Innate Time Travel
(From The Galactic Time Standards Manual, First Edition)
Innate time travel is what some call a "gift" as it is a psychic ability which activates itself instead of being activated consciously. People who experience innate time travel often report an intense period of time immersion followed by an interval of time in which no alterations occur. After this interval, the time immersion begins again and the individual re-experiences the interval of time again, but with alterations introduced in the second immersion.
Some Examples of Innate Time Travel
Juan wakes up every day at 4 AM and, in the period of five minutes, experiences a deeply immersive vision of what the next day will be like. After this experience he perceives time at a regular 1:1 speed over the course of 24 hours, during which he is allowed to act as he wishes. Because of the vision, he is able to act in anticipation of certain events. The vision is never brought on by a trigger or otherwise purposefully engaged with, instead it simply happens on its own. In Juan's, it happens on a regular schedule that he is able to anticipate.
For some people, it is as simple as Juan's experience, in which the next morning, a vision will come of the next day, and each day the same process will go as before. But for others it is more complicated. Let us examine Domingo's situation.
Domingo dreams every night of what will happen the next day. As soon as he wakes up, he tests to see what he can change and what he cannot. Sometimes he does something a little rash like steal a donut or kick over a trashcan while no one's looking. Every now and then he tries out something just to see what will happen, like giving a random person a hi-five or shouting down the alleyway at midnight that he sees Bigfoot and could someone please come help him fight off the big guy? Domingo is a bit of a prankster and the reason he is like this is that when he goes to sleep the night after doing those things, before his dream starts, he has the option to dream of the day before or the day to come. If he dreams of the day before, then when he wakes up, it is the day before. He has a new chance to start over and another try at whatever things he might have failed at. Domingo might seem like a bit of an impatient guy, kicking trashcans over like that. It turns out that is a result of re-living so many days so many times. He gets bored easily of a day he's lived three times already. This is why Domingo has never repeated a day enough times to win the lottery. He simply can't stand living the same day more than five times in a row.
Mercedes is a woman who knows exactly what she wants. When she dreams, she chooses what will happen, and when she wakes up, that is what will happen. This seems like an ability with no limit that might cause some problems, but Mercedes does not have much imagination, and she is a very laid-back person. She actually has a pretty boring job with an average salary and lives in a dull side of town, has a very lazy and predictable husband, and loves every moment of it. Mercedes has a very innate gift that cannot be taught or learned, and her subconscious uses it to keep her safe, secure, calm, and happy. Mercedes would likely never use her ability to make a big change or do something nefarious because those are not things she is predisposed to do in her life and they typically require the sort of planning the subconscious is not capable of doing.
Some people are able to repeat a day several times, or a week several times, or an hour several times. These abilities vary by person in how they manifest and exactly how they are controlled (or uncontrolled). For most people, there is a limit to the amount of repeats, and for the rest, fatigue tends to set in after too many. This results in many cases where people repeat time about 3-5 times before giving up on whatever it is they were trying so hard to do. Often there is no actual hard limit on the number of repeats one can do in time other than the limit of what your own self can go through.
Advice for Innate Time Travelers
Some people do not experience an immersion period and instead repeat an interval of time over and over until they no longer do so. These individuals are advised to speak with a hypnotist about setting up a regular "preview period" as shown in the examples. This greatly reduces the amount of "repeat fatigue" a time traveler goes through because it allows for most modifications to time to be done the first time around instead of the second.
Some innates do not experience repeats at regular intervals and instead experience them as necessary or at the behest of some trigger. For all innates experiencing repeats it is advised to complete your goal within three repeats. Do the first round dry or, if precog tells you that you are on round one of a repeat, go ahead and do exploratory work. Once the first round is done you should have knowledge of what you have to work with and what your greatest obstacles are. Before round two, also take some time to determine your end goal for this cycle.
On round two, make some changes to eliminate your obstacles and pursue your goal. Remember that you will have a round three to finalize these changes or explore additional possibilities, so use round two to gather information you couldn't get the first time around. Only repeat from round one what is necessary to succeed in round two. Do not give in to the temptation to make round two a throwaway period in which you do something silly that you know you can reset and forget in round three. This forces you to succeed at all goals in round three without any pre-work and could get you caught in a dangerous situation if you're not able to endure a repeat after a failure in the third round. If you're not able to repeat after any of these rounds, you simply have to accept the causality and live in it.
In round three, cross your t's and dot your i's. This is the part where you finalize decisions and find out any remaining information you didn't have before. A classic way to handle round three is to ask a person two different questions in rounds one and two that are designed for maximum information extraction, then in the third round, give that person a compliment so that they remember you fondly. Then you have their information (doubly!) and their future favor, all in a neat three rounds.
Using electronic assistance it is possible to re-run more than three times. Usually the first round is re-run once to gain twice as much initial information, and then the third round is allowed to run again if necessary to control a variable that went awry. This results in, sometimes, a total of five rounds. Career travelers taking this path are advised to buy private time travel health insurance to cover for all eventualities that may occur from repeat fatigue or causality anomalies.
