How can Dr. Strange rewind time in these circumstances? [duplicate]

Question

Whilst confronting Dormammu, Strange keeps dying and coming back, in an infinite loop, which eventually persuades the monster into accepting the doctor's terms.

My question is:

How does he use the gem while dead?

He is supposed to make hand gestures for it to work, so how does he do it then?

I thought maybe he set the loop before getting killed for the first time, do you guys agree? Is that even possible?

By the way, there was a similar question to mine, but they are not the same. The other one focused on the fact that Dormammu's dimension was beyond time.

Answer 1

Yes, Strange set up the "time loop" as soon as he entered Dormammu's domain, effectively locking himself and Dormammu into it. This appears to work only because time, as we understand it, doesn't exist in Dormammu's domain, so Strange can effectively bring it with him from our world, an manipulate it however he sees fit, without any of the usual consequences of doing so.

You can see when he first lands on the "planet", before confronting Dormammu directly, he checks his wrist and confirms that the spell effects from the Eye are active. Based on what he tells Dormammu, he has just set up a closed time loop -- something Mordo warned him might happen if he misused the Eye.

Once this closed loop is active, only Strange can break it, by undoing it with the Eye. So, every time Dormammu kills him, and the spell "ends", all that does is close the loop, and the little bubble of time that Strange has brought with him cycles back around to the beginning again.