The way I imagine the days is tied directly to the calendar: there’s Sunday Monday … Saturday in a row, then the next row starts at Sunday again. If I think about what day it is, I will tend to start at the location nearest day I remember well, situated in a row that’s in the “middle”. Then I’ll seek forward/backward until I get to the current date. Likewise if you ask me what day is 4 days from now, the thing I automatically do is seek forwards until I’ve moved 4 spaces.
What’s time within a day like for you? I think of that just via the numbers, and was surprised the first time I heard someone tell me that obviously analog clocks were easier because you add the angles on a circle in your head. (This is probably a generational thing: I grew up with digital clocks, and had to be taught in school how to read an analog clock like an extra skill, and would only have a reason to need that skill if I was in class and wanted to surreptitiously check how long it’d be until it was over).
Likewise if you ask me what day is 4 days from now, the thing I automatically do is seek forwards until I’ve moved 4 spaces.
I also do that with “small shifts”: I imagine taking 1-3 steps forward/backward or something. For ≥4, I calculate (June=6, so 5 months from now is 11=November).
What’s time within a day like for you?
It’s a number line, but a jagged one. 3:30 to 8:30-ish, it’s quite steep, like 30° or maybe even 50°. Then it’s more flat (but still monotonically rising) until like 14:30, when it starts rising a bit more rapidly, slows down again at 20:00, and then it crosses to the next day. Full hours are marked with a mental flag, and particular orientational times, like when I typically eat meals or wake up or go to sleep, are marked with bigger mental flags. Time within an hour or a minute is similar but less detailed, as I don’t think about it / zoom in on this often; plus there’s the feeling of a container slowly filling up with time, like 14:58 is veeery close to the tipping point.
(The way I described the day feels kind of off because in my mind’s eye, it’s more cloudy/blurry/fuzzed, and it’s plausible that there’s some significant variance in how I feel it.)
I perceive the historical timeline similarly. Replace the day with a decade, a century, a millennium. It’s slowly, but unevenly, rising upwards, with bigger steps at the boundaries of millennia, centuries, and decades.
I don’t have much mental imagery for months. Too irregular. If I want to know the number of days to a certain date or what day of the week it would be, I count.
I think of that just via the numbers, and was surprised the first time I heard someone tell me that obviously analog clocks were easier because you add the angles on a circle in your head. (This is probably a generational thing: I grew up with digital clocks, and had to be taught in school how to read an analog clock like an extra skill, and would only have a reason to need that skill if I was in class and wanted to surreptitiously check how long it’d be until it was over).
Yeah, I can see that working for some people. I guess I grew up with a mix of analog and digital (and there’s still a lot of analog clocks around me (is it a Europe thing?)), but never adopted the former as a privileged object in my imagery.
In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected to this change in film technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the experience of dreaming is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be.
The way I imagine the days is tied directly to the calendar: there’s Sunday Monday … Saturday in a row, then the next row starts at Sunday again. If I think about what day it is, I will tend to start at the location nearest day I remember well, situated in a row that’s in the “middle”. Then I’ll seek forward/backward until I get to the current date. Likewise if you ask me what day is 4 days from now, the thing I automatically do is seek forwards until I’ve moved 4 spaces.
What’s time within a day like for you? I think of that just via the numbers, and was surprised the first time I heard someone tell me that obviously analog clocks were easier because you add the angles on a circle in your head. (This is probably a generational thing: I grew up with digital clocks, and had to be taught in school how to read an analog clock like an extra skill, and would only have a reason to need that skill if I was in class and wanted to surreptitiously check how long it’d be until it was over).
I also do that with “small shifts”: I imagine taking 1-3 steps forward/backward or something. For ≥4, I calculate (June=6, so 5 months from now is 11=November).
It’s a number line, but a jagged one. 3:30 to 8:30-ish, it’s quite steep, like 30° or maybe even 50°. Then it’s more flat (but still monotonically rising) until like 14:30, when it starts rising a bit more rapidly, slows down again at 20:00, and then it crosses to the next day. Full hours are marked with a mental flag, and particular orientational times, like when I typically eat meals or wake up or go to sleep, are marked with bigger mental flags. Time within an hour or a minute is similar but less detailed, as I don’t think about it / zoom in on this often; plus there’s the feeling of a container slowly filling up with time, like 14:58 is veeery close to the tipping point.
(The way I described the day feels kind of off because in my mind’s eye, it’s more cloudy/blurry/fuzzed, and it’s plausible that there’s some significant variance in how I feel it.)
I perceive the historical timeline similarly. Replace the day with a decade, a century, a millennium. It’s slowly, but unevenly, rising upwards, with bigger steps at the boundaries of millennia, centuries, and decades.
I don’t have much mental imagery for months. Too irregular. If I want to know the number of days to a certain date or what day of the week it would be, I count.
Yeah, I can see that working for some people. I guess I grew up with a mix of analog and digital (and there’s still a lot of analog clocks around me (is it a Europe thing?)), but never adopted the former as a privileged object in my imagery.
Also, this reminded me of a fun thing: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/DreamB&W.pdf