In my dreams, time isn’t chronological. Events occur out of the usual order. For example, I’m being captured by the bogeyman, then he’s chasing me, and then I’m encountering him. In other dreams the second event opens the dream, then comes the third, then my brain goes back to formulate what must have happened first.
Scientists insist that time is only a perception, anyway. It has no reality. Nothing about time is a tangible reality. Yet we measure it. We use it every day to organize our lives. We make timetables. We hire timekeepers. We wear timepieces.
Maybe time is a continuum, with events we can visit in random order. Perhaps things that have already happened can be viewed mentally, the way some people seem able to see into the future. That may be the cause of such disordered dreams.
If time is a continuum, that would mean time is a stream of parallel or clustered happenings. Possibly it’s a double helix, a spiral that rotates upon itself. Or it’s a labyrinth or maze, wrapping around a central point and offering various channels, many of which merely turn back upon themselves and lead nowhere. But what could the central point of the labyrinth be? Our birth/death? Our universe? Is there a difference?
More down-to-earth is my belief that time is shrinking. (For something that doesn’t exist, time has a lot of permutations.) Shrinking because I have less of it left than I used to, less time to in which to complete the two books and the many articles swarming in my brain, less time to enjoy my new marriage and my new home and friends, less time to wallow in the new books I’m constantly buying, less time to travel and experience even more of the world. Less time for living in time.
My tenure in time is dissipating. And nothing can be done to expand its duration, to make the coil of time grow, the stream of time widen. Nothing to do but pretend, like the scientists, that time is non-existent. Permit it to take its inevitable course: gradually shrinking away to nothing.
I don’t want time off for good behavior. Because time flies, I want time-and-a-half. In fact, I want timelessness.
— Dorothy Jane Mills