I had a dream last night (well, technically this morning) that I was fighting this evil tree beast (don’t ask) on an Australian ranch and to fight it I had to transport to another location (for gawd knows what reason). Not only did I bend space though, I also bent time and landed myself back at Bard College at the beginning of my first semester. Unlike most time travel movies I didn’t meet (or try and avoid) my younger doppleganger. Instead I was my younger doppleganger, but with all of the knowledge I now possess, much like Quantum Leap, but just transported into my own body.

This led to quite a few interesting and baffling questions. When you know everything you now know, but haven’t had the chance to learn it yet, do you keep doing what you did or do you do something different and risk everything changing? Figure, you are trapped doing every boring thing you did before and having to face doing it all over again. Seven years is a long time to go through the motions. So do you try a completely new direction? I mean, I’m sure I could have gotten laid a lot more in college knowing what I know now. I could have sought out my friends quicker, but then how would you even go about doing that? “Hey, I already know you like this, this and this…Want to be friends?” You could have become intimate with the one that got away before they got away, but do you risk ruining their happiness in doing so? Do you take a trip down to Florida in 2000 to help stop an election from getting rigged? Alert the airports that they have terrorists on their planes on September 10, 2001? And if you do, how drastically does the world change? Does it move towards the better? I mean, 9/11 was horrible, Bush is the devil, and Iraq is a pointless war that will surely doom us all, but without all of those things there would be no remake of Battlestar Galatica.

What a responsibility it would be to live in the past with the knowledge of the future. What an incredible burden. Sure it sounds great but would it really be worth it? My mind was so blown by the complexity of the scenarios that my mind had created for me that it took quite some time before I could rouse myself from bed. And as a result I’ve been in a very odd mood all day long, lonely wondering many “What ifs”? If you’ve got a few minutes to yourself one day, take a second to think of what it would be like if the you of today went back to be you of seven years ago. Would things be better or worse? I mean much of what holds us back in life is the fear of the unknown, but if the unknown is known, couldn’t we do more and be more? This question has nagged at me all day long, and honestly I don’t know the answer.