Part Time Person

It was recently proven that light can be made to run in reverse:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060511185537.htm

This is a startling concept, especially in that in seems to violate the law against speeds faster than light. You inject a beam of light into a fiber optic cable, but the instant that it begins to move into the cable, it is greeted by the same beam travelling out in reverse from the cable. One resolution is that the lightbeam moves backwards in time, as is thought to be the case with the elusive class of particles called tachyons. Clearly something is at work here.

After I read this I had a dream. I was invited to a special Kripalu yoga group, in which about twenty other people had previously participted. It was my first time, so everything was explained to me. We stood at random intervals throughout the room and were not to move from our spot as we struck various poses. A large cardboard sheet was randomly thrown in the air, and as it sailed, we would attempt to catch it while not deviating from a pose. Each time the cardboard landed near one, you were supposed to pick it up and write something personal on it. You then flung it around the room again. This was a mixed nudity class, and the thought occurred to me as we conducted our poses and tossed the cardboard, that we were creating a performance art piece, both written and physical, in the style of Vanessa Beecroft.

However, the writing on the cardboard means something else to me now that I have thought about the dream. The prohibition against faster than speed of light travel most accurately stated says that information cannot move faster than C. Was the group poem we composed meant to represent information itself?

After the session ended, one of the participants, an elderly man, invited me to look out a window, and as he pulled back the drapes, I saw the vastness of space--utterly dark, punctuated only by specks of light. The man told me that something was wrong. Our ship had stopped moving. We should have thought ahead and placed rescue stations along the way. I told him I didn't understand.

Outside in the parking lot it was night, although it had been day when I entered. The parking lot was barren, just a few cars that looked as if they had not moved in a long time. A high chain link/barbed wire fence surrounded the parking lot. I was alone, and of course, my car wouldn't start.

And it was then that I realized that there was no wind, no sound. Birds hung in the air, midflight. Time itself had stopped.

This is how it must be, I realized, this is how it must feel the moment that a beam of light travelling backwards through time meets its own beam tunneling foward through time.