason this happened is because he's frozen time in the Forest.
• In Space theme of Irregular Webcomic!, this is the effect of the new cyberspace. The old one has Year Inside, Hour Outside.
• In Juathuur, the time for a small conversation in the god world takes three days in the juathuur world.
• In Lemme Addams, our heroine has been stuck in Another Dimension for 27 years. But for her, it's only been a few hours.
• In Nina's Magic Chest, time inside the chest is twice as fast as outside. If you ask the chest to speed up events, time passes faster outside.
• Subverted in The Order of the Stick—when protagonist Roy dies and learns that the "few hours" he's in the afterlife have actually been months, he assumes that this is what's happening. Actually, it's just that it's harder to notice time passing when you have no biological needs or functions, the sun never sets, and you're having the best time of your (un-)life. Played for Laughs as afterwords he starts asking for the time every couple of minutes.
• In Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger, an effect of space travel, except that it's nowhere near so neat a conversion. You can get a couple more years than you were expecting. Timeslips require readjusting, but even a three-month vacation is hardly long enough. Even a Ranger can suffer wistful attacks of Home Sweet Home in light of learning of one.
• Realta: Thanks to her grandfather's spell, Elowen only experienced 20 or so years in their cottage while 1000 years passed outside it.
• In Zebra Girl, when Sandra is ready to return to Earth, this is discussed between Sandra and Viv (along with the reverse) in regards to the Subfusc dimension vs. Earth. It turns out to be correct - when Sandra is leaving Earth as the Arc ends, we finally return to Earth and discover that years have passed in the mere days she spent in Subfusc.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation
  • SCP-004 ("The 12 Rusty Keys and the Door"). SCP-004 causes space-time anomalies nearby, such as personnel experiencing only a few days inside Site 62 even though they had actually been in it for several weeks.
  • SCP-163 ("An Old Castaway"). After an alien being crash-landed on Earth millions of years ago, its ship was encased in a stasis field that protected it from being crushed by collapsed rock. When the rock was removed, the stasis field disappeared and released the alien, which has not aged at all in the intervening time.
  • SCP-216 ("The Safe"). Two experiments indicate that time does not pass inside the safe while the door is closed.
    • In one experiment an ice cream bar was placed inside the safe and the door closed. Three hours later it was taken out again. It had not melted at all during that time.
    • In another experiment an operating video camera was placed inside the safe and the door closed. After some time the door was opened again and the video camera removed. When the tape was played it showed that no time at all passed between the door being closed and opened again.
  • SCP-455 ("Cargo Ship"), Experiment Log 455. During the second expedition into SCP-455 16 hours passed outside the ship while one minute passed inside it.
  • SCP-462 ("The Getaway Car"). Most people who use SCP-462 for Teleportation remember driving for a few minutes before ending up at their destination. However, they can re-appear up to seven months later.
  • SCP-728 ("The Forever Room")
    • During one test, an hour passed on the outside of SCP-728 while only 1 minute thirty seconds elapsed inside it.
    • In another test 66 hours passed outside the container while no time at all passed inside it.
  • SCP-1272 ("Slow-Motion Catastrophe"). The Time Dilation effect associated with SCP-1272 causes time to pass inside it at a rate of only 184 nanoseconds per hour outside.
  • SCP-1351 ("Moebius Cave"). A Foundation expedition entered the cave in 1925 and was discovered by the Foundation again in 2009. As far as the expedition was concerned they had only been in the cave for 18 hours.
  • SCP-1979 ("Relativistic Treadmill"). While SCP-1979 is being operated time passes faster on the outside than the inside: the multiplication factor depends on the speed the device is set for. At a speed of 2 km/hour the factor is 7.23 to 1. At a speed of 10 km/hour the factor, for each minute spent running on SCP-1979 15 days, 7 hours, 6 minutes and 18 seconds pass outside.
  • SCP-2590 ("Trailer Trash"). During its pursuit of SCP-2590, Alpha Squad lost contact with the Foundation. When it re-appeared almost three and a half years later, as far as it was concerned only fifteen minutes had passed.

