Interesting! It turns out my wife also has a helix representation in her head, with the future going downward and counter-clockwise. I never suspected there'd be so much variation here and I guess always assumed most people just saw it my way.

I wonder if you made a dating app that asked these sorts of questions ("what shape is a year?", "can you read a book while counting?", etc) if the answers would be a relevant factor for determining compatibility.

Hopefully for you and your wife it's not too much of a determining factor!

In James Gurney's Dinotopia, humanity is described as imagining time as a line, whereas dinosaurs imagine it as a circle. They compromise and teach a single cohesive theory of "time as a helix" to both saurian and simian children.

The reasoning is that it closest matches reality, "cyclically rotating around the sun and moving with the seasons, as well as forever propelling ourselves forward into the future with permanent changes".

There's a romance to it that I've always adored, as well as dammit it just makes SENSE