Didn’t you know time is not a straight line? Sometimes it goes backward. Sometimes my mind is in a different place than my body. Sometimes life breaks us into different selves and those selves still believe they live in the “past”, in the time they were created. Sometimes returning to the “present” is like swimming to the surface of a deep well.

A few years ago I had a dream:

My life flashes before my eyes like a video on rewind. People, friendships and places of the past are now present again. I am a child still living in our pale orange weatherboard lodge. My brother is so little it is not clear what sex he is. He seems like a little girl. I am a visitor from the future, holding the sacred knowledge of how we all turn out. Of how my brother is actually girl born in the wrong body, and at the age of 22 he comes out as trans and begins the process of aligning his body with who he is inside. Of how we sell this house and, distraught, I am moved to the suburbs during my late teens. Of my slow decline. I sense that I am dreaming and want to return to my current reality but I can’t wake up. I keep going into my mum’s bedroom as I am scared. My mother lies in her bed, distant, desolate. How can she understand what is going on with me anyway? How can anyone here understand what is going on with me, they are all stuck in their world, their tiny fragment of time, and have no awareness of life beyond this. Not even a psychiatrist would understand what is going on with me. I am struck with sheer terror as I realise how completely alone and lost I am. I pinch myself desperately trying to wake up. I scream hoping it might alert someone in my “real” life that I’m stuck and need help, but no one can hear me through the fog. I scream at the top of my lungs but still my voice is muffled. I wonder if this is what it’s like to die. I resign to my bedroom, sentenced to life inside my own subconscious mind. To a dream. To an endless time loop where I must live this life over and over. My little brother comes to the door and hands me a thermometer because I seem sick. I then wake up 20 years later to my familiar life and bedroom. The thermometer was magic! Relief sweeps over me, yet the terror lingers like the sun’s warmth. It takes me a while to feel safe again. I have woken up in a sweat and I throw my hot water bottle out of the bed.

The dream I had was so life-like I believe it was not just a dream. I believe that, somehow, somewhere, what we call the “past” still exists. I believe in parallel worlds. I believe in fiction. And I am left with the disturbing question, is this world also a dream? Is there even such a thing as “reality” or is dreams all we have?

‘Once Chuang Chou dreamed that he was a butterfly. He fluttered about happily, quite

pleased with the state he was in, and knew nothing about Chuang Chou. Presently he

awoke and found that he was very much Chuang Chou again. Now, did Chou dream he was

a butterfly or was the butterfly now dreaming that he was Chou?’ (Chuang-tzu, quoted in

Blechner, 2001, p. 239)