Tag: Timekeeper

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 6: The Timekeeper

An artistic rendition of the Timekeeper's eye as seen in Ray's dream

I recall finding myself surrounded by nothingness and a prevalent humming was all I could hear. A tall silhouette was walking towards me twirling what looked like a fancy walking stick with sparks coming out of it in all directions. He was bald and wore a glass derby hat, a midnight blue frock coat with gold trimmings and knee-high boots. As he got closer I could see that his eyes looked like the whole universe resided in them. He waved his fancy stick and directed sparks to a specific spot in the nothingness around us. A window started to form and his dark lips broke into a smile as he spoke to me:

“Greetings, I’m the Timekeeper and this is my domain. I call it the Anteverse, a place that exists an instant before your present. I can sense your curiosity regarding the humming. All you need to know for now is that it connects closely to what lies ahead: a future without time.”

I tried to speak but no sound came out of my mouth. Through the window created by the Timekeeper I could see the sun rising behind the cityscape. The strange entity continued its monologue:

“You’re being shown a road. Follow it and you’ll discover what the future looks like. I assure you it is not what you’ve been told before. Let me present to you something intimately linked to your quest. You see the city coming alive through the window? Just a short while ago it was all energy. What you seek is all about energy.”

A distant electronic sound started to break through the humming. As it got louder I realized it was my wake-up alarm. The Timekeeper and his Anteverse went back to the dream world where they originated as I woke up in a sweat.

I remember feeling very disoriented as I went through my morning routine. The weirdness of the previous night encounter with the ‘Einstein’ intruder combined with the acid-type dream of the man with a glass derby hat and a sparky thingamajig had rattled me more than I cared to admit at the time. I decided to shake it off by walking to the office that day.

Throughout the day I found it very hard to concentrate on the Chronologix presentation. My mind kept going back to the old man’s claim that I had summoned him. I ate half a sandwich on my desk as I worked over lunch. Around 2:00 PM one of our art directors brought me a promotional piece he got during lunch. It was a small glass derby hat.

He liked the piece and was talking to me about how we could do something like that as a follow-up piece for the new business presentation. I could hardly hear what he was saying. The little glass hat had a logo that read Clear Heads and the slogan ‘Hats off to great coffee’. It instantaneously transported me back to the weird Timekeeper dream. The coincidence was too much. I took a deep breath, told the art director to work out the specifics of the follow-up piece and decided to, once again,  go for a walk to clear my mind. Something that didn’t work at all that morning but out of pure stubbornness I decided to try again.

While walking, the details of the Timekeeper’s dream came back to me. Some of the character’s claims made me wonder what, if anything, was my subconscious trying to tell me. Was it that I was on the wrong track in my research about the nature of time? What road was I being shown? And what was that ‘future without time’ claim all about? After mulling over my memories of the dream for a while, I decided that if my sub-conscious was indeed talking to me through the Timekeeper character then I would follow its advice. If it believed that what I sought was all about energy then I would redirect my research towards the relationship of time and energy.

Feeling reinvigorated I went back to the office. My plan was to do some research but as soon as I got back I was pulled into a meeting to review what was being done for the Chronologix presentation. The meeting took the rest of the afternoon. Around 6:00 PM I finally made it back to my desk and the lack of sleep caught up with me. I dozed off until 7:30 PM when the sound of the janitorial crew’s vacuum cleaner woke me up. Figured it was time to go home.

I stopped by a hamburger joint on the way and had a blue-cheese burger with bacon and a large side dish of wedge fries with ketchup. It was delicious and I really, really needed that. I chased everything down with a Belgian beer which further lowered my engine’s revolutions. I was finally ready to call it a day.

When I got home there was a new security guard on duty. I asked about Alastair and he told me it was his day off. Of course, it was Tuesday, I had lost track of time. I asked the new guy if he had any information regarding the security tapes and last night’s intruder. The young man was still wet behind the ears but what he lacked in experience he more that compensated with good disposition. He told me he would find out and get back to me.

I went up to my apartment, opened the door and there he was again…

Posted on

TIME MATTERS: CHAPTER 7: Desperately Seeking Subtitles

Einstein smiling next to his famous formula E=mc2

The Einstein lookalike was back in my apartment. That time I opted for a different approach. Instead of confronting him, I quickly shut the door and stayed outside blocking the exit while calling the security guard downstairs. The young guard came up and we entered the apartment. The old man had disappeared again!

We searched the apartment to no avail. Frustrated by the whole thing I asked the guard if he had talked to his superiors about the security tapes.

“Yes sir, I did. I was about to call you. They found nothing on the tapes sir.”

“What about today?” I asked.

“Protocol calls for our company to monitor the tapes closely for 72 hours after an incident like yesterday’s. There hasn’t been anything suspicious recorded at all today. And nobody matching your intruder’s description has entered the building while I’ve been on duty.”

