#temporal distortion

[worldbuildingwanderlust]

Temporal distortions

And

Shifting paradigms

Are always so much

Simpler

When I can paint them

In rhymes

[dyed-red]

What are your thoughts on how much time Sam’s soul spent in The Cage? If we go by established time lines in the show, 18 months = approx 180 years. But Lucifer is an arch angel and we know angels can manipulate time so I think it could have been longer, or least made to feel longer. I also believe that Sam would have been fluent in Enochian after spending that much time with Lucifer and Micheal. Thank you for answering if you have time! And I hope you enjoy and holiday time you have :)

welp - you did it.

you asked a question i’ve been thinking about for over a decade and unleashed the full fury of my brainworms in action. this is the type of meta i expect like 4 people total to be interested in, but i’m going to spend days working on because I Have Thoughts.

the short answer: somewhere between 180 - 5000 years, with my personal headcanon landing just over 700 years, or 1400 for maximum whump.

The behemoth long answer is under a cut because long and math and meta. Skip to the end if you just want the math. The tl;dr is that SPN canon implies that hell has layers and that time distorts more the deeper that you go, and we can build an equation for that distortion and get to basically whatever number suits our purposes depending on what assumptions we make going in.

Time Distortion in Hell

The length of time Sam’s soul felt/experienced the cage is a function of two factors: how long he spent there in earth terms, and the degree of temporal distortion hell creates.

The first piece is easy if we assume Sam’s soul spent 18 months in the cage* (footnotes at the end).

The second piece... Dean spent 4 months dead (time in earth terms) which was 40 years on the rack in terms of his experience/perception. If we take this assumption that 1 month = 1 decade, we get to use some very simple math to say that Sam spent 180 years in the cage.

But.

I’ve always personally interpreted Hell’s time distortion to run a bit different than a static 1 month = 1 decade. This headcanon derives from some hints in canon (or at least, this headcanon is not actively contradicted by moments in canon) and from other pieces of media.

I believe that the deeper you go into hell, the greater the temporal distortion is.

This is basically like the move Inception, I’m not even gonna try to pretend otherwise. There, the deeper you go into the dream within a dream, the more time dilation there is. It makes sense to me that SPN’s Hell canon works the same for several reasons.

For starters, when Sam's wall is breaking in s6, he has flashbacks where 2-3 minutes is equated with what feels like a week in the cage (episode 6x14). We can take this at perfect face value (meaning that Sam’s soul experienced about 5000 years in the Cage). Or we can interpret this to be a function of the episode he is experiencing, where temporal dilation is exaggerated because of the nature of his flashback, or we can say he is speaking in hyperbole.

I think it makes sense for the truth to be somewhere in the middle - Sam is speaking off the cuff, not entirely literal or exact about how long those 2-3 minutes felt like, but nonetheless honestly that they felt like days, felt much longer than our formula of 1 month = 1 decade allows. And I take that as a realistic reflection of his time spent in the pit.

Another, and far more overt piece of evidence comes in Season 11 when Sam visits ‘the Cage’. In 11x09 (O Brother Where Art Thou), we see Rowena, Crowley and Sam in Hell whereas Dean is on Earth, and there appears to be little to no temporal distortion occurring between the events below and the events above. This remains true in the following episode (11x10, the Devil in the Details) when Crowley phones Dean and when Dean comes down to join them in Hell (and Cas as well shortly after).

So - what gives? Is there temporal distortion occurring in Hell or not? Did they retcon that, forget about it, what?

Well, Crowley explicitly refers to this area of Hell as ‘Limbo’, which brings us to an understanding of Hell’s temporal distortion through the lens of the circles presented in Dante’s Inferno.

Circles of Hell

It’s fair and frustrating to say that canon doesn’t give us much in the way of understanding the structure and hierarchies of Hell. That gives us a lot of leeway, but I like to anchor my headcanons to canon if and when I can.

Thankfully, there is at least some reason to believe that Hell in this universe is structured at least somewhat similarly to Hell in other popular works of fiction that derive their conceptions of it from Dante’s Inferno (which itself is the popular mainstream view of hell that even a lot of Christian/Catholics have adopted, often without realizing at this point).

Dante’s Inferno provides a view of hell that has 9 circles, or layers, each one deeper into Hell than the last. SPN implies the same.

We get this from the use of Limbo, as stated above, since this is the term in the Inferno for the first circle. Crowley refers to Limbo as the “furthest reaches” of Hell, whereas in Dante’s Inferno, it’s the top layer. SPN plays fast and loose with what it takes vs. leaves from real-world mythos, but I take this to mean that “far” or “furthest” not in the sense of depth, but as a place which may be vast and largely empty, and which few demons can enter (since, as per the Inferno, it’s not a place where guilty souls actually end up, so possibly has quite restricted access to demons).

