The article discusses the features of modeling the category of time in oral narratives with reliability. The most essential property of the time of such narratives is the orientation to the actual moment of speech: the narrative about the events of the past is built taking into account the time plan of the situation of the conversation. This is reflected by means of different language levels – aspectual-temporal forms of verbs, features of the reference of actors, forms of direct and indirect speech, vocabulary with temporal semantics. Their analysis in the article is based on the material of autobiographical memorates. The reflection of three time points at once is considered: the moment of speech, the moment of the narrator’s first perception of the story from a participant in the events, and the moment of the events described in the text. A comparison of these features with the traditional narrative genres of folklore shows that the main difference in the organization of the temporal plan lies in the nature of the relationship between text time and the moment of speech. This is due to the different position of the speaker in relation to the chronotope of the text. Thus, the time plan of oral narration is a projection of the narrating subject.