At that moment it occurred to me that there might be something terribly wrong going on in my head. I had a flashback of me watching the movie A Beautiful Mind. You know, the one about the brilliant Dr. John Nash’s schizophrenia. I decided it would better to be alone for a while so, instead of pursuing the intruder matter any further, I thanked the young security guard for his help and dismissed him as politely as I could given my confusion. Once alone in the apartment I felt compelled to do something I can’t explain, even today.

I said out loud: “Ok, you can come out now.”

A dark figure in the balcony lit up a pipe and started walking towards me. The man with the uncanny resemblance to Albert Einstein was once again talking to me in my home.

“Is zat vat you zink zis is Ray? Ein schizophrenic hallucination?”

As soon as he started to speak, a funny thought crossed my mind: If I created this character, why did I give him such a hard to follow speech pattern? His heavy accent had me desperately looking for subtitles to understand him. I did catch the word Ray and asked once again how he knew my name. As soon as the words came out of my mouth I realized the question was academic. If this was indeed all happening in my mind, he would, of course, know everything about me. Duh…

I was half expecting another ‘doofus’ reference but instead ‘Einstein’ walked over to the console table were I kept my snail mail and picked up a letter.

“Ein man schould look for vat is, und not for vat he zinks schould be,” he said showing me the envelope. “I know your name becauze I zaw zeze letters addrezed to you ven I arriffed. Zee zecurity guards today und last night couldn’t zee me becauze zey vere not looking for me. You, on zee other hand, zummoned me. You vere looking for me.”

This guy had me doubting my own doubts. Was it all a figment of my imagination? The whole situation was getting weirder by the minute but I decided to roll with the punches and asked when had I summoned him.

“Ven you schtarted tapping on zee univerze’s informazion field,” he said.

The effort to understand him was giving me a headache. It reminded me of a meme about some people being so hard to understand that is was like trying to pick up a turd by the clean end.

“When the hell did I do that?” I asked wearily.

“Ven you began looking for anzers zat are not currently affailable in your vorld und you schtarted to look for zem in your head. By zee vay ven I zaid zat time is vat clocks meazure, vat I meant vas zat time is merely zomething humans uze to meazure zee days und organise zeir actiffities, it vas not ein attempt to define its nature. Anyvay, your zearch brought me here. Becauze zee door zat leads to zee anzer you zeek is E=mc2.”

“What answer? You sound like Yoda but with normal syntax… and a pretty heavy German accent,” I said.

“Funny you schould menzion zat becauze it zo happens zat zee man who dezigned zee Yoda character uzed his face und mine as models. Zo maybe I schould talk more like zis: Vat time really is, zee anzer you zeek,” he said in a lousy Yoda imitation.

I was about to ask him how he knew that, when all of a sudden the corresponding synapses in my brain came alive and I realized the relationship between the separate messages my subconscious had been sending me.

The Timekeeper’s assertion that what I sought was all about energy, and Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2, in which E stands for energy, was the way to understanding the true nature of time. I started to pace around the apartment trying to put it all together in my mind but the Timekeeper’s “future without time” element was still hanging there with no apparent connection, so I decided to ask ‘Einstein’ himself.

My unconscious pacing had taken me over to the bedroom and when I went back to the living room he was gone. Only the pipe smell lingered…

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 8: Time Out… Sh*t!

Image of a bizarre dream with the Timekeeper crying time out

After searching the apartment and confirming that ‘Einstein’ was really gone I turned on my computer and started the research on the time/energy relationship I was unable to do at the office. Two hours later I found myself at a dead end so I called it quits and went to bed.

I woke up 5 hours later startled after another bizarre dream with the Timekeeper. That time I was playing basketball for an unidentified professional team against Tim Duncan and the San Antonio Spurs. To this day I haven’t found a single reason to explain that particular team’s presence in the dream. Perhaps it was because of their black uniforms… maybe because Duncan was a fellow Caribbean who had retired not that long ago… or that their coach Gregg Popovich had been in my social media feed recently… or maybe it was because they were considered the smartest team in the NBA at the time… I don’t know. Anyway, there was some sort of commotion in the dream. I couldn’t tell what was happening but the Timekeeper was frantically shouting “Time out, time out!”  The weirdness of the whole thing woke me up.

I got out of bed and went straight to the kitchen to brew myself a cup of strong Puerto Rican coffee. It was scalding hot and I burned my tongue with the first sip of the much needed morning infusion. While waiting for the coffee to cool off a bit, I pondered the idea of sharing what was happening with someone I trusted. For me the three obvious options were Gina, Bob and Professor Murdock.

I dismissed the idea of talking to Bob fairly fast. He had a tendency to overreact at times and I didn’t want him thinking his partner had lost his marbles. As for Gina, I wanted to discuss it with her, but talking about what I feared could be a schizophrenic episode with someone I hoped to have a romantic relationship with was definitely not the best approach to win her heart. The Professor was the safest route. It was still too early to call, so I sent him an email saying I had an urgent matter I wanted to run by him, and asking for a good time to stop by his office.

