Time, he said, was easier understood as the distance between events, than as a river, the topic under discussion being “Day dreams”. In a “Day dream” we were told, climbing from a dhow, at Thebes, three thousand years ago or ordering coffee in a particular café in Paris, the day before yesterday at noon, to an incident on one’s first day at school, and, even more astonishing, our very presence in this precise moment, here and now, are all equally “Real” or “unreal”. Not only might they seem to encompass the same duration, but can take place within the same moment. In those seeming brief periods, we can spend life times in any number of places and experience any number of incidents -perhaps numberless- and yet not leave our seat on the bus, all events happening, as it were, simultaneously. He claimed, a “Day Dream” to be not just a short mental absence from the present, but a valid period of existence as tangible as any other, be it in the past, present or future. He was proposing we lived multiple lives scattered though-out the entire history of … everything. That there was -in reality- no distinction between past, presence and future and therefore no such condition as either. To understand how that could be- in a universe of natural laws- was the purpose of our learning “Universal Script”. I had thought it just another artistic technique, just another a method- although amazing- of creating images… for art’s sake, but no, we were informed it was an actual living language and whose use it is to facilitate non-intuitive understanding. It does not suffer from the binary limitations of all other human languages but is multi dimensional. Such a faculty would not be easy to come by. But to master such a language… to learn a method of conjuring every image that the universe, past, present or future might contain… in a single work…..? Well! that certainly got my attention.
The ability to comprehend interweaving scales of time, space and distance, from the cosmic to the truly minute and to actually exist within those frameworks was a kind of magic in itself, yet- according to the speaker, we did it naturally, all the time. The only difference being one of understanding or ignorance. A “Day dream” it seems is a kind of journey to a state that the further one progresses the ever greater the is slowing down of time itself and further still, beyond what are called event horizons – where past, present and future lose their identities and the very mechanics of eternity are exposed. There all events are timeless and – to be in effect -one.
The subject was, to say the least, grand but fortunately, even though there were many and varying types of equations to resolve they involved not numbers and symbols but metaphors, so could be visualised and therefore easier understood.
The dissolution of time and the subsequent conflating of events onto a single flat-plane is the essence of this form of episodic imagery which being universally legible needed no translation. Embedded throughout these scriptural miracles exist “devices” called “Prime Motifs”. Resolution of any of these particular elements in the script trigger the experiences we call “Day Dreams.” There are of course many different types of natural triggers. A shadow on a wall a cracked pavement the smell of flowers, the sound of a slamming door, people hurrying past a misted window, etc. etc. Proust’s Madeleine.”Then why don’t I remember all these lives”? Was the obvious question. “You do” was the reply.
