"Rip Van Winkle" (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɪp fɑŋ ˈʋɪŋkəl]) is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, first published in 1819.

It follows a Dutch-American villager in colonial America named Rip Van Winkle who meets mysterious Dutchmen, imbibes their strong liquor and falls deeply asleep in the Catskill Mountains.

[2] Rip Van Winkle, a Dutch-American man with a habit of avoiding useful work, lives in a village at the foot of the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolution.

Rip helps the man carry his burden to a cleft in the rocks from which thunderous noises are emanating; the source proves to be a group of bearded men wearing similar outfits playing nine-pin bowling.

Rip awakens on a sunny morning, at the spot where he first saw the keg-carrier, and finds that many drastic changes have occurred; his beard is a foot long and has turned gray, his musket is badly deteriorated, and Wolf is nowhere to be found.

When asked how he voted in the election that has just been held, he declares himself a loyal subject of George III, unaware that the American Revolutionary War has taken place in his absence.

He learns that many of his old friends either were killed in the war or have left the village and is disturbed to find a young man who shares his name, mannerisms, and younger appearance.

He learns via a village elder that the men he met in the mountains are rumored to be ghosts of the crew of the Dutch East India Company ship Halve Maen.

His daughter takes him into her home, and he soon resumes his usual idleness (unconcerned by the major political changes during his slumber) and begins telling his story to every stranger who visits the village.

[9] Following the success of "Rip Van Winkle" in print and onstage, later celebrated editions were illustrated by Arthur Rackham (Heinemann, 1905) and N.C. Wyeth (McKay, 1921).

Later that day, Honi sat down to rest but fell asleep for 70 years; when he awoke, he saw a man picking fruit from a fully mature carob tree.

Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, under which a person traveling at near light speed would experience only the passage of a few years but would return to find centuries had passed on Earth, provides a broad new scope to express essentially the same literary theme – for example, in the opening chapter of Ursula K. Le Guin's Rocannon's World.

In the tenth chapter of his book Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, the third-century AD Greek historian Diogenes Laërtius relates the story of the legendary sage Epimenides of Knossos, who was said to have been a shepherd on the island of Crete.

In the original Buck Rogers book, the protagonist falls asleep under the influence of a gas in a mine, sleeps for four centuries, and wakes to find America under the rule of Mongol invaders – whereupon he places himself at the head of the freedom fighters.

In Roger Zelazny's science-fantasy series The Chronicles of Amber, protagonist Corwyn experiences drinking and revelry in an underground lair with otherworldly people who try to entice him into slumber; he knows this is a centuries-of-sleep trap and resists; the passage is similar in theme to both "Rip Van Winkle" and especially the Orkney story.