Web Videos

• Campaign Two of Critical Role introduces a magical artefact known as, depending on who you ask, "The Archmage's Bane" or "The Happy Fun Ball". When the Mighty Nein investigate the magical sphere they're sucked into a separate plane. From their perspective they spend a few hours inside exploring the rooms before finding the exit. When they return the crew they left behind tell them they've been missing for a week.

Western Animation

• In the Adventure Time episode "Time Sandwich", Magic Man steals Jake's sandwich, and creates a time bubble around himself in order the savor the sandwich. Finn and Jake stick their heads inside for what seems to be a couple of minutes, but when they come out, B-Mo tells them they were there for five hours. Jake is able to move normally inside the bubble by being sad.
• The Angry Beavers called in a form of this trope and used it as a punchline. The two newly-emancipated characters wish to stay up all night, but accidentally unplug the wall clock during their shenanigans. When this is finally discovered, they step outside to see what time it is. What greets them is a Zeerust city that was definitely NOT there when they started. No magical or technological time dilation is mentioned.
• This happened in the Captain Planet and the Planeteers two-parter "Summit to Save the Earth" episode. Inside Zarm's ship, every minute that passed would equate to a month outside, so that when the Planeteers got booted from the ship the world had become a wasteland.
• The island of Avalon on Gargoyles, where one hour passes for every day in the rest of the world. As a result the Wyvern Clan's eggs are still alive when Goliath and the others finally awaken after a thousand years of sleep. Also, their day or two spent there translates into them going missing for weeks in the regular world, frightening their friends and colleagues until they show up again.
• The villain Pharaoh from Miraculous Ladybug is able to create "time bubbles" with this effect. Though it's milder than most examples. A few minutes for Ladybug inside is no more than half an hour outside.
• In My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, this is how the mirror portal between Equestria and the human world used to function, with years passing in Equestria while only a month or two would pass in the human world. This is best seen with Sunset Shimmer, who was a teenager when Celestia started teaching Twilight and, as a result of running away to live in the human world, is still a teenager.
• The Simpsons: Referenced in the episode "The Fight Before Christmas".
  Santa Krusty: I'm sure in the 25 years of Earth time you've been gone, your parents have been worried.
• In the Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Time Trap", time passes much more slowly inside the title area than in the outside universe. The people caught inside the trap can live for centuries longer than normal.
• In Trollz, when the girls enter the Shadow World during the day they were only there for a short time, but when they came back the mall was closed and it was late at night.
• Twelve Forever: In "Spring Break Forever", Todd and Esther go to Endless for spring break, planning to stay longer than usual, but still call Reggie (who was hospitalized thanks to a burst appendix) about once a day. Since the island doesn't have a day/night cycle and messes with any clocks that are brought in, they lose track of time. Evident when they carve some pumpkins, talk for a few minutes and when they turn back to them they're already spoiled. Eventually, Reggie arrives and sees the two acting completely crazy until she drags them out. When they regain their senses, they think they've only been in there for about 30 minutes. Reggie reveals it's been five days much to their shock and disturbance.
• Occurs in Voltron: Legendary Defender when the team finds out that after their battle with Lotor, three years passed for most of the universe, but only a few weeks for them.

Real Life

• The Theme Park Version of Einstein's Theory of Time Travel: There isn't such a thing as actually jumping ahead or back in time, but if a person were to approach the speed of light or a large gravity well (like a black hole), their relative time is much slower compared to everyone else. Notice this is used in several fictional examples listed. In fact, proponents of Ancient Astronauts theories occasionally take the existence of fairy tales using this trope as a proof of extra-terrestrial meddling.
• Sleeping can feel like this, especially with a lack of dreams. A good 8-9 hour sleep can feel as if only a few minutes to an hour have passed.
• Being put under anesthesia can have the same effect. The time between being knocked out and waking up after it's all over feels like a split second, but anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours could have passed, depending on the specific surgery.
• Exaggerated with Black Holes, because the gravity near them is so strong, time inside of a black hole passes infinitely slowly compared to anyone outside, meaning that if you were to go inside of a black hole and somehow come back out a few minutes later (in your perspective) you'll find that much time has passed. How much time exactly? How about eons?!

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