The scary passage of time/An odd dream

Introduction/disclaimer/history

The below is largely a personal reflection, something that feels important to me, but is likely to bore almost all readers.

The page originally consisted only of (approximately) what is now referred to as “Original text”.

Concurrently with an addendum, fifteen years after the original writing, I took the opportunity to straighten out some of the unusually many language issues in the original text.

As I found myself about to add a third addendum, I decided to restructure the page to its current form.

Original text (2009-10-11)

This night (2009-10-11) I had an unusually odd dream (including bottom-of-ocean biosphere experiments, and a few other things that I will skip over):

The end of the decade was approaching, I was back living at my mother’s, and she was preparing a New Year’s celebration of some kind. Apparently not entirely adult in the dream, I started a discussion of how fascinating it was that the eighties, which had been awaited with so much anticipation and lasted almost my entire life, were growing to an end. Mid-discussion, I realized that the year was actually 1999, and that the perceived length of the eighties was largely caused by my not thinking clearly. I woke up and, as the haze of sleep lifted, found that the actual year is 2009—and that the eighties have been over for almost twenty years...

In a next step, I was hit by the realization (as opposed to the knowledge) of how much time actually has passed: If we use 1985 (the mid-point of the eighties and the “now” of Back to the Future^w) as a point of reference, and consider how far away it is from the perspective of a current 10 y.o, the appropriate comparison is not 1975 (my birth-year), nor even 1965, but 1960—and the comparison is about to move into the fifties! (Growing ever closer to 1955...)

At this point, some of the older readers are likely shaking their respective heads, smiling over young foolishness, and preparing comments along the lines of “Wait until you are eighty, before you write entries about the passage of time!”—with considerable justification. Certainly, a hypothetical reader in 2019 or 2109 will also have another perspective. However, I still feel compelled to write this entry as a way to deal with my feelings at the time of waking: While I have long known that (at least parts of) the eighties are twenty years or more into the past, I have not truly comprehended it, but gone around with a feeling that only five (or so) years had passed—even when I pointed out to others how much more similar the 1985 of “Back to the Future” is to the real-world 200x than its 2015 was, or how even its 1955 was more recognizable in many regards. The same odd distortion of perception is present with regard to myself: I am (at the time of writing) 34, but in many ways feel like my adult life is just about to start—as if I had just graduated.

A few observations about and around the dream:

1. The cause of the dream is likely a mixture of the approaching end of the “noughties” and a recent article of mine that referenced Nineteen Eighty-Four^w, the famous dystopian story once playing 36 years into the future, but now 25 years in the past. Possibly, some additional influence can have come from my recent reading of http://www.opendiary.com/entrylist.asp?authorcode=D604989^e, a tragic tale that brought the perishability and preciousness of youth and childhood to my mind (notwithstanding that I am much happier today than during most parts of my own youth).

2. I moved away from home in 1994 (uni) and left Sweden in 1997 (exchange student). Correspondingly, a 1989 date makes more sense for the dream than a 1999 one. While it is true that I often have been in Sweden over New Year’s, I have tended to spend Christmas with my mother’s side of the family, and New Year with my father’s. Further the absence of my step-father from the dream (while my sister was present) makes 1989 more plausible. (Although, on closer thought, it is possible that my mother had remarried before 1989—another illustration of the topic: Twenty years?!? Already?!?)

3. The mentioned prior anticipation (of the beginning of the decade about to end) matches 2009 much better: Both the year 2000 and the true millennium change in 2001 where eagerly awaited by me and countless others. In contrast, I had no true understanding of what year it was, or even of seventies and eighties, in 1979. Obviously, the other characteristic of the dream, the currently ending decade, also fits better on 2009 than 1989.

4. The eighties dominated my memories and experiences entirely for quite some time: I (understandably) remember comparatively little of the seventies, and the nineties only became competitive past 1995. Although the eighties are now both hazy and in a minority, the feeling of the eighties described in the dream would, therefore, have been easy to understand (in a dream scenario) had the dream taken place in 1999. Today, it is surprising to me a priori, but dreams are seldom logical.

5. In my private perception of history, the eighties have always been the first “modern” decade, with the seventies being a transitional phase to “the days of yore” (i.e. the sixties and everything earlier). Obviously, this (emotional) perception is very strongly coloured by my own life; however, the eighties were arguably a time when the world became more “futuristic” than during any other decade, including a flood of gizmos and gadgets, outrageously weird fashion, synth-dominated music, ... (Notably, while the technological side has developed even faster during the time since, this development has not, in my perception, had the same contrast to preceding decades. This perception, however, might have been different, had I been born earlier.)

