Time Travel

We are fascinated by the concept of travelling to different times other than the one in which we ostensibly are currently living. Shamans are said to have the ability to move in and out of time and also present space.

But perhaps we overlook that all of us also have this ability in very specific ways. Are our dreams and our thoughts and our imaginations really so very different from our present realities?

Several days ago, a slat broke on my antique (inherited from my Grandmother) bed frame, amazingly when my small cat jumped up on my bed while I was asleep in the middle of the night. Too tired to get up to fix it that night or to move to another location, I returned to sleeping for the remainder of the night at a slight angle.

The next day, after one attempt to temporarily fix it, I called on my son, who was able to come a day or two later and repair it properly, with his always amazing skills; and so I could return to my normal bed (at a level angle!) after several nights of camping out in the living room.

The second night back, I dreamed I was sleeping in my old childhood bedroom. A vivid dream, not unusual in its vividness, with all the remembrances of the surroundings: the wallpaper, the size of the room, the bedside lamps, stuffed animals. During the dream, I woke - inside my dream, inside my childhood room - and it appeared that the bed – my childhood bed now, still in my dream – had fallen victim to the same problem, and the mattress was at an angle. I thought to myself, in my dream, “Oh, I need to call my son to fix the slat again.”

When I actually woke up, in my present bedroom and the 'present' time, it didn’t at all seem contradictory that when I was in my childhood surroundings yet I was thinking about what my adult son would do. It was seamless. I realized that this is one actuality of how we can move from one time period to another – there need not be contradictory assertions or any sense of incongruity. There is such a richness of remembrances and experiences in my head, that my thoughts easily flow from one to another, from one time period in my life to another. Especially in my dreams, I experience the same with visual images. It is a slight step to imagine that possibility of doing so, not just in thoughts, not just in visual images, but with a physical presence, even if simply a sense of physical presence. The knowledge is the same.