I'm not a time synesthete, however the way I've come to understand time is that it's a matter of perspective. I see/understand time as being akin to a chessboard. We can choose to look at it on one of its edges, thus making it appear to be linear. Or, we can choose to look at it from above, thus seeing its multidimensionality. And, of course, theoretical physics tells us that time can bend and twist, depending upon circumstances.
I also see annual time as a narrow oval, with some months compressed far more than others! Though in my case the oval is oriented diagonally, at a slight upward slope, with December at the top, flowing at the tip (clockwise!) into January. The winter and spring months are pushed together, a miserable dead time best not thought of at all, where it feels little happens. The bottom half of the oval stretches out to afford May, June, July, August, and September a nice languid expanse of space where live really happens and anything feels possible.
The oval curves back from its nadir at July, moving upward as summer grows long and becomes fall, and it gets compressed again around October -- a month that never lasts or feels properly autumnal for long enough, much as I love it. November is a terrible, short upward climb into the wintry abyss at the top of the oval. I have always seen the years this way.
I view the weeks in a similar skinny oval, though it is horizontal. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday are quite compressed and ride along the first half of the top of the oval. Thursday evening and Friday expand and take up far more space, and Friday curves downward into Saturday. Saturday and Sunday are very long and take up the whole bottom half of the oval. That's where all the real living of the week goes, and time seems to slow down and details become more lush inside them. Again, I have always seen it this way.
A day is more of a straight up and down column, rising from the bottom at 8 or 9 am to the top at midnight. Moving through the day is like a climbing up a ladder in a grain silo. At the top, in the post-midnight hours, I can sit and rest and do whatever I want. The hours from midnight until morning do not feel real to me, they are not bound by the same rules. When I wake up earlier than I am used to (7am, say), it feels like I am given a brief period of time in some alternate reality before returning to my own.
I would have drawn all this if Substack would let me add attachments!
I love hearing about the similarities and differences in the ways we see time! It’s not surprising at all that so many neurodivergent people are time-space synesthetes!
I see years and weeks counter-clockwise too! It's less like an oval and more like a ribbon? And I'm not "inside" of it but see it as if I'm hovering above it. I see months as different "lengths" or "sizes" too, like yours that are crammed up, and others extend a bit more. Like January and February are longer than the rest, so I assume that my brain developed this thing while I was in school, and clearly undiagnosed, autistic child me hated every second of it and saw the months of summer vacation (southern hemisphere) as the time I could actually rest.
It took me a long time to realize this was a kind of synesthesia because I was so used to it, it's just always there. Like you said I didn't realize other people don't see time like that. What made me understand that this was a synesthesia thing was realizing that I can't think of a day of the week, or a date or month in the year without "seeing" it in my brain, like I can't separate the thought from the visual representation in my brain.
I've been writing down the days "backwards" in my planner this year, to match how I actually see weeks in my brain, and it's so simple but I feel silly that I haven't done it sooner.
Yes! It’s more like a ribbon for me too! And I’m not hovering exactly above it, but kind of beside/above the spring months. That’s what I mean that it would need to be 3D if I were going to make it accurate, and I tried to explain it further but then it got too wordy, lol. And actually I see days of the week and centuries differently still, they’re more like a track of white blocks disappearing into the distance in front of me and behind me, with the weekend a darker color. If I wanted to count how many days from now til Saturday, for example, I would “see” the blocks and literally count them one by one. But I can’t see forward more than a week, and the past disappears almost immediately behind me. And my POV is always on today, whatever today is. With the centuries it’s pretty much the same except the track runs left and right, and my perspective is stuck around 1970/80 lol. I can barely “see” the present.
Fascinating to see your diagram. I’ve never thought before, but this is such an amazing way to appreciate different perspectives. It’s literally mind expanding. My year is in two columns, with September to December the most prominent, in the biggest font size, in the right hand column, and the spring months very crushed together (as you mentioned) and hard to read, and as you said if I have to remember the order of months between March to June I have to recite them. I have a similar thing with q to u in the alphabet - they always have to be said or sung if I have to get the order right.
