Nature of time in the White and Black Lodges and the Red Room in Twin Peaks

Question

The White Lodge and its counterpart the Black Lodge are parallel realities of immense importance in Twin Peaks. The Red Room is an extradimensional construct that permits beings to cross between our world and the lodges — or at least the Black Lodge.

Several incidents in Twin Peaks suggest that time flows differently in the lodges than in our world.

• Major Briggs believes that he was in one of the lodges for only a short time, whereas his wife tells him he was missing for two days.

• Upon the Major's return, the Log Lady notices something about him that reminds her of an incident in her childhood in which she was told she had disappeared for a whole day. However, she remembered feeling as if no time had passed at all.

• In the final episode, ten hours pass in the real world while, for Cooper, only a few minutes pass for him while he is waiting in the Red Room.

Is there a constant dilation factor between time in the lodges and time in our world, or is the time at which an individual returns to our world controlled by forces from inside the lodges, or is the amount of time that passes in the real world while someone is in the lodges random?

Answer 1

We don't know, but it doesn't seem to be constant.

As you say, time clearly flows differently in the Black Lodge (or the "waiting room", perhaps; the difference between these two locations isn't entirely clear) and the real world.

Your examples show that time often seems to flow faster in the Lodge than outside. We don't know whether this time dilation is constant. (We might learn this in the ongoing third season, although by the four episodes I've seen so far, I kinda doubt it.)

One example which seems to imply that the time dilation is not constant is the disappearance and reappearance of FBI Agent Philip Jeffries. In the movie Fire Walk With Me, Jeffries suddenly appears in the Philadelphia FBI office two years after he mysteriously disappeared from Buenos Aires. He seems to have been in the Black Lodge (or the waiting room, or the room above the convenience store, or a similar place) for a very short amount of subjective time, while two years have passed in the real world since his disappearance. While we don't know how much time he spent in the other realm, it doesn't seem to have been much longer than Cooper or Briggs were there while much less time went by in the real world.

Another example is the fact that while Cooper has been trapped in the Black Lodge for 25 years, he has aged 25 years. How much subjective time his mind has experienced is of course up in the air, but his physical representation in the Lodge has aged normally while he's been in there. And that's not just because the real-life actor has aged 25 years between season 2 and season 3 out of universe, mind you: In the third season 1 episode, Cooper has a dream of the Black Lodge where he sees himself 25 years older!

We also know that the different flow of time in the Black Lodge is not restricted to simple time dilation.

In Fire Walk With Me, which takes place before the two seasons of the series, Laura enters the Black Lodge in her dreams. It's clearly not just a regular dream, as she communicates with entities there about things that we, the viewers who have seen seasons 1 and 2, know are true. In this dream, Dale Cooper is in the Lodge. She then "wakes up" in her dream to find a bloody Annie Blackburn next to her in her bed. Annie says that "the good Dale" is trapped in the Lodge and can't leave.

Of course, Annie's death and Cooper getting trapped in the Black Lodge doesn't happen until way later in the timeline, in the season 2 finale, and Fire Walk With Me takes place before season 1.