We also get evidence of these circles from Word of God through Sera Gamble, who has apparently said that the Cage is “At the bottom of the lowest depths of the ninth circle of the worst bit of Hell.” That’s pure Dante’s Inferno, ba-bey. (/mcelroy voice)

More evidence comes from Season 8 when Sam rescues Bobby’s soul from Hell, since he goes through Purgatory as a sort of back door to Hell, being told that Purgatory is “Hell adjacent”, which is true as well in the Inferno.

Another within-canon indirect hint of this is the association between Lucifer and ice. Dante’s Inferno keeps that the ninth circle of Hell, reserved for treachery, is a large frozen lake. And in the Inferno and in SPN canon, this is where the Devil is kept, in the Center of Hell, in the deepest frozen depths of the pit, the frozen lake in the ninth circle.

Also remembering that in early seasons, Lucifer and his Cage were buried so deep in Hell that most demons weren’t sure if he even existed. His existence was a matter of faith, no different than humans believing in God, according to 3x04 (Sin City).

Based on all this, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to surmise that Hell is vast, but potentially its vastness manifesting in the way in which it is layered, and that there are regions, planes, or depths that most demons do not or cannot tread to.

But okay, even if you’re on board so far, why do I believe that time works differently at different layers? And what circles have we seen in canon?

Situating Each Circle

My fundamental argument here is that temporal distortion in Hell is more extreme at the deeper depths, in a mathematically determinable way.

If we accept that Hell has nine circles (or planes or layers), then we can assume that we’ve seen three - probably five - of them. There is Limbo, as per season 11 and stated above, in which there seems to be little to no time dilation. This makes some sense if we accept that it’s the surface-most plane*, the first circle.

We have also established what’s in the ninth circle, titled Treachery, which is the Center of Hell and The Cage. Given its depth and the lines from season 3 Sin City, we can assume that, much like Limbo, this is an off-limits zone for most demons. If we accept my argument that times moves differently at the different layers, this is where time distortion - really, time dilation - should be the most extreme. It is the furthest removed from the material plane and the deepest well (do not call it a gravity well do not call it a gravity well do not call it a - )*, dilating time and everything around it at its depths.

In between, we have seen The Rack (where Dean was tortured), we have the Throne (where Rowena sat and kept court, since many of Crowley’s ruling scenes are implied to be on the surface rather than in Hell proper, although any of Crowley’s ruling scenes would be on this same level, I imagine), we have The Dungeon (from which Sam rescued Bobby’s soul as part of the Trials), and we have the glimpse we caught of how Crowley restructured the place into endless lines as a method of torment. There’s also the space where Lilith’s horn is kept, as per the Belphegor and Cas scenes in the early episodes of Season 15. I take that to be the same level as the Throne level, since it seems to be where ruling demons would both preside and reside.

Based on the seeming lack of time distortion we tend to see (in late seasons...) when we get scenes relating the Throne level, my headcanon is that this is the second circle of Hell (Lust). In the Inferno, incoming souls are judged here and then sent to which circle their sins have them belong, so I think it’s at least somewhat fitting for this to be where the Throne is. Keeping it closer to the surface world / material plane also has some advantages if doing so minimizes time distortion, since keeping closer time with Earth allows easier monitoring of Earth and tracking of things like deals etc. It also means that higher ranking aka more powerful demons who preside here are closer to Gates of Hell and therefore have less far to travel when slipping out and onto Earth.

In contrast, I think that The Rack is pretty damn deep. There is a lot of time distortion going on to get to 1 month = 1 decade (especially if we allow that a very small amount of dilation is happening at the topmost circles, even including Limbo). This makes sense to me in that The Rack is a place of exceeding misery and horror, literally the center of Hell’s most violent and excruciating tortures.

For that reason, I place The Rack as circle seven, aptly titled Violence. This is not to be confused with the sin of Wrath, which is actually the fifth circle. Rather, the seventh circle (to quote wikipedia at least), “houses the violent”. What better way to re-interpret that in the world of SPN than that circle hosting the torturers and their tortured? Within the seventh circle are those who committed violence against neighbors, against self, and against God. What better place for someone who sold his own soul (violence against self and against God), who killed?

Of course I don’t think it’s so straightforward that violent souls get sent to The Rack. I think any damned soul can be called there for a torture session. But Dean spent his entire time in Hell on The Rack, and that can’t be standard. Bobby spent plenty of his time in hell in a cell, as per 8x19 (Taxi Driver), and demons come here to torture him.

I don’t think it’s a huge leap for me to infer that Dean was special and spent his entire time on The Rack because they were so determined to use him to break the First Seal, and that most damned souls only do short stints on there, either due to limited real estate or so that souls don’t become numb to the violence (since let’s face it, most demonic torturers probably can’t keep them in anticipation of further horror as well as Alistair can, after a few days or months being cut into.) They’re probably returned to their cells to marinate in the memory and anticipation with only minor tortures until they’re brought down again. This is what we see with Bobby and probably with the endless lineups in Crowley’s redesigned Hell.

So - without too much to go on, I’m going to tentatively place the Dungeon with Bobby and other damned souls as being in the sixth circle, Heresy. It’s a circle described as hosting souls in flaming tombs, which I think fits this notion of a dungeon with cells holding on to souls, and keeps those souls close at hand and ready for another go in the seventh circle where The Rack is held. 

