Can Time Sometimes Bend or Distort?

04/04/2026

My constant mysterious experiences with time

Reading time: 6 minutes

This article was originally published on Medium in ILLUMINATION.

Physical time concept is written in concrete — it can't be changed in any way. But, were we to step aside from Physics highway, we may be able to halt time or slow it down, or even make it disappear.

My own peculiar experiences with time defy how most people perceive time. Unconsciously, my time has been behaving strangely with me since as long as I can remember!

Please don't confuse it with time blindness which is a disorder in which people can't understand time to almost debilitating, distressing, depressing outcomes.

I am talking about playing or being played with time the way children play with play-dough. Maybe, it is a kind of time play. I just do not have the right words to describe it correctly.

To illustrate my point:

Time speeds up or disappears while I slow down

I sit at my desk from morning to evening and don't notice the passage of time. At all. Five or eights or twelve hours are like barely half an hour. It feels like I had been in a timeless state where time just didn't exist. Only when I emerge, does time resume its normal passage.

To keep track of time, I tried hanging large analogue wall clocks everywhere (and directly before my eyes) in my living spaces, as well as the hourly time-announcing audio feature on my laptop. Time still disappears. I have never any idea what time is it, and how quickly it has flown!

Although, when I'm working I am fully aware of time. No slip ups. Normal speed.

It is important to mention here that when such time speed-ups happen, I am not watching movies, videos, playing games, talking to someone, or listening to any kind of music. I'm usually only reading, writing or thinking.

The Flight Paradox

This one is very mysterious. I take flights, sometimes long, sometimes short. No matter how long or short the duration of the flight is, for me it's like few minutes to half an hour max. Always! This is why I intensely enjoy long flights and can't understand why everyone complains about flying, jet lags, sitting cramps, dehydration, fatigue during flights blah blah blah. To date I never got a jet lag and have no idea what one even feels like.

You might ask what do I do while flying. I just only sit. I never, never, never watch movies, browse intrenet, play games, talk to someone, use headphones, eye mask, ear plugs or even listen to music during flights. Where's the time for that?

Sitting or lying down without sleeping at home, doing nothing

I often sit in silence doing nothing, or lie down without sleeping, (no head phones, phone, talking, music, or anything, not even reading, writing) and when I emerge, I notice that time, just like the floor boards, hasn't moved at all. I could sit like that the whole day!

During driving too something strange happens

I drive through city roads or countrysides and time seems to stand still or slow down while I move. And I don't know if there's any other way to describe or explain this.

It's weirdest during sleeping

This is even wieder and happens almost on a daily basis: I sleep but strangely remain in an altered state that's impossible to explain using traditional vocabulary.

I am usually in a state of sleeping, but not sleeping, but still sleeping, but still awake.
Or, in a state when I am sleeping and being awake, both at the same time…!
Or, like I was somewhere else during my sleep, doing something don't know what and returned back.

I only sleep for 3–4 hours every night. But even if I sleep for half an hour or 5–6 hours, when I wake up I have no memory of the time I spent sleeping. No Memory of having fallen asleep or having slept. Like I had been dead, or absent, or unconscious, or in a state of suspension, or plugged in somewhere, or unplugged.

Sometimes this feeling of 'Where was I? Was I asleep or awake?' is so huge that I have to repeatedly ask people around me if I had actually fallen asleep and how long did I sleep.

What's even more mysterious? Being in this state is deeply refreshing like emerging from a spa, tantalising, rejuvenating, restful, peaceful and oh so joyful! I could easily fit in many more adjectives…

Sometimes I dream and that's when I know I had really been asleep.

Reduced bodily needs though complete awareness of them too

During such time disappearances, I am strangely completely aware of my body, bathroom breaks if any, but I become significantly oblivious to hunger, thirst, physical discomforts or fatigue.

I realise my bliss when I see others suffering acutely from the same very things because they are aware of time and I am not. As to why I am so unaware of time, puzzles me.

For me, clock is just a round object with numbers written on it that doesn't seem to relate to me somehow. Like it is a joke or a riddle…!

Time, as we all know it, somehow behaves differently with me or I do with it — I don't really know. It just doesn't behave with me the way it seems to behave with others.

I should clarify that I do not drink alcohol and do not take any meds that could interfere with my cognitive abilities and physical/mental alertness; not even cough syrup or painkiller medication. Ever. I do not even drink coffee or black tea to give me caffeine kick. I am also not given to drugs, intoxication, substance use, hallucination or alien abduction, mindfulness, lucid dreaming, time warp or time travel.

The only explanation I can find for it, is this

Maybe my weird experience with time has something to do with plain pure love for the things that I do. This thing called 'loving what you do' may have been acting with me like a drug. However, when I am working I am perfectly aware of time; It's only when I am not working I am not, and I singularly love, love, love my work. So, why time is normal during my work which I love, and acts strangely when I am not working? But then, there are lots of other people too who love what they do. Do they also experience time-distortion at this profound level?

I asked chat GPT and this is what it answerd:

Voluntary, wakeful deep absorption with dream-like qualities and time loss

Loving what you do leads to forgetting time, slowing it down, halting it or altering it, and it is so much more enjoyable such as keeping precise track of time never can be.
It is like creating your own paradise and losing yourself in it while the whole world, well goes to hell, so to speak.

But I still don't know if loving what I do is the real reason for my strange experiences with time. Whatever, I am not trading my delicious ecstasies of 'time-loss' with dry, salty, sultry advantages of time management and time optimisation.

But that's just my opinion. Thanks for reading!

Note: I write my own posts, not AI.

This article was originally published on Medium in ILLUMINATION.