Time Travel Writing Prompts

The year is 1910. Adolf Hitler, a struggling artist, has fought off dozens of assasination attemps by well meaning time travelers, but this one is different. This traveller doesn't want to kill Hitler, he wants to teach him to paint. He pulls off his hood to reveal the frizzy afro of Bob Ross.

The year is 2038 and net neutrality has been dead for almost two decades. But a rebellious group managed to travel back to 2017...

The human lifespan is actually only one day long. To adapt, when we go to sleep each night, our mind sends us one dream deeper, where we wake up alive. When we finally die, the experience of our life flashing before our eyes is really just us waking up in each dreams, one at a time.

After you grow old and die, you wake up 25 million years ago as a Hominid Primate, asleep on a tree. Your whole life was a vivid hallucination you had after ingesting a funny looking mushroom. After this experience, you have great knowledge, and you're the smartest living being on the planet.

Every 10 years, you are expected to go to a meeting you have already been to; one attended by several future and younger versions of yourself, each version separated by 10 year intervals. The youngest you is 10, the oldest 90. You relive the same meeting, just each time from a different angle.

Your father left your family when you were a child to "go buy a pack of cigarettes". It is 10 years later and you're a teenager when your father walks back in, wearing the same clothes he left in, and insists he has only been gone half an hour.

You, a young scientist have discovered time travel. You think it would be a great idea to go to medieval times, share your knowledge and become king. On your first visit, you meet a king and he introduces himself with a polite fist bump and greets, "bro you discovered time travelling too?!"

A friendship between a time traveler and an immortal. Wherever the time traveler ends up, the immortal is there to catch him up to speed.

Your Spouse goes into the bathroom only to come running out 15 seconds later. Clutching you close they tell you they fell into another dimension and what felt like seconds to you was a 1,000 years to them. They now want you to follow them back because they have built a life for you there.

You are eight years old when you fall into a coma. 70 years later, you unexpectedly awaken, a child in an elderly person’s body. Your parents are dead, and your relatives are nowhere to be found. Your only friend is the nurse who has watched over you for the last 30 years of her career.

You often pick up pennies you find on the ground, inspecting them for date, markings, etc. One day, you find a penny from 2044. Even more shocking, it's your face on the front.

A 16-year-old schoolgirl is taken to a magical world. She slays a dragon, becomes queen, gets married, has kids, and dies 90 years later...only to wake up back at school, young and in her school uniform again, like nothing happened. She notices that her wedding ring is still on her finger.

Immortals and time travelers pass along messages for each other. It's customary and expected. One day, a stranger sits across from you at a restaurant/coffee shop/bar and asks you to give a message to someone you'll meet in New York in 2070. As far as you know, you're just an ordinary person.

You are an office worker in NYC in the year of 1999. You go for a cigarette break, but the elevator stops working and you get trapped in it for 2h. As the doors finally open, you walk out and see a brand new lobby, people holding thin digital cards and big screen TV's. It's the year 2018.

Your father leaves the house to buy milk, 50 years later he comes back with milk in hand and hasn't aged a bit.

You're an immortal. She is a time traveller. Every now and then, you two pop into each other lives.

You and friend agree that if one of you invents time travel, they will come back to this very moment. As you shake on it, an older and injured you shows up and shoots your friend in the head.

*Picks up Phone*: Hello? *Voice*: In 5 years, you will have 30 seconds to talk to YOU, right now. Make sure you have something good to say, because I'm stumped. *Hangs Up*

Time travel exists. By law, every citizen is given one day they may repeat on loop until they get it right. This morning, you found your spouse looking exhausted and crying. "I can't save you. I've tried hundreds of times."

You wake up to find yourself on a train with a note in your pocket saying "What ever you do, don't get off this train untill you arrive at the very last stop". Its been nearly 20 years and the train still hasn't arrived at the last stop yet.

A time traveler goes from 2018 to 1980. Instead of using his knowledge for great gain or influence history, he writes a sitcom that scarily accurately predicts future events.

You put your 5-year-old daughter in an elevator by herself, and run to the next floor to make her laugh when the doors open. You get there, the elevator arrives and a 20-year-old woman steps out. "Hello Dad. We have a lot to talk about"

Since you were young, time travelers have visited you. One of them explained that, in the future, an algorithm determined that you were the only person in the past that it was safe to visit because no matter what you do it will not change the future. You are determined to prove them wrong.

You were once an unbeatable hero. Your secret? Every time you died, time rewound itself for you to alter your future. You are now 97 years of age. Constantly looping over your last day before dying of old age. You have been searching for a way to break this curse for over a decade.

It turns out the lottery is actually a trap for time travellers. After winning, you wake up in a holding area, with a government suit trying to figure out when you are from.

You are a time traveler in 1918, and you just accidentally said "World War One"

You discovered the ability to time travel. You go 30 years into the future expecting to meet your future self only to discover that you've been missing for 30 years.

You die in a hospital bed after a long, rich, fulfilling life, surrounded by your family, grandchildren and loved ones. You get startled back into consciousness, back in Berlin, on that weird night when you were 26. "Like I said", the stranger says, pocketing your money. "Save point."

You're a financial advisor. In 1994, you get a weird phone call from a man asking you if he can get any Bitcoin below $200k, and the call cuts off before you can ask him what Bitcoin was. Years later you get a call again from the same man, claiming he's calling back seconds after disconnection.

You have realized that your best friend is your son/daughter from the future who wants to hang out and get to know you since you die before he/she was born