I "see" time and experience it as a sort of tilted ferris wheel. Depending on the time of year I have a sense of going "up" (in the spring) and "down" in the fall. Summer and winter are points of brief stopping/slowing of motion, while it feels like time speeds up on the ascend and descent.
That’s so interesting because while I don’t have a strong sense of motion (in that my perspective is stationary), if I were going to imagine it, fall is *definitely* rising and spring is descending! Like literally reading your comment had me shaking my head, no no no! That’s not right! lol. These images run deep don’t they?!
I don’t have time-space synesthesia but reading this i wish i did, it sounds awesome.
Just today i was feeling so trapped by my calendar. Like i schedule things in advance and then the day comes and i just have to experience all the events that have been scheduled. It’s like the calendar is the point rather than just a tool.
I would rather just be living my life.
Also, Tyson Yunkaporta has two books in case you don’t know, one of which i am very slowly reading on audio, Sand Talk. Highly recommend, especially the audio which does not strictly follow the written version 😊
Marta, I love this essay and all the comments as much as I loved the original ebook you gifted the world about time. It was the first time in my life I ever heard anyone else talk about time in a way that I had always experienced it and it was unbelievably validating and exciting. I have passed this along to many people and feel a sense of rest and like, “ahhh” relief when I think about time as spiral and ellipses especially.
I discovered that my week always starts on Monday so I make my own calendars and I need the day to go from top to bottom in columns across the page. For me the year is a circle, I have liturgical bones so when I learned about the church year as a circle it made me so happy, and felt right with Dec on the top left. If I think of time in general, I’ve always just struggled and wanted to live outside the construct as it feels so tight and limiting. I never knew this was a form of synesthesia but now I’m gonna give myself permission to keep letting my internal images and metaphors surface as they help me feel whole. Still thinking I prob need to join your divergent group….
This was incredible to read, and I am really glad to know that there are people who perceive time differently than how it is supposed to. And it even makes more sense to know that it's mostly neurodivergent folks who perceive time much more differently than the neurotypicals and their western enforced beliefs. I have also written about how I want to perceive time, mostly in relation to insights and knowledge. Here's a link to it. (https://eurekatherapy.substack.com/p/its-about-time?r=3xo9s5)
TL,dr : Perceiving time linearly helps only if you understand that the past should be viewed very kindly with the knowledge we have from the present. Time also acts as an entity that tells us invaluable information and is an essential source of insight helping us navigate the uncertain world.
I’m not a particularly visual thinker in general, so any synesthesia would be too conceptual to really qualify.
However, you’ve inspired me to think about time visually, and to me, it’s much more like the bellows of a concertina! It can shrink and expand and curve and bend, but it is always vaguely linear. To expand the metaphor, the buttons are like the things I have in my toolkit to adapt my “air” to a neurotypical world. They’re like eyeglasses but for navigating temporally rather than visually.
I like that, bellows of a concertina! I think that’s sort of how the spring months are to me, all scrunched up. Oh and you’ll get no fight here!! A construct indeed!
I don't think I have synesthesia but maybe I do have a mild case of it because I definitely do perceive time in a way that does not line up with the dominant western culture and I agree that math is blue (I always had color coded folders and notebooks, all the way through high school. Math is blue, science is green, social studies/history is yellow, English is orange, Spanish is red). I perceive the year as a circle with winter on top but my perspective changes with the seasons. I guess as I'm thinking about it it's sort of a tilted circle with winter going inward and summer going outward if that makes sense. The top is January 1 and the bottom is July 1. It's kind of like if winter is the top of a mountain, that's why it's colder up there. Lol this feels so weird but also kinda fun to try to explain!
This was beautiful! I have synesthesia and am neurodivergent, and this tracked so perfectly for me.
PS, I’ve been referring to my existence as a trauma survivor who lives with chronic pain and illness as “spiral time” for a while, and it felt really special to see someone else aligned with that term in such a different and special way. Here’s to living on spiral times in multiple different intersecting iterations 🔁
I love the story about your daughter's color-coded folders. I don't see time, but I embrace the various songs that reframe "freak" as an authentic, alive, unafraid sensual person. We can't help being unique in our own ways.