While I was writing, the ol’ professor was checking his email so his answer came fairly fast. He was going to be at his place all day and invited me to stop by any time. The weather forecast called for a rainy day, and dressing up for the office on a day like that was not in the cards. So I showered and put on jeans, tennis shoes and a Notre Dame sweatshirt.

When I got to the agency I ran into Gina who teased me about the attire.

“Well, good morning Mr. ND, aren’t you wearing the YO! Bowl good luck sweatshirt a little early?”

“To tell you the truth I didn’t do it on purpose, but the way they’ve been playing lately, any help is welcome. You know what they say, it’s only weird if it doesn’t work.”

“Did you know that the Michigan Wolverines’ distinctive football helmet was originally worn by the Princeton Tigers?” she asked me.

“What?” I said distractedly.

“Back in the thirties, the Princeton coach wanted his players to look like tigers so he had the helmets painted in orange and black. The unusual forehead wing and stripes were one of the reinforcement patterns used on the leather helmets of the time. He just painted them. They went undefeated and became national champions the very first year they wore them. Maybe that philosophy of ‘it’s only weird if it doesn’t work’ was the reason he took that particular paint job  to the University of Michigan when he became their head coach. Anyway, nowadays when people see the design they think of Michigan but it was Princeton who wore it first… Ray, are you feeling OK? You seem a little scrambled.”

She had this uncanny ability to see right through me. So even though I had decided not to mention anything to her, she opened a window and I jumped right  in.

“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” I told her. “Very weird dreams,” I added while thinking how to tell her about the ‘Einstein’ visits.

“Want to talk? My 9:00 o’clock  was cancelled, why don’t you walk me to my office and tell me all about it?”

I did. I told her everything except that, in my account, Einstein’s visits occurred in my sleep just like the Timekeeper’s.

“And you think this Timekeeper character is related to Einstein?” she asked after listening the whole story.

“I think so, yes. I know it sounds weird. But it feels like my subconscious is using these characters to help me understand in my sleep the information I seek while awake.”

“The human mind has been known to do stranger things,” she said. “So, the last thing this Timekeeper guy said was ‘time-out’? What does that has to do with Einstein’s E=mc2 formula?

“I don’t know,” I said a little discouraged.

“Did he say ‘time-out’ with a hyphen or ‘time out’, two words?” she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.

“I don’t know, the dream had no captions,” I said sarcastically but apologized immediately. “Sorry, I was just trying to be funny, I know you are trying to help. The context of the dream means that it should be ‘time-out’ with a hyphen, but then this is such a odd character, created by my subconscious, who absurdly happens to be managing an NBA basketball team, so I guess it could also be time out, two words. Where are you going with this?”

“Just wondering, that maybe what the Timekeeper was trying to tell you was to take time… out of the Einstein equation,” she said signaling with her hands the separation between the words ‘time’ and ‘out’ to make it clear she meant eliminating time from the equation and not taking a break from it.

“There’s no time in E=mc2,” I said

“It’s energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared,” she said. “Speed is distance over time.”

“Shit…” was all I could utter at the time.

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 9: Hitting The Wall

Image of the building where the Professor lives during a rainy day

I thanked Gina for the help… and rushed out of her office. The first stop was with my creative team. I had to make sure everything regarding the presentation was on track and that, in the process, they hadn’t strayed away from the concept of the Chronologix piece being a time machine. You know, something to help you manage your time better so you can travel better through time. I checked their work, gave them my input, mentioned I was late for a meeting with Cyril Murdock, a former professor from college, and left.

On the way to the Professor’s I decided to stop by my apartment for a raincoat. It had started to sprinkle and the sky had gotten darker. It was only 10:00 AM but it looked like dusk and it sure seemed like I would be needing way more than just an umbrella to face the music.

Before entering the apartment, I noticed the strange bluish glow at the bottom of the doorway I thought I had seen the night of my first encounter with ‘Einstein’. Once inside I found myself standing in front of a wall of blue light floating in the middle of the living room. It looked like a giant computer screen with formulas, pictures and all sorts of information flowing through it at a fast pace. The wall was translucent and I quickly spotted ‘Einstein’ standing on the other side of it.

“Did you do this?” I asked him fascinated by the scene in front of me.

“I didn’t create it, if zat’s vat you mean,” he said, “but I access it constantly.”

“What is it?” I probed further. By this time I was already talking to ‘Einstein’ as if he was a real person and not a hallucination. My sentiments towards him had evolved rather quickly into those akin to a newfound friendship. Even my ears were growing accustomed to his accent; it didn’t sound so heavy anymore.

“Zis is a phyzical reprezentation of the univerze’s informazion field,” he said. “You’ve been unknovingly scratching its zurface for zee past couple of days. Now it’s time to for you to step into it zee vay I uzed to vay back ven.”