And this allows me to place the endless line as actually being either in the fourth circle, Greed, or the fifth circle, Wrath. The fourth involves a nation of lost souls who, in this pit of hell, lose their individuality and become sort of empty, which fits what we see in that brief clip of the Hell line. The fifth includes a “savage self-frustration” that seems fitting of the concept of that awful endless line, with sullen and angry souls fighting each other in muck and slime.

Regardless of fourth or fifth (I have no strong sense of which fits better), I see that line as being meaningful outside (above) the sixth circle, in a torment that is less acute, as souls that are less unique and differentiated, less violent, less worthy of turning into black-eyed demons.

Because in the Inferno, there’s this critical division between the fifth vs. sixth circles as the transition between the two being the transition into “Lower Hell” and the sixth being behind guarded walls, with another steep drop from the sixth to the seventh, and so on. This makes sense to me as Lower Hell being a place where they keep the Dungeon and guard the doomed souls, whereas that place outside those walls hosting the damned but less special, less differentiated, the more generically doomed... yeah, it just makes sense to me (your mileage, as always, may vary).

This distinction is important also because of that drop down. If distance and depth are important to temporal distortion, then it matters if the first few circles of Hell involve less of a steep drop one to the next. Here we should note that the seventh circle involves three rings, and the eighth circle (Fraud, aka Malebolge, another very strong contender for the location of The Rack since it’s essentially an amphitheater for torture, so I’ll do the math both ways below)*, well the eighth is basically a funnel with 10 separate rings or steps downward.

Why does this matter? So glad you asked!

Increasing Temporal Distortion at Each Level

If you’re following the hints I’m dropping, what I’m implying about getting deeper into Hell and the further drops down at the later levels is that the time distortion in Hell does not increase linearly. It increases exponentially.

Limbo has temporal distortion that is so minor as to be barely perceptible, if perceptible at all. The Rack gives us an explicit (if fuzzy) estimate of 1 month = 1 decade in terms of perception. The Cage is implied to be much, much more than that, at the extreme end up to 2-3 minutes = 1 week in terms of perception.

If the time distortion was linear, meaning that from circle 1 to circle 2, and circle 2 to 3, and 3 to 4 and so on, we should expect that the amount of time distortion from Limbo (circle 1) to the Rack (circle 7 or 8) to be a much, much wider gap than the amount of time distortion from the Rack (circle 7 or 8) to the Cage (circle 9). Like... it should be 7-8x as much distortion.

And I mean, you could take a linear headcanon approach to it. If we accept that SPN Hell has circles or layers as is Word of God and overtly implied by the narrative time and again, you could say that there’s x amount of distortion at circle 1, and 2x at circle 2, and 3x at circle 3, etc, and this would works okay when we got the math right, but like... it’s not my preference given the way canon works.

What I mean (especially for those who hate math so might not be automatically sussing what I’m saying), is that, for example, if 10 seconds in Limbo = 1 second on Earth (sure why not) then if the time distortion increases the same way (”linearly”) at each new circle of hell, then on the Rack we get 70 seconds = 1 Earth second (or 80 seconds = 1 Earth second, if the Rack is in the eighth circle).

That specific math doesn’t check out (it equates to 23.3 years on the Rack instead of 40, or 26.7 if the Rack is the eighth circle instead of the seventh), but to figure this out we should of course work backwards starting from the 4 months = 40 years. Which tells us that each second on Earth feels like 120seconds (2 minutes) on The Rack. If that’s happening at the seventh circle, then a linear difference between each circle of hell means that the time distortion in Limbo is roughly 17 seconds for every Earth second. This math works out a little prettier if the Rack is the eighth circle because that’s an even 15 seconds for every Earth second.

To me, that’s stretching how much time distortion is implied to occur at Limbo and vastly exaggerating what we see with Sam rescuing Bobby from Hell. If Bobby is actually kept in the 6th circle, that’s 102 (7th circle) or 190 (8th circle) seconds in Hell for every second on Earth. It just didn’t seem that Sam was spending a minute and a half in Hell for every second that Dean was spending on the surface in Taxi Driver, but then again, I haven’t rewatched that episode so I’d have to double check to know for sure.

Between those implications about time distortion in Limbo and Bobby’s rescue and even the Throne room when they visit Rowena to the way Dante’s Inferno (which SPN canon clearly drew from) funnels more extremely downward the deeper you go in the circles, to what Sam’s episode of Hell memories could imply about his experience of time dilation in the Cage (assuming we accept his statement about his episode “feeling like a week” even if we don’t take that number at exactly face value)... an exponential increase just makes more sense, mathematically?

And again, for anyone who doesn’t like math or doesn’t know what that means and why I keep using this word “exponentially,” what it means is that the difference between the first circle and the second circle is not as big as the difference between the second circle and the third circle. At each depth, the intensity of the time dilation increases. So that you might not even notice the difference in time dilation between circle 1 and 2, but the difference between circle 5 and 6 is massively noticeable, and the difference between circle 8 and circle 9 is like several times even that big. Like Inception!

