Last Memorable Dream of 2010
In the dream the night before last, I was looking out a car window up at a starry sky in the middle of nowhere, no lights around anywhere I could see. I was alone in the car, talking on the cell phone to my aunt who, after I complained that Mom wasn't there yet, was commiserating with me about my mother's irresponsibility. Suddenly I remembered: Mom died way back in the 1980s. What am I doing here?
Then my mind flashed back to a time in my personal timeline when I'd been a 41-year-old disabled woman who was suddenly sent back to her life nearly 30 years earlier. With all my memories intact, I'd somehow ended up in my life before my mother got cancer, right around the start of puberty, and wondering how the heck I'd gotten there. As soon as I realized where and when I was, I started making lists of people I'd known in my 30s and 40s who I thought I might want to reconnect with eventually. I wrote down approximate dates of birth, what I knew of where they were in the 1990s or later. If I could somehow avoid being disabled--maybe getting treatment for epilepsy earlier would help--then life would be different enough that eventually meeting the people I wanted to re-meet might take some work, but I had years to plan for it all. After all, the Internet wouldn't have widespread popularity for more than a decade, and some of my friends weren't even born yet. There was time.
So in the new timeline, my mother survived. I was closer to her than to Dad, which seemed strange to me given my memories of my original life, though it was understandable too, since in the timeline where he was never a single parent, he saw no particular need to retire early and spend more time with me.
(Today, thinking about the dream again, I imagine myself asking Mom a million questions I've thought of in the years since she died. I imagine her saying to 13-year-old me, "I'll tell you when you're older," and me with my extra decades of memories thinking to myself, "But I am older.")
As much as I loved my linguistics professors, I felt no need to sit through Chomskyan linguistics lectures again, so I thought about what I should focus on in high school, which questions I should ask that I'd never asked before, and what I might want to major in in college. I seem to recall leaning towards visual arts, thinking of fractals and looking forward to faster personal computers to play with. Frustratingly, it took me longer to decide on a college major than it had the last time I was in school.
(Again thinking about things that never came up in the dream: how many things have to change in the world before popular culture is affected? Would my friends and acquaintances be wondering why I sang all the wrong words to all my favorite songs?)
At a university--not the one I attended in this original timeline--I was walking down a path when I saw a younger version of a man I met in my original 2009. Seeing him was the first thing in my new life that confirmed for me that I hadn't entirely imagined my old life. I tried to think of some excuse to say something to him, but had pretty much decided to let him continue his conversation with the pretty blonde woman walking next to him when he turned in my direction and looked at me with recognition.
"You!" he said. "I remember you. We met in the future! I know that sounds--"
"Which future? Did we meet at the farmers' market?"
"Farmers' market? No, we met--"
--and that, of course, is when my alarm woke me up from the dream, so now I'll never know which alternate reality he came from, and how many years he'd spent in our newest timeline, and whether he knew any more than I did about why we were in this new world at all. And I still don't know why I was waiting for my mother in a car in the middle of nowhere.
Then my mind flashed back to a time in my personal timeline when I'd been a 41-year-old disabled woman who was suddenly sent back to her life nearly 30 years earlier. With all my memories intact, I'd somehow ended up in my life before my mother got cancer, right around the start of puberty, and wondering how the heck I'd gotten there. As soon as I realized where and when I was, I started making lists of people I'd known in my 30s and 40s who I thought I might want to reconnect with eventually. I wrote down approximate dates of birth, what I knew of where they were in the 1990s or later. If I could somehow avoid being disabled--maybe getting treatment for epilepsy earlier would help--then life would be different enough that eventually meeting the people I wanted to re-meet might take some work, but I had years to plan for it all. After all, the Internet wouldn't have widespread popularity for more than a decade, and some of my friends weren't even born yet. There was time.
So in the new timeline, my mother survived. I was closer to her than to Dad, which seemed strange to me given my memories of my original life, though it was understandable too, since in the timeline where he was never a single parent, he saw no particular need to retire early and spend more time with me.
(Today, thinking about the dream again, I imagine myself asking Mom a million questions I've thought of in the years since she died. I imagine her saying to 13-year-old me, "I'll tell you when you're older," and me with my extra decades of memories thinking to myself, "But I am older.")
As much as I loved my linguistics professors, I felt no need to sit through Chomskyan linguistics lectures again, so I thought about what I should focus on in high school, which questions I should ask that I'd never asked before, and what I might want to major in in college. I seem to recall leaning towards visual arts, thinking of fractals and looking forward to faster personal computers to play with. Frustratingly, it took me longer to decide on a college major than it had the last time I was in school.
(Again thinking about things that never came up in the dream: how many things have to change in the world before popular culture is affected? Would my friends and acquaintances be wondering why I sang all the wrong words to all my favorite songs?)
At a university--not the one I attended in this original timeline--I was walking down a path when I saw a younger version of a man I met in my original 2009. Seeing him was the first thing in my new life that confirmed for me that I hadn't entirely imagined my old life. I tried to think of some excuse to say something to him, but had pretty much decided to let him continue his conversation with the pretty blonde woman walking next to him when he turned in my direction and looked at me with recognition.
"You!" he said. "I remember you. We met in the future! I know that sounds--"
"Which future? Did we meet at the farmers' market?"
"Farmers' market? No, we met--"
--and that, of course, is when my alarm woke me up from the dream, so now I'll never know which alternate reality he came from, and how many years he'd spent in our newest timeline, and whether he knew any more than I did about why we were in this new world at all. And I still don't know why I was waiting for my mother in a car in the middle of nowhere.