/touch and sound/color and emotions/taste. For instance, sadness is salty and wet. Anger spicy and bitter. Joy, light, airy and faintly citrus. As for time, I've come to understand it in the Taoist sense. Rather than the past building through the present into the future, the future flows through the present moment, and how we choose to navigate through the moment creates the past.
Very cool, I don’t have any other types of synesthesia but I’ve often imagined what it would be like. And I like that idea about time. I’m gonna think on that.
I see the year in an oval, too! I never knew that made me a time synesthete. Unlike you, my "position" on the oval stays with whatever time of year I'm in, but I still see the upcoming months stretching out ahead and across from me, curving counterclockwise until the oval comes up behind me with the months that just passed.
I am indeed a synaesthete. I see energy (sound waves and having reiki for example) with eyes closed especially in hypnogogic moments. Had no clue it wasn’t typical. I write about time being non- linear. Love your story thank you 🙏 x
It's wonderful to explore other views of time than the Western timeline; thank you for this post! I'm not sure about my own view. I sometimes feel trapped in a timeline, as if time is a narrow tunnel I'm crawling slowly through (for example, in summer when it's really hot and I'm eager for fall). But sometimes I feel like I'm being pulled through the tunnel too quickly (e.g., as winter ends if there hasn't been much snow—I love snow). But I also see personal time as a spiral, where the same things keep coming up but I've climbed the spiral since the last time they came up, so I have a different view of them.
I used color-coded folders through my undergrad years when I was studying astrophysics. I did see math as red; astronomy was yellow, and physics was blue. Green was whatever other class I was taking, maybe history of science or French.
I'm not a time synesthete, however the way I've come to understand time is that it's a matter of perspective. I see/understand time as being akin to a chessboard. We can choose to look at it on one of its edges, thus making it appear to be linear. Or, we can choose to look at it from above, thus seeing its multidimensionality. And, of course, theoretical physics tells us that time can bend and twist, depending upon circumstances.
That’s a really helpful way to conceptualize linearity as one perspective in a much richer, more multidimensional universe!
I also see annual time as a narrow oval, with some months compressed far more than others! Though in my case the oval is oriented diagonally, at a slight upward slope, with December at the top, flowing at the tip (clockwise!) into January. The winter and spring months are pushed together, a miserable dead time best not thought of at all, where it feels little happens. The bottom half of the oval stretches out to afford May, June, July, August, and September a nice languid expanse of space where live really happens and anything feels possible.
The oval curves back from its nadir at July, moving upward as summer grows long and becomes fall, and it gets compressed again around October -- a month that never lasts or feels properly autumnal for long enough, much as I love it. November is a terrible, short upward climb into the wintry abyss at the top of the oval. I have always seen the years this way.
I view the weeks in a similar skinny oval, though it is horizontal. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday are quite compressed and ride along the first half of the top of the oval. Thursday evening and Friday expand and take up far more space, and Friday curves downward into Saturday. Saturday and Sunday are very long and take up the whole bottom half of the oval. That's where all the real living of the week goes, and time seems to slow down and details become more lush inside them. Again, I have always seen it this way.
A day is more of a straight up and down column, rising from the bottom at 8 or 9 am to the top at midnight. Moving through the day is like a climbing up a ladder in a grain silo. At the top, in the post-midnight hours, I can sit and rest and do whatever I want. The hours from midnight until morning do not feel real to me, they are not bound by the same rules. When I wake up earlier than I am used to (7am, say), it feels like I am given a brief period of time in some alternate reality before returning to my own.
I would have drawn all this if Substack would let me add attachments!
I love hearing about the similarities and differences in the ways we see time! It’s not surprising at all that so many neurodivergent people are time-space synesthetes!
I see years and weeks counter-clockwise too! It's less like an oval and more like a ribbon? And I'm not "inside" of it but see it as if I'm hovering above it. I see months as different "lengths" or "sizes" too, like yours that are crammed up, and others extend a bit more. Like January and February are longer than the rest, so I assume that my brain developed this thing while I was in school, and clearly undiagnosed, autistic child me hated every second of it and saw the months of summer vacation (southern hemisphere) as the time I could actually rest.
