Diegesis

Source: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/narratology/terms/diegesis.html

The diegesis of a narrative is its entire created world, so any narrative contains a diegeses and every story will portray it in a different way.

The manipulation of diegetic time and space is an editing technique used to portray a story showing different time or age periods. This can be used to show the passage of a person's life or certiain points in their life with flashbacks and dreams. It can also be used to portray the environment that the story is set in, so it could be futuristic or it could be set at some point in the past.

An example of a futuristic environment is The Hunger Games. Panem is a picture of the dying world based on past events. The Lovely Bones is an example of flashbacks and dreams and we see the main character as being 'dead' in limbo.