So let’s run some final calculations and get you your answer(s), Anon!

Some Final Math and Estimates*

Assumption 1: Equivalent Dilation

If we assume that there is no difference in time dilation from one region of Hell to another, then the ratio that Dean gives us in Season 4 is accurate for all of Hell, and 1 month (30 days) in the pit feels like 10 years. That’s 120 seconds below to every second above.

This would mean that in 18 months in the Cage, Sam experiences 180 years worth of torture.

Assumption 2: Linear Dilation Circle 7

Assuming The Rack is in the seventh circle, then a linear difference at each level means that 120 seconds on the Rack equates to 154 seconds in the Cage at the ninth level. That would mean that in 18 months topside, Sam’s soul spent 231.5 years in the Cage.

Assumption 3: Linear Dilation Circle 8

Assuming the Rack is in the eighth circle (which, tbh, I kind of thing makes more sense even though I argued differently above, but shhh let’s pretend otherwise), then a linear difference at each level means that 120 seconds there equates to only 202.5 years for Sam’s soul in the Cage. Slightly less awful! 

Assumption 4: Exponential Dilation Circle 7

The simple way I’m doing this is that instead of taking the time distortion at Limbo and making it x2 at the second circle, x3 at the third, and so on, I’m taking the time distortion at Limbo and making it to the power of 2 at the second circle, to the power of 3 at the third, and so on. I still have to start with The Rack being 120seconds on Earth time and work backwards to get that initial Limbo starting point before I apply the exponent, but otherwise that’s all I’m doing. There are definitely more sophisticated ways we could approach it since that’s a pretty simple linear increase in the exponent, and we could instead make the exponent itself an equation we’d derive through more complex means but... I’m really not about to do that.

So.

If we start from The Rack = 120seconds (2mins), using the exponent assumptions above, then Limbo time dilation is roughly 2 seconds (actually 1.98167 or so) in Limbo for every Earth second (works beautifully for what we see in canon, basically imperceptible), and time dilation in the ninth circle is 471 seconds (7.85 mins) per Earth second. Yes, that big of a difference, because that’s how exponents work.

This would mean that Sam’s soul spent approximately 707 years in the Cage.

What a great number! What a reasonable number, and a pretty damn canon-compliant number to headcanon. I like this number.

Assumption 5: Exponential Dilation Circle 8

As above in terms of the exponent assumptions, if the Rack is actually in the 8th circle of Hell, that much closer to the Cage, then here the math works out so that 120 seconds on the 8th circle being... roughly 2 seconds in Limbo. Because that’s how exponential functions work. It’s actually 1.81928 in Limbo vs. the previous 1.98167, but that rounds to the same thing (2 seconds) in terms of human experience, even if it makes a big difference when we take it out to the difference it makes in months, years, etc.

(But like, this is why I think it’s exponential, because this works so much better for what canon implies about the time dilation there*.) 

Anyway, here, this would mean that Sam’s soul spent roughly 327.5 years in the Cage instead of the 707 from above. That’s a big difference.

Assumption 6: Off the Rails

We can also take Sam’s statement about 2-3 minutes on Earth (having a Hell flashback) feeling like a week in the pit. If we estimate conservatively and go with every 3 Earth minutes = 1 week in Hell, depending on how we approach it (depending on if you go with minutes in a week vs. a month and which way you get to a year), you get somewhere around 5000 years (in my present calculation it’s 4984, but I also calculated it another way to get to just over 5000).

Assumption 7: 9th Circle vs. The Cage

Dante’s Inferno distinguishes between the 9th Circle on its own vs. the Center of Hell as the place where Lucifer resides, right at the deepest depths. The Cage itself is remote in Hell, distant from all other demons, enough so as to be a matter of faith to many of them. If we allow the possibility that this all means that the Cage is deeper than the ninth circle itself*, we can add another linear layer or else another exponent (take our equation to the 10 instead of to the 9).

This works out to be:

Rack 7th Circle, Linear: 257 years

Rack 8th Circle, Linear: 225 years

Rack 7th Circle, Exponential: 1400 years

Rack 8th Circle, Exponential: 596 years

Meaning this is a good place to note that... depending on the final number you want to get to, you can use whichever assumptions you want to get there and justify it by math. Remember kids, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

TL;DR!!!!!

How much time did Sam’s soul spend in the Cage? My headcanon is that he spent probably either 600 or 700 years there, on the assumption that it was 18 months between Swan Song and Appointment in Samarra, and assuming time dilation gets more extreme the deeper that you go in Hell.

For people who want to make more conservative estimates but still embed some complexity to Hell’s time dilation and/or who be more canon-compliant to other glimpses we’ve seen of Hell’s time distortion (Limbo, etc), I think anywhere from about 200 years to 330 years is perfectly reasonable.

