Thoughts on Angels and Time
Everyone knows that time passes faster the older you get. When you’re a kid, the summer seems to last forever because it’s such a large fraction of the time you’ve been alive. As you get older, the months start to fly by. Summer’s gone. The years start to fly by, too, and you find yourself wondering how it was 20 years ago that you graduated high school, and so on.
This, of course, raises a big question about how angels experience time. If a 26-year-old (like me) can feel like another month has gone by every time I blink, how could a 4 billion year old being possibly experience time? A month, a year, a century, a millenium even--if angels experienced time like humans do, all of the events of the show would seem like they’d gone by in an instant. Cas discovering the importance of free will and forging these incredible relationships with humans would have occurred almost instantaneously from an angel’s point of view. It would be a like a human turning into a mayfly and having to undergo years worth of mental and emotional development in a span of twenty seconds*.
Which is where my (random) headcanon comes in. What if in their pure form, angels do experience time much differently? If they didn’t, they’d probably go insane as eternity stretched out for ever and ever and ever. But when they take vessels, everything slows back down to a human perspective. Making it totally plausible that Cas would be able to change so much in such a short time, relative to his angel life span.
Anyway, this is an idea that I’ve had kicking around for a while and I just wanted to share it. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming of meta about Mary Winchester and season 12 goodness.
*There’s actually a Stargate episode that deals with this idea.
