Why does the Dark Dimension have time when Strange arrives?

Question

It's a pretty major plot point that the Dark Dimension is timeless. Strange alters this with his time loop spell after he arrives.

But when you observe the Dark Dimension before he casts that spell, time is still quite evidently in effect. The planets(?) move, for instance, Strange moves through the dimension, and Dormammu himself does not seem very put off by this at all, seeming to progress through time forwards as standard.

I'm further confused by Strange's statements during the time loop. He tells Dormammu that everybody on Earth will live, even though when he returns, they are still in the same moment and are clearly being affected by the loop. It seems to me that they won't live at all, since they are frozen in time.

Furthermore, why does Dormammu bother with Kaecilius at all? Shouldn't he know, since he is timeless, that he won't succeed?

Answer 1

You are assuming that the Dark Dimension needs time to pass in order for there to be something we consider "movement". Given that the Dark Dimension is a violation of the basic laws of physics, attempting to apply what we "know" about time to it is fruitless.

The exact quote from the movie, I believe, is that Dormammu's dimension exists "outside" of time. All that means is that our 4-dimensional concept of space/time is not how things work in his dimension. It's entirely possible -- likely, even -- that some other fundamental principle of that dimension allows things like thought and movement and the concepts of "before" and "after" to exist that, in our world, are a by-product of the passage of time.

Ultimately, we can only go by what the movie tells us. It's possible that the sorcerers were just wrong in their description of the Dark Dimension, but aside from that possibility, we have to accept that the Dark Dimension has motion and thought and cause/effect all without having any concept of "time".

Answer 2

Part of it is probably the lack of the writer's understanding of the idea of timelessness, part of it the human inability to comprehend the idea of change without time.

When Dormammu chooses to interact with our universe, by definition he must interact with time. He has some way to deal with the inherent contradiction.

Life does move on for the rest of the world while Dr. Strange is in the time loop. It just happens that because the whole fight existed in a timelooped instance from the point of view of the rest of the world, the amount of time that moved forward was either 0, or close enough as to make no difference... however that is just because the time loop was attached to that moment for Dr. Strange. The time of the human universe was unaffected and proceeded at the normal rate for itself. Dr. Strange just left and came back at the same moment from that frame of reference. It wasn't time travel exactly, it was just walking back out of the same moment he left.