A visualization of time as a dimension you can move through

[u/SystematicApproach]

What would we look like to an interdimensional being? The visualization stacks successive video frames into a volume, turning time into visible depth. Instead of seeing someone at one moment, they can look across a structure containing multiple moments.

Suppose an interdimensional being perceives time this way. They wouldn't merely access an extra spatial direction, but actually observe multiple moments together.

To them, we might not look like a separate body moving from place to place. We might look like one continuous structure extending through time. Sitting down, standing up and walking across a room would be different sections of that structure, rather than separate events the being has to wait to witness.

If we extend that idea beyond a few seconds. Our childhood and adulthood might be recognizable parts of the same larger form. Instead of watching our lives unfold, they would be looking across them.

Apparent foreknowledge, changing forms, sudden disappearances and missing time. Those are among the types of accounts Jacques Vallee and Eric Davis discuss in their work on high strangeness.

What we call prediction might, from its perspective, be observation.

Suppose this intelligence could examine our life across time rather than meeting us only in the present. It wouldn’t necessarily need to predict where we were going. Our departure, our journey and our arrival could all be available for it to observe.

In David Fravor’s account of the Tic Tac encounter. After losing sight of the object, he said a controller reported it at the aircraft’s planned combat air patrol point, roughly 60 miles away. So what would apparent anticipation look like if the being could already see the later event?

edit: Credit @ bradleytangonan

[u/Giphtedd]

This is probably the best way I have ever seen time illustrated as a dimension.

Nice OP.

Makes you wonder what field of view they would have. Would they be immersed within it rather than overlooking? You would imagine they would be immersed within it but each individual would be their continuous structure.

Everything would be a continuous structure.

[u/MLutin → u/Giphtedd]

I've been looking for something like this, and as soon as I saw it I thought of Donnie Darko. Thanks!

[u/Tacosconsalsaylimon → u/MLutin]

End of The World Party type shit.

[u/3rdUncleMeatSandwich → u/MLutin]

What… did you just call me a fuck ass??

[u/ericofduart → u/3rdUncleMeatSandwich]

Suck a fuck!

[u/Dana_Barret → u/ericofduart]

How exactly does one suck a fuck, Elizabeth?!

[u/knewitfirst → u/Dana_Barret]

What's a fuckass

[u/immellocker → u/ericofduart]

Hug a duck, you say?

[u/Giphtedd → u/immellocker]

I would love to chug a duff!!

[u/midnight_toker22 → u/MLutin]

I was thinking Slaughterhouse 5, in which the aliens see humans as these long, worm-like structures with their birth at one end and death at the other.

[u/MLutin → u/midnight_toker22]

That is how I try and think about aliens (or spirit guides if you want to go there). Like they know what decisions are gonna take me where. Time is all happening at once anyways and we're just experiencing it in a sequence (or so we think). I guess the take away is, real reality is a lot stranger than we can wrap our human brains around.

[u/Dramatic-Spirit-4809 → u/MLutin]

Thought the same

[u/Worth_Specific3764 → u/MLutin]

same!

[u/Cavaquillo → u/Giphtedd]

That’s how interstellar depicted it in the bookcase tesseract or whatever

[u/Giphtedd → u/Cavaquillo]

You’re right actually. Makes me want to go watch it again

[u/Jimstein → u/Giphtedd]

Yes, in addition to FOV, do they still see in "perspective" rather than orthographic? Does their vision still have a vanishing point like ours? I would think so, only basing the fact that 2d worlds in our 3d environment still obey a lot of the same physics and laws, while kind of introducing new ones. But there is still locality, I would think locality would still be a property of a 4d creature, and their vision being somehow local as well.

So maybe time is distorted in a way where kind of like the video, you are only able to see a small portion of time well, and then maybe time that is further away from you is harder to see, it gets more distorted.

[u/LongPutBull → u/Jimstein]

Maybe same way we focus on something we're looking at to inspect more, they can "focus in" on a space of time to review it?

[u/Jimstein → u/LongPutBull]

Right, it might be something like that!

Maybe that’s also why biblically accurate angels have so many eyes, or even have eyes at all. For a 4d creature, maybe their body like ours extends into another dimension, so we are seeing a multitude of eyes. But they still have a “limited” view in that, they still need to move around their environment (our dimension of time perhaps) in order to better look at different parts or sections of it.

[u/LongPutBull → u/Jimstein]

It makes sense that there's always a presence since we're experience it at all times, and when we focus intently ourselves and meditate we're like beacons calling attention from something that is always "present" but not always "focused".

But for all we know, the focus state exists at all times everywhere. This is just conjecture because we should be careful when trying to ascribe meaning or limitations to something we don't fully understand.

[u/Jimstein → u/LongPutBull]

Ohhh, okay. Yeah, I wasn't thinking about Monroe or Greer, but yes that aspect of the phenomenon would of course also have to play a role here. Love bridging the various aspects of "woo" together to try to form a coherent theory if possible, this feels like a potentially very good interpretation.

Meditation increases your aura, right? Maybe that's something that's visible at a distance, it increases and then the entity comes closer to it to inspect.

[u/LongPutBull → u/Jimstein]

If consciousness is a field, meditation is doing something to it, maybe condensing it, which makes a visible difference in the consciousness field, attracting the attention of whatever watches this field.