“Wow, you mean I can enter it…” was the last thing I said as I walked into the field of blue light. I woke up on the floor four hours later with a bump on my head and a note in my hand that read:

“Doofus! Don’t you know the meaning of a figure of speech? Don’t ever walk into an unknown field of energy like that. Look up the Akashic records and my gedankenexperiments. And go into E=mc2.”

I was signed simply “A.” followed by a symbol I couldn’t recognize. It looked like a weird “Z”.

I stayed on the floor for what seemed like half an hour listening absentmindedly to the rain outside. A pretty loud thunder got me out of my post-shock daze. I looked at my watch and realized I still had time to see Professor Murdock so I called and told him I was on my way.

It was raining cats and dogs and the traffic was hectic. It took me forever to reach the professor’s abode over at the university district. The place was a small apartment in a brick structure with a mansard roof and classic moldings. I rang the intercom bell and the professor let me in. When I reached his apartment he was waiting for me at the door. I was shivering from the cold rain and he was wearing a warm cardigan with Matthew perched on his shoulder.

“Come in, come in. Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please, I would love some. Hey Matthew how are you,” I said to the pet ferret extending my arm to make a bridge between the professor’s shoulder and mine. Matthew crossed over enthusiastically and decided it was time to closely examine my head of hair.

“You must have a lot in your head,” said the professor.

“Why do you say that?”

“Matthew does the same to me when I’m in a state of deep thought,” he said. “My theory is he can detect the energy we radiate when our brain is hard at work.”

“Matthew, you rascal, you’re a little mutant”, I said to the ferret while stroking the neck area under its chin.

“I wouldn’t go that far. Everything around us is energy, and animals are more in tune with that aspect of reality than we humans. Besides, if Matthew were a mutant then that would make me Professor X,” he said with a smile in obvious reference to the X-Men character from the Marvel comics and movies, “or maybe Professor M…”

The professor brought the tea, I took a sip and the blister on my tongue came ablaze. The professor noticed my grimace and asked if the tea was too hot for me.

“No it’s perfect. It’s just that I have this sore on my tongue that’s been pestering me all day,” I said.

We had tea and chitchatted for a while, literally talking about the day’s weather, before getting to business. I then proceeded to tell him everything about my encounters with ‘Einstein’ and the weird Timekeeper dreams.

“What worries me the most about the whole thing,” he said with a concerned look on his face, “is that you may be right about all this being… let’s not say schizophrenic but… an intense experience created by your mind.”

Then I showed him the note…

 

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 11: The Professor Calling

take Image of the Professor calling Ray's iPhone

It was dinnertime, and having being unconscious through lunch I was ravenous, and a pretty nasty headache was creeping up. Before heading home I stopped at a deli near the university and proceeded to devour a hearty Reuben sandwich. I enjoyed being among college students and remember thinking that maybe the professor was right about not delaying my interest in teaching.

I stayed at the deli for a while trying to put my thoughts in order. Gina had opened my eyes regarding the E=mc2 formula.  I needed to take time out of it and see what happened. Also, I had to check out Einstein’s thought experiment approach and the possible access to the mysterious Akashic records. Since what started all this was my search for the true nature of time, my area of inquiry was pretty much defined.

I was very tired and wanted to lie down for a while so I decided to try my luck first with the directed meditation process to access the Akashic records.

Before leaving the place, and out of pure curiosity, I Googled ‘Akashic records’ on my phone. It so happens that Akashic comes from the Sanskrit word Akasha which means sky, space or aether – a term that has been interpreted in some sources as ‘primary substance’. Moreover, I found out the records could also be accessed through dreams.  I wondered if the Timekeeper episodes were a manifestation of that.

Traffic was still slow due to the heavy rains so it took me quite some time to get home. Once in the lobby I asked Alastair, the security guard, to add Gina Caulder and Cyril Murdock to my file as people to call in an emergency. I thought that, being now aware of what was going on, it would be a good idea for security to call them if the need arose.

To my surprise, ‘Einstein” had taken the night off, although I had my doubts when I entered the apartment. The pipe smell had taken residence in my place. I made a mental note to ask my distinguished visitor to refrain from smoking inside my home.

I took a warm shower, settled myself comfortably on the bed and started to go through the directed meditation steps the professor had outlined. Frankly, I couldn’t clear my mind at all. After a while I just gave up and went over to my computer to work on the E=mc2 equation. That’s when the professor’s call got through.

“Raymond, sorry to call you at this time but I felt this shouldn’t wait till morning,” he said before I could even say hello. “I did a quick research and found out the strange looking ‘Z’ in the signature is actually the way Einstein wrote the capital ‘E” when signing. But what worries me the most is that the handwriting on the note matches Einstein’s handwriting,” he said and I could detect a trace of deep concern in his tone.

