I was more upset about having fallen asleep at Gina’s than by the game result. She was very gracious about it but still… not the best way to move a relationship forward. Felt like a total loser and apologized beyond what would have been reasonable. Once certain she truly wasn’t upset about it, I got down to telling her about the Timekeeper dream I had while sleeping on her couch.
“What about the energy thing of the previous dream? The one with the Timekeeper shouting ‘time out’,” she asked.(1)
“Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. After you reminded me that speed was distance over time, I went over to Professor Murdock’s…”
“Professor Murdock?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, he’s an old college professor of mine.”
“The old man with the bow tie at the office the other day?”
“The one and only. How did you guess?”
“I saw him leaving YO! and asked Tanya. She was the one who told me about him being an old professor of yours.”
“Oh, OK… so anyway, he gave me some additional information and I did the math. Once one takes time out of the Einstein equation it becomes clear that… are you ready for this? Time is the universal materializer.”(2)
“Hold it Ray, this sounds a bit familiar. Oh yes, I think I saw it in an episode of The Big Bang Theory.”
“No you haven’t, and the reason I know that is because I’ve seen every single episode of that series at least twice and that has never been in any of them. But it’s funny that you mention the Big Bang because that’s precisely the moment when time started interacting with the infinite energy field that existed before.”
“I’m a woman with above average intelligence…”
“You’re brilliant,” I interrupted.
“Whatever, but right now I listen to you and I can’t help but feel like Penny listening to Leonard on the show. Did you tell the Professor about this stuff?”
“Not yet, because to be honest, when I went over to his place he got worried about me maybe needing… professional help.”
“Maybe you do Ray. You’ve been working your ass off without a break for quite some time now. That takes its toll on the body and the mind. I hear you talking about recurring dreams with weird characters and, how shall I put this… unusual ideas about time… and I worry about your overall health.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I said deciding to keep the rest of the story to myself.
The conversation was interrupted by a call from Bob regarding the game’s final score and my side of the bet. We agreed that I would pay up the following Friday because I needed time to get me a pair of hipster red pants and red Converse tennis shoes. I was actually buying some time to try and get my life in order. After hanging up, Gina and I chitchatted about other stuff for almost an hour and then it was time for me to go home.
The drive back took a lot longer because of a car pileup on the expressway. Traffic was slow but my mind was spinning way beyond the speed limit. I felt like I was losing it. For the first time I dreaded getting home and facing the blue light wall, so the snail pace was a welcomed circumstance; it allowed me to do a lot of thinking.
Two things kept popping up in my head regarding the latest Timekeeper dream. The past being a physical construct and its potential relationship to the hypothetical dark matter was one – Professor Murdock had mentioned dark energy(3) before; I wondered if the two concepts were related. And the other one was the representation of the present as a materializing or construction process. All of a sudden, the notions of past, present and future, which I had always seen as a set of three mostly homogeneous stages of time, turned into three very different ideas: the past became a physical construct, the present a materializing process, and the future an energy field.
When I added the previous night’s musings on time travel, I came to a standstill. Within that train of thought I had come to the conclusion that one could travel outside of time in energy form(4) only. And that, since one is traveling in a timeless energy field, there’s no speed, and what takes the place of movement is a shift in our mind’s focus. In the dream the Timekeeper said that one could visit the past. But how can one travel to the past if it wasn’t composed of energy. That was a conundrum I needed to explore further.
The signal for a new voice message sounded off on my iPhone. I remember thinking it was odd because no calls had come in. I voice activated the retrieval of the message and almost hit the car in front when I heard an unmistakable electronic voice saying: “Raymond Young, you’re invited to look at my time travel experiment of 2009.”
(1) For the details of this dream go to Chapter 8: Time Out… Sh*t!
(2) Ray reached this conclusion in Chapter 13: A Not So Silent Night
(3) The Professor mentions it in Chapter 11: The Professor Calling
(4) Read about these musings in Chapter 15: ‘Twas The Night Before YO! Bowl