Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day

Evidently, today is Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day.

It's as good a day as any to extrapolate on an old theory I had growing up, one which will explain a lot about me, I think.  I don't remember how old I was when I first thought this up, because the oldest memory I have about it dates back to middle school, and that memory is a privately excited realization that a dusty old theory I'd had was true.  It happened during gym class while they were taking attendance.

Gym - sorry, Physical Education - at that point was 3/4 the entire class.  The other quarter was off in the bowels of an unused classroom, trapped in what was known as Health Class, which was usually accompanied by dramatic chords and terrifyingly bad photocopies of genitalia.   Gym class meant there were fifty-odd middle schoolers to wrangle into some semblance of physical activity.  They took attendance by having us sit alphabetically by last name, in long rows with ten feet between each kid.

Class periods were only about 45 minutes long, and we were given five minutes at the beginning and end of the period to change into and out of our gym clothes.  That brings us down to 35.  Fifteen minutes were spent taking attendance and making us all do "warm up" exercises.  These warm-ups were Do Quad Stretches, Run In Place, Do Arm Circles, Do Jumping Jacks, Do Push Ups, Stop Complaining, Run In Place.  That leaves twenty minutes to do the activity of the day, but that's not important.


In any event, I was sitting there, one day, waiting to get the infernal warm-ups over with, when I spaced out.  This was more or less a common occurrence, as I'd realized much earlier in my life that I'm a little off, and it would make my life that much easier if I kept certain things to myself.  So there I was, staring into space, when I suddenly came back into awareness with the thought in my head, "Wow!  I was right!  We CAN travel through time!" This was immediately followed by, "Crap! I have no one to tell about this!"

This was before personal blogging really picked up steam in general, and also during the under-a-rock part of my life, so, many years later, I can finally explain this idea/theory to people.  Hopefully, you will appreciate my naive wonderment.


The theory went like this:

You have both a mind and a brain.  Your mind is the conscious thought, that top layer, inner monologue that that mainstream media telepaths can hear.  Your brain is the subconscious, automatic stuff - regulating your heartbeat and breathing, and things like that.

Your brain is attached to the body, and without it, will die.  However, your mind can wander, as the expression goes.  It can travel through time.  When you are staring into space, your mind has vacated and leapt forward a short distance in time.  Your brain, which cannot accommodate time travel, stays behind to keep your heart pumping and your lungs breathing.  The body itself, and the components that make it up, are dependent on time - cell cycles, aging, etc.  It cannot physically travel through time.  The mind is something more, and does not necessarily age, and so is free to traverse the wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

What is a memory, if not traveling backwards to a specific point in one's life?  Can you not see the events in your head, feel the emotions you felt, the way you did at the time it occurred?  If our minds are capable of returning to and revisiting moments in our past, why can't they jump forward?


Anyway, I was a strange girl, but felt that this was a perfect anecdote for Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day.  Now if only I could travel ahead to see a finished manuscript, and somehow sneak it back to the present.


Wibbly-Wobbly Links for fellow Time Travel Pretenders:
- The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
- Photographing the Past
- Young Me / Now Me
- Time Travel Face Bags
- Dear Photograph



-Em