[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?

_______________

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.