[See note at bottom of the post for information about this image.]
One of these days, if I’m feeling very ambitious, I might expand this dream (from the other morning) into a whole story or book. Until then, feel free to use it for your own purposes. Should you take it to publication, I’m sure we can work out some sort of suitable deal. Just contact my attorney — and prepare to negotiate.
I’m with a team of adventurers — you know, one of those ragtag bunches of (probably) misfits who go around the world solving problems — digging up treasure, recovering stolen loot, righting wrongs, and so on.
Unlike other teams of adventurers, though, this one has a special talent: it travels in time.
Now, as you surely know from various pop-culture references, time travel is possible… but only if you have superpowers or other almost impossible resources. For instance:
- If you’re Superman, you can zip around Earth in a direction opposite to the planet’s rotation, at a speed faster than light. All you have to do is, uh, be Superman.
- Or, like the guy in H.G. Wells’s story, you can build a time machine to move backward and forward.
- If you’re Claire Randall (née Beauchamp) in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series of books, all you have to do is sort of walk through the right group of standing stones in Scotland at the right time (it helps if you swoon); just be in WW2-era Scotland, be a nurse, be brilliant, and be attractive. Also wry.
- Dr. Who travels around time and space more or less at will — thanks to the TARDIS and its impossible geometry.
But this dream team doesn’t need any of that. It needs no machinery. Its members have no superpowers. All they have which you lack is one critical piece of information, and the training to use it: every human being is born with the ability to time-travel.
The leader of the team (think the Richard Attenborough character in Jurassic Park) made this discovery starting with a simple realization: that human memory and hope/expectation are simply diluted expressions of time travel. And the training? You just practice focusing the portion of your brain most responsible for memory (the hippocampus); you just rehearse sharpening the details of your hopes and expectations.
…and that was the sum of the dream. I didn’t remember any details of the group’s adventures or anything (ironic in light of what I did remember, eh?).
Would you time-travel if you could?
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Note: The photo at the top of this post shows a sand sculpture by the artistic team known collectively as Duthain Dealbh (“fleeting sculpture” in Gaelic). The subject of the sand sculpture is the Australian aboriginal legend of the dreamtime. From Wikipedia (quoting a line from Peter Weir’s film The Last Wave):
Aboriginals believe in two forms of time; two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the “dreamtime,” more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. It was believed that some people of unusual spiritual powers had contact with the dreamtime.
Find more information about Duthain Dealbh at their site.
DarcKnyt says
Oh, I’d definitely travel in time if I could. Find out what fate awaits me beyond the immediate view of my finite life vision; go back and see what changes I could effect for the better and what impact they’d have on that future or this present; oh yeah. I’d monkey around in the time stream, no two ways about it.
Great dream, John.
Froog says
Really, the word hippocampus occurred in your dream?
The notion of ‘unrecognised psychic abilities’ put me in mind of an early Robert Sheckley short story called Specialist. Do you know it? Great fun.
Sorry to be a party pooper DK, but – long ago, when I was still in high school – I wrote a little sci-fi story about the impossibility of changing things in the past: everything that’s happened has happened, and can only happen one way, even if you are experiencing it as the present (with the benefit of detailed hindsight, and the appearance of free will to act however you choose). My protagonist, of course, went back to 1920s Germany to try to assassinate Hitler, but his every action towards achieving that end was thwarted – not, as I’ve seen some stories suggest, by mysterious ‘laws of physics’ protecting the timeline (invisible barriers, guns that refuse to work, time standing still at critical moments, etc.), but by mundane, random, everyday obstructions – late-running trains, power failures, women who start flirting with you at just the wrong time.
Maybe I should try and redo that one…
Froog says
On a related theme, I can’t now recall the writer (I’m delving back into the memories of the horror and sci-fi anthologies I always used to read on summer holidays in Somerset when I was a kid), but there’s a short story – fairly famous, I think – about a company in the future offering time travel tourism. One of their most popular destinations is, of course, the crucifixion of Jesus. There’s only one rule – tourists aren’t allowed to try and change the past; so, for example, when they go to see Pilate offering to free Jesus as a goodwill gesture for Passover, they are told that they must join the crowd in chanting “Free Barabbas!”. Trouble is… the crowd is entirely composed of such tour groups.
moonrat says
woot!! write it!! that’s what all the cool kids are doing!!
The Querulous Squirrel says
I have enough trouble just staying in the present.
John says
Darc: I’d monkey around in the time stream
You do have a reckless streak, don’t you? :)
Froog: I’m sure you’ve had the “do you dream in color or black-and-white?” conversation. In the same vein, I’m curious if people remember exact words of dialogue from their dreams. In this case, I don’t know if the word hippocampus put in an appearance, as such. Now, several days later, it was more like the group leader moved his mouth as though saying no word in particular (like a Muppet, maybe), but the soundtrack itself was blank… which was all right, because my dream-self “knew” that hippocampus was in the air.
