Other cases in point of how much time really did pass in the series:
Episode 478-482. Episode 478: [spoiler]Evening: Dr. Lang renders Jeff Clark unconscious with a nasty looking hypodermic and straps him to a table. At 4 a.m. Cassandra causes Maggie to have the Dream. The next scene in that episode switches back to Dr. Lang with Jeff strapped to the table where he's telling an unconscious Jeff " You should be honored... It will be through your eyes that Barnabas Collins will see...etc.".[/spoiler]That had to have occured BEFORE Maggie's dream even though it came in the scene FOLLOWING the Dream.
Episode 479 begins with Barnabas knocking on the door of Lang's laboratory room, and ends with [spoiler]Lang threatening Barnabas with a pistol if he picks up the phone and calls the police. Then there are the following episodes where Julia discovers Lang's experiment and flakes out seeing the headless body threatens to call the police, at which point Barnabas has to shout " Dave Woodard! Remember Dave Woodard!" in a desperate attempt to dissuade her from making that call. Then the scene where Barnabas catches Cassandra eavesdropping on his and Julia's conversation on the terrace at Collinwood, Julia coming to Lang's house and reluctantly erasing Jeff's memory of the evening's events....[/spoiler]It seems all these events in the following episodes would have had to take place BEFORE Maggie's dream in Episode 478. A bit confusing!
And also 100 episodes or so latter in the Adam storyline there's the subplot in which [spoiler]Willie locks Maggie in the Secret Room of the Collins Mausoleum to save her from being used as the sacrificial lamb in the Make-Adam-a-girlfriend experiment[/spoiler] (Episodes 583-599).
During those episodes a whole lot happens: [spoiler]The failed experiment with Carolyn, Carolyn's supposed death, the appearance of Leona Hetridge (? I forget the woman's last name), Adam going off the deep end, acting like a twerp, kidnapping Vicki, threatening the Collins' family with destruction, the creation of Eve, etc... During all of this time Maggie is locked up in the Secret Room, without any food or water as far as we can see. This begs the question: How much time actually passed when she was locked up in the Secret Room? Adding to the confusion: when she finally escapes the Secret Room with David's help, she's exhausted, weak, in her night robe. After her visit to Joe's apartment where someone (obviously Nicholas Blair) erases her memory of her being kidnapped, she's back at her cottage, fully dressed, looking healthy and well as if she had never been locked up at all without food or water. How within the short space of a few hours did she fully recover physically from that ordeal ( that's when she has Barnabas come by to pick up the portrait sketches her dad had done of Barnabas...having no memory at all of seeing Willie for 3 or 4 weeks or so).[/spoiler]
Just a few instances of confusing time passage in DS.