sottostime

Sottostime is a neologism used in speculative contexts to denote a hypothesized layer or mode of temporal reality that operates beneath ordinary clock time. The term blends Italian sotto, meaning under, with English time, signaling a beneath-time or sub-temporal domain. In discourse, sottostime is often employed as a metaphor to describe processes that unfold too quickly to be perceived at normal temporal granularity, or events that are temporally decoupled from the macroscopic timeline.

Origins and usage are informal and scattered; the term does not belong to established physics or philosophy of time, and there is no consensus on a precise definition or measurement. In speculative fiction and certain fringe essays, sottostime is used to imagine how actions in a sub-time layer might influence or foreshadow what occurs in standard time, or to discuss cognitive experiences where perception of duration differs from physical time. Some writers treat sottostime as a literal conceptual layer, while others use it as a rhetorical device to discuss subconscious timing, reflexive processes, or asynchronous processes in complex systems.

Critics caution that sottostime risks conflating metaphor with mechanism and may obscure rather than illuminate real temporal phenomena. Because it lacks formal criteria, the term remains informal and context-dependent, gaining traction primarily among niche online communities and speculative genres.

See also: subjective time, time perception, multiscale time, subtempo.