Multiple Realities and the Experience of Duration

This article documents an exploration of the following question: How does transition from one to another subuniverse of social reality shape the individual's sense of duration? That question is addressed through a phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness. The data consist of personal testimony in the form of anecdotes that summarize incidents in which time was felt to slow noticeably. Analytic induction is applied to these ethnographic observations. These data suggest that the shock that accompanies relatively distinct shifts from one finite province of meaning to another provokes increased perception of immediate detail as the individual strives to interpret emerging events.