Have I lost my mind, you ask? Experiments with time? But these were inevitable, as you must see when you consider the nature of a dream. Try to draw a map of the places you've been, a schedule of the events you've witnessed.They won't hold together, won't make sense, until you let go of the expectations your high school geometry teacher pounded into your pimply little head. It's not Euclidean, this world you drift through. It creates its own time and space according to its own organic rules, and why not? What would it mean to say that5 this imaginary world filled up a real place? How could space and time being anything but defined by the things in them, given form and substance by that which they contained? Can one speak of an ordering without speaking of that which is ordered?

But the "real world" was but another dream, was it not, so how could the space that our "real" bodies moved through or the time that would pass as they did so, be any less a mirage, one that would trap us through our misguided faith in it? A faith hard to lose, I will admit - as strongly as I have tried to imagine myself into the places where I've wished to be, I've never succeeded in reaching them without stretching my legs. I've wondered whether that was good or bad. What a wonderous sight that would be, so enlightening for those who would see me suddenly just be there. "In a blaze of light?", I wondered, soon seeing the folly of this, and the reason for my failure. So frightened would be the masses by this apparition before them, one so solid as to make the floorboards creak, that they would lose the faith that sustained the dream. I was ready to embrace the paradox - disbelief coming to the rescue of belief - but most were not, and no one sould had the strength needed to sustain the rest.

Had I any humility in me at all, I'd have to see that.

That understanding, had I been less bold in my understanding of the world, or more bold in my understanding of myself, might have ended my attempts at transcendence, right there and then, but fortune, smiling on me, spared me the ravages of both my folly and wisdom. While space eluded my grasp, time greeted me with a warm embrace, yielding so demurely to my touch as to arose the concern or disapproval of none.

Think of the horrible moments that you have seen, moments that you so wish you could go back and repair. No, I could not go back, not completely. Time had not given herself to me so completely as that - but I found that I could make the bad times simply go away, not have been at all, fading out as one might have expected, now that they were forgotten. Having thus cut and spliced my day as if it were a passage in a story needing revision, I could now go through my day without regret.

At first, I was afraid that I would break that naive faith with which we all begin, so I adopted a prudent timidity, only abolishing a few seconds at a time. I found that the people accepted these changes without distress. Why? Strange, wasn't it? But it wasn't. Everything, physically, was where it would have been if the moment had been left in its original flawed form, so the mind was free to fill in the blank spaces left by my excisions. "A good theory", I though, but good theories could be wrong, so out of a sense of responsibility for those around me - and myself - I only allowed myself to become bolder in increments. I'd wipe away mere minutes until, seeing that this was good, would move on to do the same to hours. These observations I recorded in loving detail, before accepting with any confidence that what I had begun in wonder, then becoming no more than the start of a mere hypothesis, had truly become theory and on its way to being confirmed fact, to be shared with those ready to put it to good use.

Had I become a scientist in spite of myself, I wondered? Why, yes I had and why should I have shied from that thought? Had I not made of religion a science, replacing all of the angrily proclaimed dogma with a deeper understanding of the world, gleaned from observations gathered through eyes that I had forced myself to keep open, and unclouded by prejudice? And how much more there was to the the religion of these "scientists" who so imagined themselves to be beyond superstition and prejudgement? Look at how they would respond when one dared to suggest that one even question the notion that the world was unresponsive to our thoughts about it! One might as well have asked a medieval clergyman to question the divinity of the Christ, so quick were they to rage, so eager to get away from you, the heretic.

Not that I judged them. Was this not the way of the world, the old fighting to the last to hold its ground, against the inevitable triumph of the new, which it so strongly tried to deny? How frustrating and yet, at the same time, how wonderful that the old guard imagined that it might win. From where else might the common man find his faith in the solidity of things, if he didn't have some comfortable source of authority to reassure him of the truth of what he needed to believe. What we all needed to believe to some degree, in fact.

So it was - I had a debt of gratitude to these who frustrated me so and yes, this was a paradox, but then, so was the world. How much so, I would soon find out.