“Professor, are you telling me this guy is really Einstein?” I asked him getting a little worried. Up until that point I had come to terms with the fact that this character was real somehow. But I hadn’t entertained the idea that he was Einstein himself. How could he be? I started to look for his note but couldn’t find it.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions, your mind is not out of the woods yet. First of all, there have been cases in which a person has been able to channel somebody else’s handwriting. The people who have studied this type of occurrence claim it’s a sign of spiritual channeling.”

“Oh shit, spiritual channeling as in what a medium does?” I asked with disdain.

“Yes, Raymond. The practice of channeling, where a spirit takes over a person’s body for the purpose of communication, has been around for centuries. Channelers, sometimes known as mediums, claim to use what they call ‘spirit guides’, kind life forces who assist them through the course of their spiritual journeys. Many so called mediums are charlatans, granted, but there are documented cases of people who were able to truly access that otherworldly dimension.”

“So now you’re saying I’m a channeler?”

“It’s a possibility, no doubt, but in cases like this, I like to go with the Occam’s razor approach.”

“The simplest explanation tends to be the correct one,” I said.

“That’s right, other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones. In this case the simpler explanation, I’m sorry to say, is that you’re having a schizophrenic episode. But it could also be that you are channeling Albert Einstein’s spirit in your search for the true nature of time, a topic very dear to him.

“What’s more, in 1917 Albert Einstein added what he called the cosmological constant to his theory of general relativity. I’m not going to go into the details but suffice it to say that later on he abandoned the constant. He called it the ‘biggest blunder’ of his life. Recently, scientists have revived Einstein’s cosmological constant to explain a mysterious force called dark energy. One that seems to be counteracting gravity causing the universe to expand at an accelerating pace. Maybe his channeling through you has something to do with this. You say he claims you summoned him.  Well, maybe he wanted to come back and you were the open door to this dimension.”

“Wow, you’re right, the simplest explanation is that I’m a schizophrenic.”

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 16: Bowl Time Revelations

Dreamlike image of Ray's ecounter with the Timekeeper during the Notre Dame/Stanford game

The drive to Gina’s home was almost uneventful. On the way I realized I had forgotten to buy some beer for the adults to chase down the BBQ food so I stopped at a convenience store and bought a six-pack of one of those fall seasonal craft beers that looked like it could do the job. The checkout lady, who had an uncanny resemblance to one of the alter egos of Melissa McCarthy’s character in the movie ‘Spy’, looked at me funny and said:

“Honey, are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine. But I know I look like crap.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that. I mean you being a customer and all, but yeah, you look like you could use some rest… and maybe some chicken soup too.”

“I’ll do just that. Have a good day… oh, and thanks for caring,” I said and the lady’s face beamed with a smile.

I finally made it to Gina’s and as soon as she opened the door the first words that came out of her mouth were: “Ray are you okay? You look like shit.”

“And a good day to you too,” I said.

“Sorry I didn’t mean to… you know, it’s just that I haven’t seen you since Wednesday morning and you look like the rest of the week piled up on you,” she said apologetically.

“Don’t sweat it, my bathroom mirror and the checkout lady at the convenience store agree with you. I just haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Still having those weird dreams you told me about?”

“Sort of… but today is all about indoor camping, BBQ and some Notre Dame/Stanford football, not about weird dreams. What do you say we get this tailgating going?”

“Sounds good to me,” she said. “Chris, Mel, come on over. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Christian and Melanie were Gina’s niblings. He was six years old and she was four. I was surprised at how well mannered they were. Gina introduced us and Christian extended his hand to shake mine while saying: “Nice to meet you.” In my mind I questioned whether this kid was for real. Melanie was a little shy so she just said hi while grabbing Gina’s thigh.

Gina led the way to the kitchen and helped me unpack all the goodies. I had brought hamburgers and hotdogs for the kids and some Italian sausage and ribs for the over-21 crowd. The ribs were the unpack-and-heat-up kind; I wasn’t such an accomplished BBQer. As it turned out, the kids had had hot dogs the night before and little Melanie loved ribs so the menu was set at one hamburger for Christian, ribs for everyone else and Italian sausages as appetizers for Gina and me. I added one cheeseburger for me simply because I loved them, although I didn’t know how I would be able to eat all that stuff.

The BBQ in Gina’s backyard was in excellent condition and everything turned out delicious. I hurt my sore tongue with a hot sausage but I solved that with a cold brew. After eating to our heart’s content, Gina and I sat down to watch the game. I recall watching the opening kickoff and not a single down after that. Without warning I found myself in the company of the Timekeeper in the place he called the Anteverse.

“Welcome back to my domain,” said the strange creature over the constant humming that permeated the featureless place(1).

“What is this place… this Anteverse?” I asked.

“It’s the place that exists an instant before your present,” said the Timekeeper. “It exists between the construct of the past and the energy of the future.”

“What do you mean by the construct of the past?”