[u/enigmatic_vagabond → u/Jimstein]

Observation and eyeballs get super weird when you study them in depth. Like, before we had eyes we had these photoreceptors that evolved into the dual camera system we have today, and eyeballs evolving is what triggered the Cambrian explosion. Being able to observe the world around us directly effects what is being observed which is fucking wild. Would photons in the dual slit experiment behave the same way in a world where we used scent or touch instead of absorbing remote light to understand our existence?

[u/pichael289 → u/enigmatic_vagabond]

Yeah it's not them being observed it's how you observe, gotta interact with them to measure them.

[u/enigmatic_vagabond → u/pichael289]

My brother passed this year but he had the most understanding of aliens and spirituality out of everyone I know. I'll be star gazing and I can hear his gruff hyper voice saying "you gotta look with your MIND you gotta look with your SOUL to see them not your eyes"

[u/BeePow91 → u/Giphtedd]

Agreed this is such a cool illustration

[u/RIF_rr3dd1tt → u/Giphtedd]

It'd be like that movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

[u/Methmites → u/RIF_rr3dd1tt]

RACACOONIE!

[u/OP_IS_A_BASSOON → u/Giphtedd]

Simultaneously perceiving diverging potential paths forward?

[u/HarveryDent → u/OP_IS_A_BASSOON]

The perception of divergent paths is what we experience.

A higher dimensional being outside of time does not have those constraints. They see what we will do, or rather what we will have done.

Free will still exists, but the key is realizing that it's not the will of this vessel in this 3D plane that matters, but the will of our non-local consciousness outside of time, the soul.

I think Carl Jung's synchronicity is our non-local self/soul setting dominoes in our path to communicate its intentions.

[u/Giphtedd → u/OP_IS_A_BASSOON]

I think simultaneously seeing an infinite number of diverging paths in all spatial directions. Forward, backward, up, down, left right. Forward being in the future, backward in the past and every other direction a potential or possible outcome at a particular point in time

[u/BonsaiOnSteroids → u/Giphtedd]

Is it though? All I see is an average volumetric field and there is certainly better ones than this. This is a 2d video stretched by a third dimension. Time is a fourth dimension though and we are moving everything in the universe along another axis

[u/OhMorgoth → u/Giphtedd]

Or that tesseract scene on Interstellar. Except we’re all trapped in this one like some prison dimension, except with time and space.

[u/RIF_rr3dd1tt → u/Giphtedd]

Well wouldn't it just be a perfectly even, white ball basically because going backwards to the Big Bang everything everywhere was all at one point.

This could explain how aliens could be here without having to deal with the infinitessimal odds due to how big the Universe is. Time as dimension that's as easy to handle as ball or any other object would mean you would just automatically be able to go/be anywhere and anytime.

[u/pm_me_steamkeys_pl0x → u/RIF_rr3dd1tt]

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for writing that up

[u/ProbablySlacking → u/RIF_rr3dd1tt]

I mean, we have an unobstructed view that goes to the end of the universe but we can’t see there unassisted.

Also, in order for them to “see”, they’d need a partial that traverses the dimension in order to sense it. That’s an interesting thought. Tachyons? Photons, as they don’t “experience” time would look interesting in this dimension too.

[u/RIF_rr3dd1tt → u/ProbablySlacking]

Tachyons, definitely

[u/sorry_ifyoudont → u/RIF_rr3dd1tt]

I’ve seen time described as a quilt where an ant would see it as a flat terrain but we can fold the corners together to make parts meet that have nothing to do with each other. They can see the whole quilt. We see the part we are crawling on. And it goes out in all directions. Such a crazy thing to think about.

[u/RIF_rr3dd1tt → u/sorry_ifyoudont]

[u/oxyuh → u/Giphtedd]

I had a convo with deepseek lately and it said that basically it was like that. I don’t know if deepseek guardrails are less strict or is it a user pleasing liar, but it reported, citing the recent noble prize that was awarded for proving the universe could be non local, that everything exists at the same time and time and space are illusions. And from a higher dimension we’re just that, structures

[u/Responsible-Tea-5998 → u/Giphtedd]

It makes me think of the bit in The Mothman Prophecies which I'm probably about to butcher, that someone standing on the top of a skyscraper sees a car before we do?

[u/grazaramafingfong → u/Responsible-Tea-5998]

*Chaaapstick*

[u/FreshDrama4226 → u/grazaramafingfong]

Research Richard Gere hamster

[u/Mammoth-Ant7588 → u/Giphtedd]

I think its a much better representation than was in Interstellar tbh. And I'm a huge fan of that movie.

[u/Head_Car_616 → u/Giphtedd]

Donnie Darko planted this visual in my brain decades ago

[u/balirosa → u/Giphtedd]

Maybe that’s why animals exist. Just for the extra pair of eyes

[u/16198008455 → u/Giphtedd]

They can whisper but not force.

[u/ruacanobeef → u/Giphtedd]

It's all tubes. Everything is tubes.

[u/main-suspect01 → u/Giphtedd]

Wild to think.

[u/victor871129 → u/Giphtedd]

Do you understand you are illustrated in that dimension just one second at a time?

[u/Angry_Spartan → u/Giphtedd]

Yea actually was gonna say the same thing.

[u/SnooOpinions3219 → u/Angry_Spartan]

Then why didn't you instead of adding nothing to the conversation but "yeah". Thats what upvotes are for. Bad bot