For people who want to go with maximum whump, the sky (5000) is the limit, but you can mathematically point to up to 1400 being pretty reasonable.

*Footnotes

1. Because canon plays fast and loose with how many months exactly have gone by, and some people headcanon that only about 4 months have passed in Season 6 before Appointment in Samarra when Death pulls his soul out. I personally read it as more like 6 months having gone by and think this is the more standard headcanon, so your 180 years is the most common interpretation, and definitely the most easy to defend. I also made calculations for Sam having spent 16 months in the Cage instead of 18 months there though, if anyone is interested.

2. There is also the Vestibule in the Inferno as the opening to Hell, before the first circle, and this requires passage from Charon to cross over and into Hell proper. This is where the quote “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here” is from at the Gate of Hell, which of course is evoked in season 5 as the episode in which Jo and Ellen die.

I like to think of the Vestibule in the world of SPN as being any and all of the many Hellgates implied by canon, including the one that opens in AHBL2. No time dilation occurs within the Vestibule(s), as a person has to enter into Hell’s circles to properly separate themselves from the material plane.

3. Not getting into it here but if I ever get around to writing an original piece of fiction about angels and demons etc like I kind of want to, some of my worldbuilding will explicitly connect/relate angels to celestial bodies, like literally to stars, with the depth of hell essentially being a black hole, hence why the closer one gets to it, the greater the time dilation there is. Gravity and heat increase near the center of hell in this unbearable way, and then at the very center, like within the black hole itself, it becomes unbearably incredibly cold, like that frozen lake in which Lucifer is half-submerged in Dante’s Inferno. Lucifer existing impossibly both within and outside the event horizon. But I digress.

4. When you think about how many angels are implied to have died in order to rescue Dean’s soul, compared to how simply Sam snuck into Hell to rescue Bobby, I think the circles of Hell interpretation becomes quite important. If Dean was in the seventh or eighth circle, like especially that eighth circle, that’s so much deeper in than the Dungeon. The angels also couldn’t infiltrate subtly, methinks, and had to storm the walled and heavily guarded gates at the sixth circle, through that dungeon, then fight their way down the three rings of the seventh circle and possibly down into the amphitheater of the eighth. We know that their powers alone can’t kill a demon as powerful as Alistair even on Earth, so on their home turf in Hell, it makes sense that demons would have put up a really solid fight against the angels. This helps resolve some of my own frustration at what seems to be discrepancies in the abilities of angels and how dangerous they are to demons in canon.

5. Please be aware that all maths above involve some rounding, since I didn’t think anyone wanted the detailed decimals. I also calculated months as being 30 days and for simplicity, calculated years as being 12 months. I could rework the math into weeks with 52 weeks being a year instead, which gives slightly different numbers, but it’s work so I’m just going to go with these approximations. Also noting that I used calculated everything using excel to save myself a headache. I’m sorry if there are any errors, especially when it comes to the exponents, my brain got very tired. Please let me know if you find any.

6. When it comes to the exponential ones, if The Rack is in the 7th circle of hell, then if the Dungeon where Bobby was kept was in the 6th circle, then each Earth second is 60 seconds (1 minute) in the Dungeon. That’s more time dilation than I think canon implies, because 60 minutes (1hr) in the Dungeon is only a minute on Earth? In contrast if The Rack is in the 8th circle, then 1 Earth second is 36 seconds in the Dungeon. I honestly think both of these are more extreme than canon implies, but again, it’s been a million years since I watched that episode because it’s written by Bucklemming and I cannot stand their writing. But as a count in favor of the exponential argument instead of linear, if time dilation increases the same amount at each circle then 1 Earth second translates to 103 seconds in the Dungeon (Rack in 7th) or 90 seconds (Rack in 8th), both of which are a lot more dilation than our exponential account.

7. For simplicity, I’ve also ignored the different rings which occur at the 7th and 8th circles. Those would, of course, change the math here as well, and we could add another linear or exponential step for each of those rings. That would lead to some crazy numbers because we’re talking about 13 additional steps. Linearly we’d add a few thousand years, but exponentially we’re starting to talk about a geological timescale. I don’t think it’s productive to make that extreme of an assumption about those rings, but I think we could comfortably stretch the distance between the 7th circle and the pit in which Lucifer’s cage sits at the deepest depths of hell if we wanted to, if you wanted to reasonably get closer to that 5000 years estimate.

8. Since your ask mentioned it, Anon, I realize I don’t touch on Enochian in this post but I have two tag-rambles about my thoughts on enochian and I thought I had a proper post on it somewhere but can’t find it. I could/should probably make a post with a tumblr ficlet about that, since I started drafting a canon-divergent post-Hell fic with Sam and Enochian and there’s like... no chance I’ll ever finish it. But anyway.

Thanks for reading this far, to anyone who did.

[xtruss]

Why You Almost Never See A Clock At The Mall! Retailers, Casinos, And Grocery Stores Use A Trick Called Temporal Distortion To Make You Forget About The Real World.

— February 27, 2024 | Mark Dent

The week before Christmas last year, I went to a mall in my hometown.