“As you have discovered, time is the universal materializer, and that means that what you call the past is a solid construct. Something like frames in a movie with each frame being a moment in time. The moments exist forever, unaltered, created by the effect of time on the three-dimensional space of energy, and spilling over into your present. See, you are actually living ‘in the past’. Everything that surrounds you is a remnant of the past; an existing past construct that spills over into your ‘now’. An that ‘now’ is the edge of creation.”

“So, if the past is a physical construct, then it has mass… Can it be visited?” I asked.

“Once materialized, the past stays there for anyone to visit. Like a museum with every instant of existence frozen in an endless stream. Its mass affecting the present from an unseen source.”

The Timekeeper went on talking about how the theoretical dark matter is in actuality the mass of the past, but I was more concerned with the nonstop whirring.

“What’s with the constant humming?” I asked.

“That’s time interacting with the energy of the future,” said the Timekeeper. “What you call the present is a materializing process and the humming you hear is the sound of time creating your immediate future.”

I had many questions and had lost track of time when a distant voice started to warp the Anteverse.

It was Gina pulling me out of the Timekeeper’s domain.

“Ray, Ray wake up. Hey Ray. Earth calling Ray. Come in Ray…”

“What… oh crap I fell asleep. Is it half-time already?” I asked groggily.

“The game’s over Ray, you slept through it. I tried to wake you up earlier but you were sound asleep and snoring like a bear in the middle of winter. I think there’s a video of you sawing wood in YouTube now. Sorry, the kids’ idea, and I thought it was pretty funny.”

“Oh well, I hope it goes viral. Who won anyway?” I asked.

“Not Notre Dame,” said Gina grimacing. “What was your bet with Bob?”

I took a deep breath and started to feel the pain of what was coming to me. “Must go to the office all dressed up in red and every time somebody mentions my name I have to say I went to Notre Dame because I wasn’t good enough for Stanford.”

Gina burst out laughing and said: “I’m going to have so much fun that day.”

 

(1) For more on the strange Timekeeper character go to Chapter 6: The Timekeeper, and Chapter 8: Time Out… Sh*t!

 

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 17: Postgame Jam

Chapter 17 of Serial Blog "Time Matters" at imaginationgate11.com

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

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 19: Dark Past, Dark Future

.An abstract representation of the dark matter past, the present and the dark energy future

It was almost midnight and thanks to the embarrassing nap at Gina’s I was nowhere near to being sleepy. So, I started surfing the web for information regarding dark matter.

I found out the term refers to a hypothetical substance that scientists have never been able to detect but believe should exist to account for the gravitational forces prevalent in the universe. They estimate that 80% of the mass of the universe is composed of dark matter. In other words, for gravity to make sense across the universe we would need 80% more matter.

In the Timekeeper’s dream at Gina’s, he mentioned that once materialized, the past stays there for anyone to visit. Like a museum with every instant of existence frozen in an endless stream. “Its mass affecting the present from an unseen source.” And went on to postulate that the theoretical dark matter is in fact the mass of the past. Could this be possible? Can the mass of the past account for that 80% of missing matter in the universe? An image of Marty McFly in Back to the Future saying “Whoa, this is heavy Doc” came to my mind. I found myself smiling at the unintended pun.

Einstein’s theory of relativity stated, among other things, that gravity was so powerful that it could bend the fabric of the space-time continuum. This included bending light and in extreme cases, like in the equally theoretical black holes, not allowing it to escape the enormous forces of gravity present. My research took me to territory reserved for knowledgeable physicists and I started to get lost.

The bottom line was that everything regarding dark matter was hypothetical. Nothing has been found, and physicists’ opinions are split up with some of them feeling uncomfortable with the concept. They are divided in their visions of what accounts for the missing mass in the universe.

Some say it has to do with dim brown dwarfs, white dwarfs and neutrino stars. Others add the hypothetical supermassive black holes to that mix. And there are some who go fully theoretical with exotic particles such as WIMPS (I’m not making this up), an acronym for ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particle’. These have ten to a hundred times the mass of a proton, but have such weak interactions with “normal” matter that they are difficult, and so far impossible, to detect. For some, the foremost candidates are the neutralinos, massive hypothetical particles heavier and slower than neutrinos, although like all other hypothetical particles none have been spotted.

My feeling at the time was that for such a proof-based scientific community, they relied way too much on unproven concepts. I thought for a moment that if that was the case, then the hypothesis of the mass of the past accounting for the missing mass in the universe was as good a concept as all the others. And since some physicists have been able to both date the universe and calculate its overall mass then maybe it would be possible to determine the mass of the past.

Satisfied at the moment with the information on dark matter, I then switched my attention to the concept of dark energy. As was the case with dark matter, dark energy is a term used to describe an unknown force. One that causes the universe to increase its expansion rate. In layman’s terms, a mysterious force that makes the universe expand more rapidly. Physicists estimate that the universe is 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% normal matter. In other words, everything we have observed on Earth and throughout the cosmos is only 5% of the universe. The nature of everything else is up for grabs.

