On time (again).
In waking life, we do not experience time as moving, because we are inside it, carried along by its steady current. We do not notice time explicitly, just as we do not feel motion on a moving train except through the window. In sleep, however, we are conscious of nothing, time included. For a while, we escape the stream and its cradle, suspended in a void of timelessness.
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One night, half-awake in my slumber, I noticed light under my roommate’s door. When I woke again in the morning, the light was gone, and everything else remained the same: the same door, the same crevice beneath it, which had once leaked a clue of life. How could that be? Because of my sleep, the two moments did not feel separated by any duration. They lay superimposed, and the only difference between them stood out sharply. If the physical dimensions were identical in both moments, then some other dimension must account for the presence and absence of light. That dimension is what we call time, and this was my clearest perception of it. Since I had been outside time’s reach, I could perceive it as an observer rather than as one of its captives. Time is a dimension alongside the physical ones, and it is what allows the physical to change. Without it, every moment would be isolated from the others, each single and complete in itself. No change would be possible, and we would experience the world as a series of still photographs.
11.5.2026
