In which I think I am on the surface but time and depth creep up on me

Journal, 3/13/22-

Things do not enter into me so deeply lately. I feel like I am wrapped in Formica. Absent is reflection, or at least its automaticity, and absent is the glaring, glaring, glaringness of what lies beneath, of what is under things.

I am so buoyant! How strange.

My dream last night was complex, intricate. Timey-wimey. I know this innately but I do not remember much of it at all. Most of what I remember are images. The urgent, desperate face of a woman being helplessly pulled through time, between the future and the past, granted only the briefest spasms of moments in each to gasp out critical messages—to attempt to pass them through a cracking temporal barrier before disappearing again to the other side of it. It was a dream that probed an age-old question of time travel itself, a paradox of it: If you know the future, can you alter it?

I look out the window at the charging snow, a panting dog, a taut leash, a woman in a parka bracing herself against the wind and her own outstretched hand, and I wonder what it might be like to be light. Light itself. To outpace all other matter, arrive at futures to which nothing else has made it yet. I imagine it is very quiet there, in that place where only light is.

How dark it would be to move faster than light! How empty and vacant a place we would arrive, with even the future behind us. Maybe from there, and only there, could we shape its trajectory. Run back to the present time, gasp out messages, try to facilitate the unfolding of events. Not to alter something that has already happened, because that is impossible. But to alter the factors that produce the inevitable, make it no longer inevitable.

But we can do that without violating the laws of physics. Our minds themselves can travel through time, examine futures, calculate factors, render trajectories, and facilitate our travels along them.

We have unbearable power. It is no wonder so many of us are corrupt.

Hmmmm let’s lean into this depthless place. See what it contains. See what we can do, while we are here on the surface of things. How we can organize ourself to find more use underneath the next time we sink below it.

[Several hours later]

FUCK. Daylight saving creeps up on me again.

[One week later]

Holy shit. It has taken me over a week to notice this, but what a very peculiar coincidence it was to have a dream about someone being pulled through time just as time itself was being pulled through night—our construct of it cracking and fragmenting and being stitched back together oddly, this big human conspiracy to relabel physical property to our favor—all while I lay in bed in total ignorance that this, of all nights, was the annual night of this maneuver. This temporal maneuver! So many maneuvers our species has…