The numbers caught my attention and I wondered… What if the 27% corresponding to dark matter was the mass of the past? Couldn’t the 68% of dark energy be the energy of the future? Energy that, as we sit here, is fueling the materializing process that is the present.

“Could that be what’s accelerating the expansion of the universe?  The ever increasing area of the present?” I said out loud. “The present is like a factory that keeps expanding, the more it creates the larger it becomes. The larger it becomes the more it produces. And the rate of expansion increases because the manufacturing footprint keeps on growing.”

“Zat’s a bold schtatement Ray.”

I jumped when I heard his voice.

“Don’t you ever knock? You scared the shit out of me.”

“Zorry, but I understand you’re now dealing vith ein specific topic fery dear to me.  I zought zat maybe I could be of help.”

“Are you going to stay around this time? Because you fled a while ago after directing me to Stephen Hawking’s time travel experiment. Which reminds me, did you take down the information wall?”

“It dizipaded becauze you nein longer needed it. It vas alvays meant to be zomething of ein vizual aid.  To help you master zee ability of accezing zee Akaschic records. You’re perfectly capable of doing zat on your own now.”

“I wish I shared your confidence in me,” I said and then proceeded to share with him my thoughts on dark matter and dark energy, and their relationship to the past, present and future.

“I must zay, I like zee vay you zink Raymond Young. A hypothezis like zis has countless ramifications.”

“I know! Just listening to myself telling you all this I realized a couple of those ramifications. For example, what if your wormholes were just points in the universe untouched by time? Places completely devoid of matter. Areas of pure energy through which one could instantaneously travel long distances outside of time. And at the other end of the spectrum, what if black holes were very old areas of the universe. Places where the mass of the past was such that its gravitational forces go off the scale?”

‘Einstein’ looked at me blankly and started talking in the language of physicists. This time I couldn’t understand a single word he was uttering, not because of his accent but because I had no idea what he was talking about. I heard terms I didn’t know existed in the English language, and names I had no idea how to spell. He was just thinking out loud but I felt like a little kid who had just told a grownup that he had learned to tie his shoes.

At one point he addressed me by name and just said:

“Ray, can I uze your compuder?”

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 20: The Time Particle

Image of the Time Particle

‘Einstein’ monopolized the computer and his concentration was such that it vanquished me from his reality. The tiredness associated to the day’s events finally caught up with me so I went to bed leaving my distinguished visitor to his cerebral pursuits.

I laid down on my bed for some sleep but my eyes kept going to the point in the room where the blue light wall had been before. A question popped up in my mind: does time have a tool for the materializing process? I remembered the Timekeeper saying that time interacts with the energy of the future(1) in what constitutes the materializing process that is the present. I wondered what did time use to create the future? It definitely wasn’t the staff-like thingamajig the Timekeeper carried around. But while on that line of thought, I mulled over whether the sparks coming out of it were a clue to finding the answer to such a question.

Tiredness finally won, and as soon as I nodded off I found myself back in the Anteverse.

“Well, well, well… good to see you’re back to finish our conversation,” said the Timekeeper twirling the sparking stick while tipping his glass hat. “Where were we?”

“You said the constant humming I hear in this place is the sound of time building the future. And I was wondering what, if anything, does time uses as a tool to do its materializing?” I asked.

“The tool, as you call it, is a primordial particle that infuses energy with mass. Scientists in your reality named it the Higgs boson, the mass giver. I believe you might have heard of it by its most common name: God’s Particle. A designation disliked by physicists but one that is understandable in the cultural context of the creator god when you take in consideration that this particle creates matter where there isn’t any. The term is really a misnomer for the boson has nothing to with God and everything to do with time. It should be called Time’s Particle.”

I woke up…

I had no idea how long I had been in bed. All I knew at the time was that it was still dark and I was too excited to sleep, so I went straight to my computer and found ‘Einstein’ gone. Not the kind of surprise that would give me a heart attack, but it would have been nice to have him around to talk about the Higgs boson being time’s particle. Sans Einstein, the only option left was Mr. Google.

My search revealed that the term boson pays homage to the Indian theoretical physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, best known for the quantum mechanics work that provided the foundation for the Bose-Einstein statistics. By that time it didn’t surprised me anymore that Einstein’s name kept popping up everywhere I went.

The Higgs boson was named after Peter Higgs, the British theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of this particle way back in the sixties. Its presence was initially recorded in 2012 at the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and finally confirmed in 2014. There are several types of bosons and all of them have an integer spin, but the Higgs boson is the only one with zero spin, and it’s the one responsible to give mass to other fundamental particles. But, what I found to be the most interesting fact about the Higgs boson was that they break apart in approximately a ten-sextillionth (10-22) of a second. At the time I thought that number could very well be the time it took the present to materialize!

