I was in a large room, possibly a cafeteria or gym. The room was dimly lit, and there was a large group of people dancing in a kind of mosh with lots of jumping up and down and churning of the crowd in general. Apparently, this dream was physics-based, because there was a man providing off-stage narration. I had a small battery-operated race car in my hands.
"Let's say you're at a dance," the narrator said, "and you drop your car battery."
The small, silver battery dropped to the floor and rolled under the roiling feet of the dancers. The battery appeared to be smashed into the floor. Sometimes it seemed like it broke through the tiles, other times it seemed like it phased through. I made some protest, and managed to find the battery, a little dusty, on the ground where some dancers has passed.
As I picked it up, the narrator asked, "How do you know that's the same battery?" The implication was that this was an illustration of how an electron's quantum state is probable after an exchange between atoms / ?the quantum foam?
"Well," I said, the battery did look a little worn, and I wondered if it still had a charge, "presumably, there's only one loose battery on the floor, and I've just found it." (In waking life I'm thinking of all sorts of problems with this assumption and my imagination is filled with Newton's cradles made of electrons...)
There's a break in the narrative.
I was in a lounge or living room. The lighting was very dim, but there was a sense of a series of red, vertical, permeable planes sectioning off the room at regular intervals. The planes gave off a ruddy glow, and cast a dull glow on objects or people between them at certain angles. I was aware that the X, Y, and Z axes of the room were adjacent dimensions, and if one looked in the right direction, one was looking in the direction of time.
The narrator, a 50-ish man with short salt-and-pepper hair and beard, was explaining something (he had a science-hip, sexy-dad air of a TED talk presenter). There was another man in the room, I think he was clean-shaven and in his thirties; he was more a shadow than anything. The narrator had a small red ball. I have an image of the ruddy ball moving between two red-tinged and transparent planes. If he walked a certain direction, the ball turned white. My sense is that when the ball was red, it was moving though space, but not moving on its timeline.
The three of us walked through the room along different directions, and our paths crossed. The Narrator tossed me the ball, which turned white. I caught it, and tossed it to the shadowy man; the ball stayed white, but seemed to be floating in the air with no one holding it. The shadowy man lobbed the ball from behind his back and the Narrator caught it. The path of the ball between the three of us described a loop, and I understood that it had looped back to its starting point in time.
The Narrator finished speaking and turned to me.
"All I want to know," I said, "is what is time and what force is it that draws us through it?" (In waking life, I wonder if forces like gravity and electromagnetism can propel objects through physical dimensions, could there be a force pulling us through an axis of time? Are we living in a time-well analogous to a gravity-well?)
This seemed to be the correct response, because the Narrator and the shadowy man both grinned like maniacs, and an influx of sound and light woke me.
I swear, I fully expected a dream about Ancient Egyptian things, because I went to bed reading about the Coffin Texts, The Book of Going Forth by Day, The Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and the development of ancient pharaonic tomb architecture as a physical map to the rituals involved in those texts. Perhaps rumination on the cyclical re-birth of the sun somehow turned into a dream meditation on the nature of time?
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