It took me a long time to realize this was a kind of synesthesia because I was so used to it, it's just always there. Like you said I didn't realize other people don't see time like that. What made me understand that this was a synesthesia thing was realizing that I can't think of a day of the week, or a date or month in the year without "seeing" it in my brain, like I can't separate the thought from the visual representation in my brain.
I've been writing down the days "backwards" in my planner this year, to match how I actually see weeks in my brain, and it's so simple but I feel silly that I haven't done it sooner.
Yes! It’s more like a ribbon for me too! And I’m not hovering exactly above it, but kind of beside/above the spring months. That’s what I mean that it would need to be 3D if I were going to make it accurate, and I tried to explain it further but then it got too wordy, lol. And actually I see days of the week and centuries differently still, they’re more like a track of white blocks disappearing into the distance in front of me and behind me, with the weekend a darker color. If I wanted to count how many days from now til Saturday, for example, I would “see” the blocks and literally count them one by one. But I can’t see forward more than a week, and the past disappears almost immediately behind me. And my POV is always on today, whatever today is. With the centuries it’s pretty much the same except the track runs left and right, and my perspective is stuck around 1970/80 lol. I can barely “see” the present.
Fascinating to see your diagram. I’ve never thought before, but this is such an amazing way to appreciate different perspectives. It’s literally mind expanding. My year is in two columns, with September to December the most prominent, in the biggest font size, in the right hand column, and the spring months very crushed together (as you mentioned) and hard to read, and as you said if I have to remember the order of months between March to June I have to recite them. I have a similar thing with q to u in the alphabet - they always have to be said or sung if I have to get the order right.
Columns! Wow, that has literally never occurred to me. Mind blowing indeed!
Do the columns go from top to bottom, or bottom to top?
I "see" time and experience it as a sort of tilted ferris wheel. Depending on the time of year I have a sense of going "up" (in the spring) and "down" in the fall. Summer and winter are points of brief stopping/slowing of motion, while it feels like time speeds up on the ascend and descent.
That’s so interesting because while I don’t have a strong sense of motion (in that my perspective is stationary), if I were going to imagine it, fall is *definitely* rising and spring is descending! Like literally reading your comment had me shaking my head, no no no! That’s not right! lol. These images run deep don’t they?!
I don’t have time-space synesthesia but reading this i wish i did, it sounds awesome.
Just today i was feeling so trapped by my calendar. Like i schedule things in advance and then the day comes and i just have to experience all the events that have been scheduled. It’s like the calendar is the point rather than just a tool.
I would rather just be living my life.
Also, Tyson Yunkaporta has two books in case you don’t know, one of which i am very slowly reading on audio, Sand Talk. Highly recommend, especially the audio which does not strictly follow the written version 😊
Marta, I love this essay and all the comments as much as I loved the original ebook you gifted the world about time. It was the first time in my life I ever heard anyone else talk about time in a way that I had always experienced it and it was unbelievably validating and exciting. I have passed this along to many people and feel a sense of rest and like, “ahhh” relief when I think about time as spiral and ellipses especially.
I discovered that my week always starts on Monday so I make my own calendars and I need the day to go from top to bottom in columns across the page. For me the year is a circle, I have liturgical bones so when I learned about the church year as a circle it made me so happy, and felt right with Dec on the top left. If I think of time in general, I’ve always just struggled and wanted to live outside the construct as it feels so tight and limiting. I never knew this was a form of synesthesia but now I’m gonna give myself permission to keep letting my internal images and metaphors surface as they help me feel whole. Still thinking I prob need to join your divergent group….
I think you would love DDS so much Amy!
This was incredible to read, and I am really glad to know that there are people who perceive time differently than how it is supposed to. And it even makes more sense to know that it's mostly neurodivergent folks who perceive time much more differently than the neurotypicals and their western enforced beliefs. I have also written about how I want to perceive time, mostly in relation to insights and knowledge. Here's a link to it. (https://eurekatherapy.substack.com/p/its-about-time?r=3xo9s5)
TL,dr : Perceiving time linearly helps only if you understand that the past should be viewed very kindly with the knowledge we have from the present. Time also acts as an entity that tells us invaluable information and is an essential source of insight helping us navigate the uncertain world.
