I just dreamt this… half of the examples have dissipated already. Writing it down ASAP. The dream ended with someone building it into computer software. For example, Windows in 10 years time changed the default font it used, and most people liked it, so then Windows of today automatically changed to that font, and all memory of the original font was erased.
Memes so powerful they flow backwards through time.
You know when you see or hear something and go Wow!?
Imagine if you are Paul McCartney and you are watching the news in 1999 and hears that Yesterday was voted the #1 pop song of all time, and listens to it being played. And he goes, Wow, I did that!
Suddenly, that meme (the tune and lyrics) flows backwards through time and enter his dreams:
According to biographers of McCartney and the Beatles, McCartney composed the entire melody in a dream one night in his room at the Wimpole Street home of his then girlfriend Jane Asher and her family. Upon waking, he hurried to a piano and played the tune to avoid forgetting it.
I have been thinking all this time that love at first sight comes from the accumulation of feelings for that person in the future being so powerful that you recognise them at the beginning. But maybe, what causes it is a Wow moment, when that accumulation makes you think about how awesome knowing that person has been.
You have to be receptive to it and be able to adjust. In my dream, my laptop, when I went to do something, the operating system rewrote itself, before my eyes, to provide the functionality I needed. It received the wow from the future and implemented it, but only when needed. (remember it was a dream, it doesn’t necessary make sense, or make sense now).
I just stopped writing this because I had to go to the toilet, and while sitting there I picked up Uncut magazine, Sep 2000, an interview with comics writer Alan Moore, who says, talking about his use of a watch stopped at 8:15 and then the same thing being in the movie Insignificance:
it was almost as if I’d stolen the film, three months before I had actually seen it
I’m wondering if it can only happen to an individual. There is a list of “it came to me in a dream” at Wikipedia, including some pretty major moments in history:
- Frankenstein – the first science fiction novel
- The scientific method
- Double Helix structure of DNA
- Structure of the atom
- The periodic table
Science of course being more noteworthy, but in art surely it is quite commonplace.
I’m happy with the concept at an individual / dream level. All that is missing is the method. We know that time flows both ways, so that aspect is fine, but what is the mechanism? That is what I need to work out!
Because we also have existing concepts of timelines, and time travel, then thought should be given to a wow moment being universal, and rewriting history.
And maybe there are parallel wows. Rupert Sheldrake calls it morphic resonance, which he writes about in detail in The Presence of the Past, which suggests we can all tap into some field of memories in aether, and those we are most in tune with (species, family) share more:
In England, blue tits learned to diversify their diets by pecking open the aluminum lid on milk bottles left on doorsteps by the milkman. Within a short space of time, blue tits throughout England, up into Scotland and even as far afield as Sweden and the Netherlands were opening milk bottles using the same technique. Blue tits have a flight radius of 15 miles. None of them could have flown to Sweden and taught their Nordic cousins the new trick there.
https://open.prodir.com/en/2019/02/all-blue-tits-are-connected-at-least-somehow/
Many inventions and movie plot lines popped into the heads of different people at the same time, as if one person’s wow moment was felt by someone else who had a similar nature.
An epiphany could be the waking reception of a wow moment, instead of in a dream. I would suggest that you must at least be daydreaming for it to happen, or that only the subconscious can receive it.
Of course the above has come to me from a dream, so maybe one day I will work it out properly, have a wow moment, and that sends me the idea backwards in time to the dream I just had.
UPDATE:
I’m thinking something like sonar. Your dreams send a signal into the future, and it bounces off a wow moment and it returns to you. Instead of a shape bouncing back from across space, it is a shape bouncing back across time.
Maybe dreams are seeded by a sonar that randomly sends out signals and sees what bounces back. I am starting to learn how to control my dreams and that is what it feels like, and that is what causing magic feels like as well, all this is the first time I have come close to describing it. I do something similar before turning a corner, send out a signal, to stop me from crashing onto someone. It feels like radar/sonar. Beams sent in every direction, and listening for a response.
If the future, present and past already exist, then the Wow moment already exists. That leaves three possibilities. It has been fetched by the person already, and is lying there waiting for activation, there is some externality that provides a rare of unique situation for it to be known, or there is some internal trigger from the person that seeks that specific thing or lets them be open to wow moments in general. Because of believe in love at first sight, that narrows it down to two… Either your future memory of this person already resides in you, or when you meet then is triggers the seeking of Wow moment that features them, the sonar is filtered to match them only.
If we can be in touch with Wow moments from the future, then in theory all of the future is knowable. Of course knowing everything in advance would destroy the point of living, many would say, which is a good reason for our brains having limitations on this. I think there are only three ways the future can come to us:
- Wow moments that are personal
- Wow moments of others, which the very few true psychics can access
- The immediate future, moments ahead, that bleed through into the now