Tuesday 21 September 1999

I dreamt that some friends of me had invited me to a fairly short space flight with them. (In this timeline local space flight was fairly common, but faster than light travel was of course non existant. This will be important later.) The friends were a few families from Smith's Friends, pious christians known for their large families and peaceful fundamentalism. We were supposed to be back home a few days later. Alas, this was not to happen.

Not too far from Earth we encountered an unknown and invisible astronomical phenomenon, which must basically have been a kind of one way spacetime warp. We were thrown light years out of course, and finally happened on an Earth-like, habitable planet. (So sue me, it was a dream, OK?) So we settled down here. Aware that help may not be forthcoming for years, most probably for many generations, we settled down and built dwellings near the landing place, living off the nature here and taking up agriculture. (No further details on this.) The symbol of community, the center around which people gathered, were a few original objects from Earth - and chief among them a piano.

A few months later, I was standing outdoors, looking at the piano and the cupboards or whatever those were behind it. And I realized that it was already a shrine, a small temple, though they knew it not. And my thoughts turned to distant Earth. I realized that there I was presumed dead, when our spaceship had been gone for months. By now surely people had cleared my apartment, making their opinions on my life based on the things they found there. Then again I reflected on how calm I felt about that: I was after all departed, albeit in a more literal sense, and would never more have any part in what went on under the sun.

It was a few years later that the dream ended. At this time I came back to what was now essentially a very small village. I was reflecting on the fact that the small colony was breeding furiously, and would almost certainly take hold on this hospitable planet. But what would become of them? First of all, I decided I had to teach them how to make a functional printing press. I knew enough about the principles that I could oversee such a construction. Without paper and printing, there was no way they could avoid a spiral down into superstition and barbary. By the time their descendants would be found by the expanding Earth empire, they would be ugh-ugh cavemen if they survived at all. They were doing well so far, but my time might be running out. I had to teach them.

Coming home to the house where I lived along with a young family, I looked at a row of three small boys, very serious looking, and apart from a slight age difference all looking like twins, exact copies of their father. Then I woke up.

Leonard Cohen himself is rather blatant about mixing religious references into love songs. Another favorite of mine, Irish singer and songwriter Chris de Burgh, has this disturbing tendency to sometimes go so far in his adoration that only a deity could do it justice. And I find it again and again elsewhere too: Love songs that would be better classified as hymns. And often as not they are among my favorites too. Am I, like, a closet theophile?

Now, given my recurring hetero leanings, there may be a kind of unmet demand here if I actually do have a ream of this hide. But there is just no way I can stretch my notorious gullibility to the level where I endow females with godlike attributes. Well, some of my female friends are arguably endowed with divine attributes, but that's for very different values of "divine" as well as "attributes". -Not that it matters to me, of course. I mean ... Like, just because I notice don't mean I ... Look, how did I end up talking about this?

Uh. I think I am painting
myself into a corner
here ...