Sleep (And/As) Time-Travel.

Whereas:

During sleep (as well as other medical conditions such as the so-called coma), one undergoes a process wherein there is little if any concept of time in the real sense, but rather, a dimension by which imagination and a chaotic twist of or on all things normally tethered by reailty. When one awakens, sometimes they do not or cannot comprehend time until they are told or discover by visual means how long their travel had been. Consider the exceptional cases such as this.

Is this, then, therefore, essentially time travel? Are there any other rules by that standard, other than an arbitrary emphasis placed on eras or centuries of travel, rather than hours or minutes? Would that not be a victory for time-travel, then, however small? Perhaps it is because it is a mundane form that no one gives it consideration.

Why do so many scienficitonal narratives and portrayals assume such things in so meticulous a process as the persistence of an atemporal rift within the machine or device used to travel time? That is, why is the traveller spared from manifesting within a rock, between walls or underwater? Is such a precise calibration truly possible, even within a realm of nigh-inifinite possibilities such as that of literature?

Indeed there is also the phenomena of space-time, but it is usually assumed in many of these fictions that the traveller does not travel through space, but in fact remains stationed in an approximation of the same place that they had started in! This causes all sorts of continuity problems, such as the fact that the precision required to maintain the x, y, and z axes would certainly create an additional wrinkle...combine this calibration and one has a precision of ultraspecific magintude.

On another note...

Did not Plato, in his cave parable, realize how similar his "Shadows and Dust" synchronises with the concept of the human vision process (called simple by some), or by that token of any process that involves sensory datum? Perhaps it was simply a less scientfic and more cynical description of these selfsame processes. After all, rods and cones are nothing but a collection of light sensitive cells.

~Dain Quentin Gore