I sat for a long time staring at the computer screen. I wasn’t expecting a finding like that. Holy crap! I had stumbled into a possible measurement of the instant that is the present. I don’t know how long I sat there motionless. All I know is that at one point I fell asleep on the chair. The sun came up and a tiny ray hit me straight in the face. I woke up and stumbled to the couch where I continued my slumber.

It was way past noon and I was still asleep when I heard the knock on the door.

 

(1) Check out the full extent of what the Timekeeper said in Chapter 16: Bowl Time Revelations

Posted on

TIME MATTERS – CHAPTER 23: Bedside Manners

Image of ghostly figure in hospital room bed

I woke up quite disoriented… on a bed that wasn’t mine… in a room I couldn’t recognize. Professor Murdock was seating by the door reading something on his iPhone. He noticed me waking up and approached the bed.

“Welcome back to the world of the living Raymond. You gave us quite a scare back there.”

“Where am I?”

“St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

“What? Why? I asked still groggy.

“I got your message yesterday asking me to stop by your apartment, but when I arrived nobody answered the door. Figured you had gone out and decided to leave, but as I walked through the lobby I casually mentioned to the security guard that you weren’t in. He found that curious because Ms. Caulder had left just a bit earlier and you hadn’t been through his station after that.

“I told him about the message asking me to stop by and he got worried. Exaggeratedly so, I might add. He asked me in a heavy Scottish accent to accompany him back up to your apartment, and once upstairs he knocked on your door and dialed your phone with no answer to either. He then called somebody to ask for authorization to enter the apartment using what he referred to as ‘the security protocol’. After explaining the situation to whoever was at the other end of the line he got authorized to enter.”

“His name is Alastair. The security guard’s name is Alastair,” I interjected.

“A very nice fellow. A little rough on the edges, but very capable. Anyway, once inside we found you unconscious on the kitchen floor. That’s when Alastair called 911 and we ended up here,” said the Professor gesturing with his arms to show me the hospital room. “The doctor says you need plenty of rest because the whole chain of events was most probably caused by acute exhaustion. They still have to do some tests but that’s the initial prognosis.”

“What do you mean by the whole chain of events?”

The Professor’s answer was delayed by the entrance of Gina and Bob.

“Oh good, you’re back with us,” said Bob. “Sorry it took us so long to get here buddy but the Chronologix presentation kept dragging on an on.”

“That’s usually a good sign in a new business pitch. Good for you guys!” I said.

“Well you know how it is. These things can be very unpredictable. Some times they make you feel like you hit the ball out of the ballpark and then give the assignment to somebody else. So we’ll do all the follow-up antics during the next couple of days and keep our fingers crossed. We’ll know for sure in a week. How are you feeling?” said Bob.

“Dizzy… a bit unfocused… like I’ve been disconnected from reality for ages. How long was I out?”

“Close to 24 hours,” said Gina. “I got here last night after Alastair called…”

“Alastair called you?” I asked surprised.

“Of course he did. You added me to the list of people to call in an emergency. You remember that don’t you? I tend to agree with him that finding you unconscious on the floor of your apartment qualifies as an emergency. Anyway that’s not all he did. He also made sure that the people in the hospital knew that the Professor and I were authorized by you to receive information regarding your medical condition.”

“Wow, I didn’t know he could do that,” I said.

“Which brings me to the point at hand before you two arrived,” said Professor Murdock. “You’re here today Ray because of a whole chain of events that started way before you started seeing this Einstein character.”

“What Einstein character?” asked Bob.

“We’ll explain to you later Bob,” said Gina.

“You had been working very long hours and sleeping poorly for a while,” said the Professor, “and that brought forth an exhaustion induced brief psychotic disorder during which two things happened. First you bought a pipe and some tobacco and started smoking it without any recollection of doing so. That’s what caused the blister on your tongue by the way. Then the pipe smoking served as a trigger for the Einstein hallucinations.”

“So Einstein was never there…” I said with a hint of sadness, “but it all felt so real. It still does…”

“All in your head,” said Gina.

“And speaking of that, I brought something that will make your head feel a lot better,” said Bob as he got a Stanford cap out of a paper bag and placed it on my head. “Don’t you feel a lot smarter now? I figured you would need one after Saturday’s YO! Bowl.”

I took the cap off my head and looked at it while pondering the consequences of my alma mater losing the Notre Dame/Stanford game.(1)

“Thanks for the gesture Bob, I’ll be sure to wear it when I get back to the office,” I said sarcastically.

“I’ll have the cameras ready to go,” said a grinning Bob.

A nurse came in the room and announced that visiting hours would be over in 10 minutes. Gina said something to the nurse that I couldn’t hear and soon after, everybody said their goodbyes and I dozed off again… just to ‘wake up’ almost immediately back in the Anteverse.

 

(1) For the details on the consequences Ray has to face due to Notre Dame losing to Stanford  see CHAPTER 16: Bowl Time Revelations