I May Never Get It

OK, Part III of this week's "Shanna Doesn't Get It" series. Today:
A Fold In Space

I called it that, as I'm not sure exactly what I'm going for. This concept was introduced to me in that same book, A Wrinkle in Time, as a tesseract, but after further investigation, I have found out that it may have been misrepresented and it is not a tesseract.

The concept is this:

If you need to get from one place to a next, you simply "fold" space to get to it quicker. Here's how it's presented...


OK, so let's say we have an ant that needs to cross a piece of string to get from point A to point B. In the normal world, the ant would simply walk across the piece of string, which would take some time. Like this!
Now, the idea is that to shorten this time, you simply take the edges of the string and bring them together. The ant then simply needs to walk across to get to point B. A lot less walking. Done like this!


Now, the idea is that you just "fold" space and bring the two points together to get rid of the travel time.

I just don't get this. In my mind, you must have some type of magical power to do this. However, when looking this up, it is said that what the author of the book was referring to as a "tesseract" relates more to a Wormhole, which is shown like this:


However, this seems more like something that is just there, not something you have to do. The wormhole is something you stumble upon...like a small path in a forest that creates a shortcut. In what I'm talking about, you would bring the end of the path you're on to yourself and just step onto the end...you wouldn't find a separate path.

So, maybe finding a shortcut is possible in space, like the wormhole, but I really don't see the capability to shorten a trip by bringing the end location to you and then returning it as something possible.

Unless you're magic.