I wanted to buy a gift for my brother and browse through Barnes & Noble. Instead I purchased a smoothie from a vendor by the escalator and an overpriced cookie from the food court. I didn’t find any Christmas presents — I found a Korn T-shirt at Hot Topic that would’ve been a solid gag gift, but it was too large. Or did I see it at Spencer’s? The stores all blended together.

When I returned to my car in the parking lot, after a journey through a walkway brightened by artificial lighting, I wasn’t sure if I’d been shopping for 30 minutes or an hour. I’d lost track of my surroundings and bought something I didn’t need.

In other words, I was an ideal customer.

This experience is shared by millions of shoppers every year — and it’s by design. Malls, department stores, grocery stores, and even casinos enlist tactics that cause “temporal distortion,” making us lose track of time and spend more money.

A Time-Free Fantasy Zone

When designing their layouts, malls took a cue from an industry that has perfected the art of separating people from their money: casinos.

Bill Friedman probably knows more about casinos than anybody else on the planet. He’s a former gambling addict, the only person to manage two casinos on the Strip at the same time, the author of two seminal books about the casino industry, and a researcher who performed empirical studies on dozens of Nevada casinos and interviewed some of the earliest casino operators in the state.

Friedman confirms an oft-cited detail about casinos: There are typically no clocks.

Back when Nevada first legalized gambling, in 1931, the casinos did have clocks. Over the next few years, however, the owners heard complaints from the biggest gamblers: Remove the clocks, or they’d stop coming. The reason why?

“[The gamblers] don’t want time,” Friedman told The Hustle. “They are in a fantasy and an escape world.”

Roulette at Nevada’s New Meadows Club in 1931. Bettmann/Getty Images

Friedman says he and other casino operators never unlocked an innovation that caused people to gamble more (not even free alcohol, he says). But they did what they could to eliminate distractions that interfered with the gamblers’ fantasy states.

In the mid-1970s, for instance, when Friedman started managing Castaways and The Silver Slipper, he identified a major obstacle: natural light.

One side of the Castaways casino was covered in glass. Every morning when the sun peeked over the buildings on the Strip, the slot machines and tables emptied. Some 85%-90% of customers left the gambling floor.

“They realized it was daytime and they had a world they had to go back to,” Friedman says.

Friedman bought a dark plastic covering for the glass. His security team raised it over the glass about five minutes before sunrise every morning, blocking out most of the light. The daylight exodus ceased.

Under Friedman’s management, Castaways and The Silver Slipper became two of Vegas’ most profitable casinos in the 1970s and 1980s. He trained his staff not to interrupt gamblers who were in the zone — if somebody earned a comp, a staffer was to quickly tell them they’d like to buy them a free meal and let the customer claim it when their “fantasy” ended.

“You don’t disrupt,” Friedman says.

Castaways thrived in the 1970s and 1980s. It was imploded in 2006. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Friedman shared many of his techniques in his books and as a casino consultant. Some of his top design principles included:

Intricate spacing: Low ceilings, maze-like designs, and intimate nooks for slot machines allow customers to slow down and feel a busy energy as they pass through a casino — yet still have room to carve out their own private domains by the machines.

Mundane and medium sound levels: Sensual overload and environments in which sounds bounce off interior surfaces confuse customers. Most casinos use bland, low-volume music or ambient noise — researchers have found that songs provide gamblers a cue of how much time has passed, a big no-no.

Monotonous design: Friedman believed that the machines and tables should be the focal point of any casino. Decor shouldn’t be so elaborate that it draws attention away from them.

With the atmosphere just right, gamblers become engrossed in the game in front of them, causing their “field of consciousness to break down,” according to sociologist Gerda Reith.

“In the arena of chance, as though under the sway of a magnetic field, the passage of time freezes into repetition, space contracts, and the value that accrues to money is obliterated,” she wrote in a thesis on gambling in western society.

Raymond Lavoie, a New Mexico State University marketing professor, studied gamblers and flow, a state of mind where a person is so attentive to a task they lose track of everything else, including time. He found that gamblers who entered a flow state — caused by a distraction-free environment and a focus on a stimulating task — spent more time and money gambling than those who didn’t.

They kept going because it felt good, so much so that despite losing more money overall they enjoyed the experience more.

“You’re not thinking about the future,” Lavoie says, “you’re just enjoying this moment.”

The Longer You Stay, The More You Spend

Casinos are unique in their aim. No other industry builds a world designed to maintain a customer’s fantasy so that they continue to partake in an activity that, in the long run, advantages the house. But retailers share at least one common goal with casinos: They want to keep people inside.

“The goal of the retailer is to make sure that they find ways to increase the time we spend in the store, the number of items we see at the store, and end up buying not just what we came in for but ideally a few additional things,” says Vassilis Dalakas, a business professor at California State University San Marcos who has researched consumer psychology.

