Time without a sun

[JC Lamont]

OK, I am going to try and explain this and be vague at the same time.....so please bear with me.

There is no sun in my world, so technically there is no time. Early on in the book, they discover a world with time through a portal and then they just track time based on the other world.

But before that happens, I would like to distinguish the difference so that when they discover this world through the portal it seems so different.

In thier world, daylight is attributed to the mountain in the center of the world. It's luminous and basically lights up the whole land (does that even make sense?) And then for night, it just dims but doesn't go out, so it's never dark, just an evanescent twilight.

For now I've been calling it day and night, but that doesn't really distinguish the difference between their world and the other world they discover.

Does any of that make sense? Does anyone have a suggestion?

[torainfor]

That sounds like time to me. Sounds like up in the far north or south when the sun doesn't set completely. Or, did you mean they don't have time spans longer than a "day"? I've got the opposite problem, I have annual seasons, but no day or hour or minute. Nothing shorter than what we would think is a couple of weeks.

I can see how in this case crops wouldn't have seasons, per se, although they'd still take the same amount of time to develop and grow. And that would be pretty standardized throughout history unless the weather somehow had seasons. You could base seasons or years on that, or even a woman's gestational period.

How long does it take to get from full light to twilight and back? A day as we would think of it or a year?

[JC Lamont]

This world does not have seasons. There is no climate changes. It does not have a solar system. I've pretty much copied a 24 hr day except "night" / twilight lasts only about three hours.

The "sun" is the palace/mountain in the center of the world. The mountain is luminous rock, the palace is built from this rock, and the sky just sort of absorbs and reflects this light. Then for the 3 hours of twilight, the palace/mountain just kind of fades.

Why aren't my characters blinded?

I don't know.

What I think I need is this:

A different way of measuring time

because I can't have a character say "We will reconvene here tomorrow" (meaning when the moutain glows again and after we sleep) but then when they discover a new world through a portal have them in awe over the concept of measuring time

I need a way to convey a few different things that would be different in a world with no clocks, season changes, climate changes, no calenders, etc -- even if just breifly -- so that the concept of measuring time (keeping track of time) can seem so foriegn to them.

[Divides the Waters]

Do they encounter a different language, as well? Because if they do, the system of measuring time will naturally be learned in the course of learning the language, and then of course "tomorrow" will still have more or less the same meaning, because it will all (presumably) be translated for the reader.

[kirstymca]

Do they sleep at a set time?

[lexkx]

Here is my confusion: the point of Time is to say that one thing happens after another. You're wishing to stay vague, which I respect, but unless your world has no need for past, present, or future, then you *do* have time in that world. You're right, it should be redefined, but it's largely a matter of really interesting word choice. The concept of so much change happening as time passes (stars, seasons, and storms) will be enough of a shock to them.

I would think, and I could be wrong, that this culture of the constant light from the mountain palace would have a lot of patterns and rhythms to the day. Not necessarily rigid, but certainly systematic. And, if the light were going to fade routinely and return, that some sort of system would be in place to remind the people "now we go in for breakfast" or "the mountain fades in the next little while." Bells or whistles would work. "The cry of joy" when the palace light resumes, "the call of the lark" at the equivalent of 9:30, that kind of thing.

[metalikhan]

Don't know if you've resolved the time thing, but I thought I'd toss forth an idea. Could the inhabitants of your world measure time by something like Shine (or Bright), Dim, and Glow (for the transition between Shine and Dim)? Perhaps they have a counter (not a clock) that only advances when Shine reaches a set or peak luminosity. Measuring periods might occur when Shine has cycled an arbitrary number of times, say 100. If Shine does not reach the lumen set-point with each cycle or if the pattern is not consistent (Shine, Glow, Dim, Glow, Dim, Glow, Shine...), then one 100 count period will not be the same length as the next one or the one before it. The equivalent of a month could be called the Lesser Count; a year, the Greater Count.

I can't help but wonder if the inhabitants (human? non-human?) of this world have a rigid internal clock for waking and sleeping. When I saw this post, I remembered the cave experiments (I think they were in the '70s or '80s) and the problems that occurred in the subjects when their way of measuring time (hour, day & night, calendar) was completely withheld from them for long periods. As I recall, the experiments were discontinued indefinitely because of lingering psychological problems (severe depression, interrupted sleep patterns, paranoia, suicidal behavior) once the subjects completed their period of time deprivation.