I would say synesthesia is a type of neurodivergence and often multiple neurodivergences exist together.
Time is a construct. Fight me. 😉
I’m not a particularly visual thinker in general, so any synesthesia would be too conceptual to really qualify.
However, you’ve inspired me to think about time visually, and to me, it’s much more like the bellows of a concertina! It can shrink and expand and curve and bend, but it is always vaguely linear. To expand the metaphor, the buttons are like the things I have in my toolkit to adapt my “air” to a neurotypical world. They’re like eyeglasses but for navigating temporally rather than visually.
I like that, bellows of a concertina! I think that’s sort of how the spring months are to me, all scrunched up. Oh and you’ll get no fight here!! A construct indeed!
I don't think I have synesthesia but maybe I do have a mild case of it because I definitely do perceive time in a way that does not line up with the dominant western culture and I agree that math is blue (I always had color coded folders and notebooks, all the way through high school. Math is blue, science is green, social studies/history is yellow, English is orange, Spanish is red). I perceive the year as a circle with winter on top but my perspective changes with the seasons. I guess as I'm thinking about it it's sort of a tilted circle with winter going inward and summer going outward if that makes sense. The top is January 1 and the bottom is July 1. It's kind of like if winter is the top of a mountain, that's why it's colder up there. Lol this feels so weird but also kinda fun to try to explain!
That’s exactly time-space synesthesia! And totally makes sense to me!
I think it's more accurate to say winter is going outward and summer inward? But I think it really just depends on the perspective, which isn't fixed
This was beautiful! I have synesthesia and am neurodivergent, and this tracked so perfectly for me.
PS, I’ve been referring to my existence as a trauma survivor who lives with chronic pain and illness as “spiral time” for a while, and it felt really special to see someone else aligned with that term in such a different and special way. Here’s to living on spiral times in multiple different intersecting iterations 🔁
Thank you so much! Yes, spirals are everywhere, so many people and cultures come to them independently as a way of thinking about time.
I love the story about your daughter's color-coded folders. I don't see time, but I embrace the various songs that reframe "freak" as an authentic, alive, unafraid sensual person. We can't help being unique in our own ways.
I appreciate your support so much!!! ♥️🌀
I have synesthesia, but for sounds
/touch and sound/color and emotions/taste. For instance, sadness is salty and wet. Anger spicy and bitter. Joy, light, airy and faintly citrus. As for time, I've come to understand it in the Taoist sense. Rather than the past building through the present into the future, the future flows through the present moment, and how we choose to navigate through the moment creates the past.
Very cool, I don’t have any other types of synesthesia but I’ve often imagined what it would be like. And I like that idea about time. I’m gonna think on that.
I see the year in an oval, too! I never knew that made me a time synesthete. Unlike you, my "position" on the oval stays with whatever time of year I'm in, but I still see the upcoming months stretching out ahead and across from me, curving counterclockwise until the oval comes up behind me with the months that just passed.
You describe this so well.
I am indeed a synaesthete. I see energy (sound waves and having reiki for example) with eyes closed especially in hypnogogic moments. Had no clue it wasn’t typical. I write about time being non- linear. Love your story thank you 🙏 x
It's wonderful to explore other views of time than the Western timeline; thank you for this post! I'm not sure about my own view. I sometimes feel trapped in a timeline, as if time is a narrow tunnel I'm crawling slowly through (for example, in summer when it's really hot and I'm eager for fall). But sometimes I feel like I'm being pulled through the tunnel too quickly (e.g., as winter ends if there hasn't been much snow—I love snow). But I also see personal time as a spiral, where the same things keep coming up but I've climbed the spiral since the last time they came up, so I have a different view of them.
I used color-coded folders through my undergrad years when I was studying astrophysics. I did see math as red; astronomy was yellow, and physics was blue. Green was whatever other class I was taking, maybe history of science or French.