Shoppers at London’s Westfield Shopping Centre. Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Extra time in the store, in fact, can be nearly as dangerous to one’s wallet as extra time in the casino. When we shop, we have about 20 minutes before our brains lose the power to keep us from making questionable financial decisions, according to researchers from Bangor University in the United Kingdom.

Using MRIs to gauge “the neural basis of decision making,” they found that after 23 Minutes supermarket shoppers began using the emotional part of their brain rather than the cognitive part. That switch made it harder for people to consider costs and made them more susceptible to marketing bargains.

After 40 Minutes, their brains effectively shut down. They struggled to make any logical decisions.

The Hustle

But grocery stores face an uphill battle in persuading customers to stick around. Most people go to the grocery store knowing the items they want and trying to get out quickly. To keep shoppers around longer, grocers and other retail stores employ several tactics and design elements similar to the casino industry:

Removing distractions: There are few clocks and windows, so customers won’t be reminded of the outside world. Boring designs draw attention to the products, especially at grocery stores and discount department stores.

Building a maze: These layouts, most prominently deployed at Ikea, force customers to move through the store slowly and see as many products as possible.

Retail stores also use sound and music to manipulate the environment. A study from the early 1980s showed that slow-tempo music led to shoppers moving more slowly through the store and spending more money than if fast-tempo music played. (There wasn’t a huge difference in results between slow-tempo music and no music at all.)

“It’s almost mood maintenance,” says Theodore Noseworthy, a York University business professor who has studied the impacts of sound. “They’re trying to keep you in this positive state and almost in flow [so] that if you’re shopping, [you] just stay shopping.”

The Hustle

Whether it’s inside a department store or a casino, it’s now harder than ever to minimize distractions and foster a sense of lost time and place. Blame smartphones.

A ping from a text or email can draw a person’s eyes to a screen, giving them an instant reminder of the time and something else they could be doing.

“When you pull that thing out, it breaks you from that immersive environment,” Noseworthy says.

The good news for retailers and casinos, though, is they may soon be able to use technology to create an environment more immersive than anything we’ve seen.

No Time in The Future

When I asked Lavoie, the academic who studies flow state, for another area ideal for creating flow besides casinos, he offered an immediate answer: virtual reality.

People who don VR headsets don’t see or hear anything other than the virtual world in front of them. If VR takes off, retailers, marketers, and casino operators will use it to their advantage, building mesmerizing simulations for people to shop, buy, and gamble in.

There would be no human distractions, such as friends or family members telling someone it’s time to stop gambling or shopping. And there would certainly be no clocks.

“You don’t have to worry about any of that,” Lavoie says. “This is infinitely better than that. It narrows your attention fully.”

It also sounds dystopian. But if learning about this worrisome consumer future makes you queasy, at least take comfort in knowing that it’s natural to lose track of time and space.

As you get older, Noseworthy reminded me, it feels like time moves faster. In reality, it’s just that most of our days are mundane and monotonous, blending together and helping us lose track of time.

Casinos and malls may be time warps. But so is life.

[sincerely-sofie]

Hey you know how it’s implied throughout the Pokémon franchise that despite there being multiple appearances of different celebi, they’re all supposed to be the same Pokémon who is living thousands of lives in thousands of eras simultaneously? And how celebi are extremely sensitive to temporal distortions and paradoxes, to the point of being able to see them as if they were physical objects in front of them?

I think it’s very nice and polite of the Celebi in Explorers of Sky to keep a lid on all that.

[distorted-fate]

My votes for favorite Phigros song of 2023. Man so many good bangers to choose that it was hard to decide :’D

I maybe should’ve gone for Terabyte Connection instead of Dance with Silence, but I already had 2 boss songs…

[x1tadpole1x]

for awhile now (i'm not even sure how long anymore) i've been on a mission to catch an alpha of one of every final evolution in legends arceus (along with the regular pokemon)

i only need to catch a few more, alpha rampardos and like four unown, and rampardos is being a pain in the ASS

and now i'm tempted to catch an alpha and shiny of every single pokemon in the game becus they're so common ;-;'

[ask-aurachnid]

So the time bubbles. Who wants to hear about them? Fjsjhsha

I thought my universe was one of the normal ones :0/

[my-timing-is-digital]

@captnjtkirk​ asked: ‘ oh my god! are you okay? ’

‘I believe so,’ the android reported composedly, lithely hauling himself out of the crashed shuttlecraft. ‘However, my shuttlecraft is not,’ he stated matter-of-factly, assessing the damaged vessel rigorously.

    Then, he diverted his attention to his environs and the company he currently found himself in — an away team. They were Starfleet officers, but their uniforms dated from the mid to late 23rd century. Data creased his brows contemplatively at this realisation, his yellow eyes oscillating from one familiar face to the other.

    ‘Captain Kirk,’ he said politely, a tone of recognition in his voice. ‘I am Lieutenant Commander Data of the U.S.S. Enterprise... D.’