6. When I began my studies in 1994, I for several months had an impression of living in the future, as if the eighties were the true “now”, and I had somehow been transplanted in time. This was likely fueled by a combination of my intense exposure to computers and the Internet during that time, and my childhood being filled with frustration over all the inventions and developments that were promised for the nineties in various pop-science features. (Obviously, the otherwise great changes in my lifestyle and independence can also have played in.)

Later additions and remarks

Dreamtoons, another fifteen years, and various reflections (2024-10-27)

Today is 2024-10-27 and I am reading a comic book dealing with the dreams of various contributors (“Dreamtoons”, Jesse Reklaw). Among the many absurdities, and just a few pages from each other, I found an underwater scenario followed by “I had a dream that it was the end of the millennium”, and was reminded of this page.

Since the time of original writing, another fifteen years and sixteen days have passed; the 2015 of “Back to the Future” came and went ten years ago; the year of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is now forty years back (longer than the time it once was into the future); even 1999 is already a quarter century back; and so, almost, is the millennium of the comic (and its copyright year of 2000); and so on, for other years mentioned.

1999/2000/2001, incidentally, was an important time for me, and included my graduation, my first real job, my first non-student/non-shared apartment, and a handful of other firsts and whatnots, e.g. a solar eclipse and my first DVD-player and DVDs. The millennium, it self, was a big thing, at least in pop culture, in a manner that might not be obvious today. We had the Y2K scare in computing and 9/11, and this and that. It does not quite seem like yesterday, but it is not that far off. The passage of time is indeed scary.

This interval also contains the mid-point between my birth and today, leaving me twice as old. A downside is that my counterfactual 2009 feeling that “my adult life is just about to start—as if I had just graduated” has long faded: while I feel reasonably young in some ways, including, surprisingly, the physical, the accumulation of negative experiences have turned me into a “grumpy old man” long before it was due. (Why are humans so stupid? Why does evil always seem to win? Why does no-one learn from history? Why do governments get away with doing so much harm? Etc.) The time since I moved to Wuppertal has been particularly hard on my take on life and humanity, with the years of construction noise, long and costly problems with incompetent civil servants, the COVID-countermeasure era, the ever-increasing spread of far-Left insanities that should have died with the Soviet Union, etc.

ABBA, “Happy New Year” (2025-01-01)

It is shortly after midnight and I just listened to ABBA’s “Happy New Year”, which was released in 1980 (so an Internet search) and which speaks of “the end of a decade” (by implication, the 1970s) and refers forward to 1989 as “in another ten years’ time”.

While there likely is no causal connection from the song to my dream (and certainly none in the other direction), it is noteworthy that ABBA, even now the Swedish band with the highest record sales, did contribute strongly to my memories and impressions of the 1980s, even if more so of the early 1980s. Moreover, the song was very often played on and around New Year’s, e.g. to conclude the TV broadcasts some time after midnight. Thematically, this aspect of the song is a perfect match.

(The mixture of dreariness and hope present in the song could also be argued to match some of my above moods, but that would be a more complicated matter.)

A sad semi-repetition (2026-01-12)

Again shortly after midnight, a few words on my last dream, from yesterday morning:

I was back in my bed in the house that I lived in until 1994 (cf. the original text and see a side-note below), in the process of waking up within the dream (presumably, in a blending of real and dream events). My mother was away for a week or so, for some reason, and I realized that she had been gone a day or two longer than planned. I found myself missing her and (very pragmatically) worrying whether there was enough food left in the house.

I had a sudden wish to take a look out her window(s), on the other side of the upper floor from my room, which gave the best of the limited views in the house. (My own bedroom window pointed out over the garage and where the garage ended, the wall of the neighbors’ house began. All the other windows were on the lower floor and limited by their lack of height above the ground.)

I was just about to get up, when I, in short order and while waking up in real life, realized that I was actually in my 2026 apartment in Wuppertal, a country away, that my mother was not just absent, but had died almost eight years, and that even the house had been sold.

Compared to my original dream, the nature is a little different, but it does show the same great jump in time and reset to a teenage setting, and I was left with a similar feeling of loss and nostalgia. The theme of my mother (in both dreams) is important in its own right because I rarely dream about her, for some reason. The time of year (likely, autumn), however, was off relative both the actual time of year and that of the original dream. The actual time of year is compatible with the original dream and the theme of changing years, but a week or two earlier would have made for a better match even there.