Loved the premise of your own time-travel story. If an inability to change the past had become the predominant theme of such stories in general, you could have changed the future of science fiction!
I’ve never read that “time travel tourism” story. But I do remember one about a company offering time travel safaris, to prehistoric times. On such a trip, you were given a rifle loaded with a single blank; the guides would have gone on ahead and selected a target for you which they knew would die at a particular instant. Just as the triceratops (or whatever) was about to keel over, the guide would signal you to fire — so it felt to the hunter like he’d shot the beast.
(The actual treks took place on a carefully constructed elevated walkway, and you were not allowed to step off because of possible unintended consequences. In this particular story, though, a prehistoric butterfly lands on it, and a hunter accidentally steps on the butterfly. All seems fine until they return to the present day, and even then no change seems to have occurred… until he notices a sign. I don’t remember the particulars, but the sign was subtly different: all the c’s had become g’s, or some such.)
moonie: Something about the tenor of your comment felt to me as though you’d keyed it in under the influence of gin.
Squirrel (or, rather, Squirrel!): so good to see your reappearance online this week.
I know the feeling — the difficulty of “staying in the present.” Wonder if the therapist’s handbook (the DSM) has an entry covering those who are temporally adrift?
Nance says
Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time regularly in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five as a result of war trauma. I’ve been using that term often since I first read the book in 1970.
I believe we can technically describe PTSD as a form of coming unstuck in time; the sufferer regularly physically re-experiences an event from the past when a certain trigger is present. Often, with Panic Disorder in conjunction with Specific Phobia, a sufferer physically lives in a barely conceived traumatic event that COULD take place in the future. And, of course, in Schizophrenia, the sufferer is sometimes simply unstuck in every dimension.
I’ve experienced something recently that I’ve been hoping for. Watching my elderly relatives sit and stare into space, I would ask them figuratively where they were. I’d often here that they were “off in a memory.” I learned that many of them began to re-experience some memories in newly vivid detail, and with more of the senses engaged, than they had ever done before. Now, in my sixties, I am beginning to have that same experience sometimes, although I can’t will it or repeat any specific incident of super-memory.
Dying is the ultimate form of coming unstuck in time. Aging is a time to practice that loosening. In fact, some physicists declare that time does not exist. I like to think that, like Schrodinger’s Cat, I am all the ages I’ve ever been.
Staying in the present moment has been an escape for me when I am overwhelmed, but it gets harder and harder to do as I age, outside of actual meditation. What if I just go with it, the unstuckness? And, do I have a choice?
cynth says
One of my favorite descriptions of time travel happens in the Potter books when they are able to wind their memories in thin, silvery strands into the Pensieve. They can then witness the events of the past, but not participate in them. The reason I like it so much is, wouldn’t it be wonderful to go back to some scene from childhood and see it from an adult perspective? Perhaps closing up some wound, or even seeing that the wound wasn’t as bad as it was originally seen?
marta says
Summer is completely derailing my schedule. If I could time travel, I’d avoid summer. The Doctor never lands on a Sunday because “nothing ever happens on a Sunday.”
I don’t think I’d time travel unless a real deal TARDIS showed up. But the price is high. I don’t want to know the future til it gets here. The past, well, best left alone.
I wouldn’t write about time travel to the past because I don’t want to do the research.
Sigh. But dreams are good. Keep traveling however you can.
John says
Nance: You have an advantage, as a professional student of the mind, in that you have a reasonably good idea on how this all probably works (at least in theory!). And you’ve clearly been thinking about it for a while, which adds a comfort level all its own. When/If I experience what you describe, I think I’ll find it both comforting and… well, “terrifying” may be too strong a word. But I do treasure stability, and if I see familiar bits of the now-landscape starting to turn translucent I’ll probably feel very disturbed!
cynth: Oooh, yes, the Pensieve. (Not only an ingenious creation of JKR’s, but an ingenious word for it.)
Now, I’m not sure I’d want to be able to fix the “wounds” as you call them. The trouble with doing that would be it would truncate the learning experience — I might end up happier at that time, but more miserable (or dead) over long haul, for not having suffered the wound(s) in the first place… A comforting, soft-focus fantasy, though. :)
marta: Funny comment on any number of levels.
I didn’t know that about Dr. Who. I guess, from the perspective of someone inside the TARDIS, there’s not really any such thing as “Sunday” anyway, huh?
…Now I’m confused. Which may be the point of anything related to time-travel. Maybe the veil of confusion and real or apparent contradiction surrounding the concept is just a self-preservation gimmick which humans have come up with to shield themselves from thinking too much about something which — if we only stopped thinking about it — would really be quite simple.
Another comforting, soft-focus fantasy!