[clanoffelidae]

Well I’m glad I went down that rabbit hole about my aiws as a child because I only knew about my visual distortions and didn’t know about any other symptoms (since that was all I had as a child), because now I’ve learned that occasionally waking up and spending the first 5-10 minutes of my day feeling like everything’s on fast forward, that the music I’ve put on is impossibly fast and my brain just can’t keep up even though I know this is a song I listen to all the time and it’s playing at a normal speed, that the seconds are just slipping away and I’m watching them go but I’m just too slow to catch them, and that my heart is pounding even though I know I’m not having a panic attack because I feel like the whole world is rushing and I just want to snap at it to slow down, is in fact NOT a universal part of the waking up experience that just ‘lol that happens some days, like when you wake up from a deep sleep and feel all sluggish, some morning’s the world’s just on fast forward and you just can’t keep up y’know lol’

Like full on didn’t know this wasn’t completely normal and not worthy of note until like, 48 hours ago. Thinking on it I’m pretty sure I’ve had it as long as I can remember but I only remember the most recent episode from a few weeks ago and have a vague recollection of one a few weeks before that. But I literally disregarded it so thoroughly and considered it so unimportant that that second memory is almost completely gone because it never occurred to me that these were things worth sparing the memory space for. I have learned.

Every day I discover my experiences are not universal

[russellmoreton]

P3228227a : Engineering Blueprint on Watercolour Paper. 2011 by Russell Moreton Via Flickr: Slumped glass panel " evolved " from a head gasket (Hillman Imp) and a note recording failing compression readings.

[devpalmer]

My game is out now!

re:curse is a surreal RPGmaker horror game inspired by the likes of OFF, Ib, LISA: The Painful RPG and Yume Nikki.

Play as distraction-prone researcher Linda Langley and explore as your laboratory distorts and degrades around you. Send emails. Grapple with your clown infestation. Face consequences. Maybe even survive!

This is a game about...

doors

screens

bitrot

self-fulfilling loops

computer viruses (not real ones)

trans-temporal communication software

gay subtext

surprises

secrets

re:curse was solo developed as a passion project, mostly between 2020-2021. I've returned to it and added the final touches necessary to make a finished game. Bundled with the game is a trove of bonus content for your perusal, including uncompressed source files, concept art, unreleased original music, 3d files, and more. I hope you enjoy!

Download for free on itch.io!

[cirrus-grey]

RQ newsletter: You may hear a familiar voice on this week's Protocol episode!

Episode summary: Architecture (liminal), Temporal Distortion, Spatial Distortion, Altered Reality

Me: Michael? Helen?? How interesting...

Jon Gracey: Hi

Me:

[statement-continues]

Jon: Mahtin you have to help me communicate with Sam about what’s going on!

Martin: yeah okay

Martin: *gives temporal distortion statement when the only two people who would actually listen to it are gone*

Martin: I tried 🥺

Jon: you did your best and I love you

That's how it happened I was there

[distorted-fate]

Impedimenta Rhythms I never posted

[sincerely-sofie]

the idea of twig evolving is really cool but now i wanna see grovyle evolving because he got that height envy over not being the "tall, big bro" anymore so he goes to celebi to help him in his little crisis to one-up twig, to which she helps him evolve only for immediately blow up in his face because Grovyle Anatomy And Sceptile Anatomy Are Very Different and he's gonna learn that the hard way. but hey, at least they're seeing eye to eye now!

Grovyle can’t evolve in The Present is a Gift due to his own temporal distortion issues akin to Twig’s (though much more severe), but this was too rich of a prompt to pass up.

He’s fiiiiiine.

[389]

BLUNDERDOME AUG 2023 DJ MIX HOUSE / GARAGE / BREAKS / BREAKBEATS / BASS / TECHNO Dynetic - Changing Forces [Global Cuts – GC 36] DAWL - Beats Intravenous [Furthur Electronix – FE 015] Andy Toth - Temporal Distortion [Interdimensional Transmissions] Overmono - Bby [XL Recordings] Breaka ft. Adam Pits - The Show Must Go On [space•lab] Nocturnal Sunshine - Foundation [I/AM/ME – IAMME024V] Aaliyah - Rock The Boat (Mikey B Bootleg) Janzon - Poetry In Motion [Code Is Law] Disaffected - Sublimation [Palms Out Sounds] Anybody Anytime - Where The Head Goes (Ruff Mix) Dayzero - Daruma [Livity Sound] Static. - Back to the Start [Moot Tapes] Prince Josh - Let It Go [Nervous Records] Justin Jay - Swarm [Shall Not Fade] BFTT - iOSMIDI6_Droplets (broken iPhone in the club mix) [Mutualism] Colombo - Get Ready [Distorsion Records] Usurper - Back In Time (Baithead Remix) [Omertà Records] Mani Festo - Eraser [Sneaker Social Club] Pangaea - Fuzzy Logic [Hessle Audio] Hiroaki Iizuka - Beatpoint [ARTS] Overmono - BMW Track [Poly Kicks] Stenny - Lights On [ilian tape] White Afghani - Styrum [Noorden] Full track-list and links here: https://www.buymusic.club/list/ivnn-blunderdome-aug-2023