This essay is about time and patterns in time. We are concerned with patterns that can be defined only over time and may have temporal constraints as part of their definition. Although there is a widespread view that time can be treated by nervous systems in the same way it is treated by scientists and engineers, we shall argue that this approach is naive - that there is no general method for representing time in the nervous system, that is, no single representational mechanism that is applicable to recognition of all temporal patterns. Instead, different patterns are analyzed using different methods of measuring temporal extent. We will then present several dynamic mechanisms developed in our lab for the recognition of various kinds of satterns in time.