Following on the heels of the other dream post, last night I had a nightmare. I know, most people’s nightmares are pretty realistic and usually grounded in some sort of reality. An event that could potentially happen. No, not me. The things that scare me to death are just… weird.
In most of my dreams, they play out kind of first-person, kind of third-person. More accurately, it’s like I’m a cameraman in the dream. I may interact and be party to the events going on, but there are also a lot of wide shots or overhead shots, or views that I could not physically have if I was there. It’s actually quite typical for the astral plane, which is not bound to any concepts of the physical plane. But I digress. I’ll come back to that in a bit.
The part where the dream centers on is where myself and a few people have been placed in a remote location. Not exactly barren, but there’s no civilization there. We more or less know each other but we don’t know why we’re there. We are informed that a nuclear explosion is expected to happen. It’s not absolutely certain, but it’s highly likely. The time frame is also unknown, but it’s expected to be soon. It’s assumed to be an attack from outside, not something we’re doing to ourselves. Despite this, no one is really freaking out over it. It’s all delivered and received very matter-of-factly.
This is the unexplainable part. After being told that essentially we’re all going to die soon in a nuclear blast, it is explained that is not exactly how we’re going to die. When the first nuclear explosion happens, we will utilize a different weapon for retaliation. Not much detail is given about this weapon or technology, but when asked about its effect, the explanation is "time will go backwards for about 30 seconds."
That statement still creeps me even now. I can’t explain why, but I’ll try in a little bit.
Our group passes the time, inexplicably, playing music together in a band format. We’re figuring out songs that everyone knows and surprising each other with our musical knowledge and breadth of experience. During one song, me being cameraman, I have a wide shot of the group playing and suddenly the music stops and everyone has been knocked to the ground. In the distance, a mushroom cloud starts forming. The time has come.
As cameraman, still, the scene pans to the left to an open field where I know the special weapon is. Out of the ground, small (like really small, maybe an inch in diameter) metal tubes rise up. The number sticking in my head is 60, but there were no way 60 in the scene, maybe 8-10. And they each shot a small cylinder high into the air. No huge explosion or report – I’m not sure how they were propelled. A few seconds later, the payloads came back down to the ground and submerged into the ground. Again, no explosion, they just buried themselves into the ground near the tubes they were released from.
The weapon then started and it appeared like the payloads got sucked back out of the ground and arced back to their tubes, but the motion was choppy and sequenced. Not all the payloads came back out and the ones that did made a very clear whooshing/shh-ing sounds as they came back out. And then.. nothing. Stillness, a freeze-frame. And I woke up.
I woke up absolutely terrified. And what I was scared about was not death or dying, but this concept of time going backwards. As I’ve spent the day pondering why that is so scary to me, the best I can come up with is that in my dream, the smart people have theoretically devised a destruction method that transcends all life. A nuclear response is simply not enough. Destroying all life on Earth isn’t enough, even physically destroying the Earth itself isn’t enough. This weapon has to destroy the entirety of existence, everywhere. Because no one knows what would really happen if you could reverse time. The best theory we have is the event horizon of black holes where time slows to nothing and matter is ripped apart at the atomic level. What could happen if you went beyond that?
And even that explanation doesn’t satisfy me. It’s assigning a bogeyman to the concept, but it’s the concept itself that scares me. One of my post-waking thoughts was a consideration of how supposedly everything in our universe is simple vibrations. Denser matter (the physical) vibrates at a slower frequency and you move into the astral and higher planes of existence the vibrations become higher. And my mind thought that a sudden shift in time from forward to actual reverse, would disintegrate our beings by disrupting the vibrations in a way that we could not rematerialize again.
That probably doesn’t make any sense. Let me try and give it some context. In esoteric philosophy, there is the belief that at our core, we are a soul (an ego, an id) and we present ourselves on different planes of existence by forming bodies of material native to those planes. Those bodies would be of the vibrational frequency native to the plane. As you move up in divinity, you shed each denser body to begin life in a higher-frequency body in the higher plane. Follow that so far? So now, what if your ego/id/soul was ripped apart even at its highest frequency? You would no longer exist, period. Nothing, no one would exist anymore. It’s the real end-times. Not just the end of the physical world, but the end of all planes of existence, the end of existence itself.
But, that’s just a weird, funny, unexplainable idea. I mean the planes of existence concept isn’t even widely considered valid, and no one even knows what time is all about. Some sources say we’re a unique species that is bound by time, where other, higher forms do not have that constraint. Oh well. I guess time will tell what comes of this. It’s just a dream, right?
Watching The Races
I’ve been keeping an eye on the COVID race for a few months now. The players I watch are all standout players: FL, TX, PA, and GA. Those are the places that have people that I know, so I watch their progress.
I remember when FL was the star, I seem to recall it was in the top 5 for a while. But PA put forth a massive effort and shot right up the charts. TX was a slow starter, but it’s been doing pretty well lately. GA has always been mediocre, which I suppose is a good thing, honestly. But FL is recently finding its mojo and is climbing in rank again. Go, FL! Obviously, no one is going to take the crown from NY, and NJ is probably always going to be second to NY (in everything), so there’s only so far you can go.
For three of my players, I watch their personal progress dashboards. Two of them, FL and TX, use the same software, so it kind of gives some equal comparison of the numbers. But in both cases, they use graphs that are misleading. Well, they aren’t if you understand the data, but for casual observers and those that don’t want to put the minimal effort into understanding, the response could be either, "this isn’t so bad", or "this is great" when the reality is neither of those sentiments.
Take a graph from FLs dashboard:
Wow, that’s impressive. Deaths are falling, and dramatically at that! This is all behind us, let’s go party!
But there is a small disclaimer below the chart, for those that care to read: "Death data often has significant delays in reporting…". That means that those low numbers in the near term are low because there’s no data yet. Those numbers will rise as time goes on, but that’s just fine, because there will be newer, lower numbers to report as time goes on as well.
Here’s a graph from TX’s dashboard.
This is just dumb design: plotting two values, one that will constantly increase, and one that will remain relatively constant on the same scale. This will have two effects. First, the number of deaths per day (in blue) looks like a really small value. And comparing 20 to 1,698 does make 20 seem very small. But as the total number grows, and it will, every day, the scale is going to eventually have to be adjusted, and the daily value is going to be insignificant.
TX does the same charting with the number of cases, with the same effects.
Maybe its incompetency that made these charts, but in the current political climate, and judging that these two states have pushed very hard to justify their reopening plans, it might not be a stretch to think this is just propaganda. The numbers don’t lie, they’re not telling you anything false. It’s just being presented in a way that looks most favorable.