Cell Phone Time Machine Dream

TIME TRAVEL DREAMS from Simulation Theory p 82-87 (originally published in 2007, 2nd edition 2009)

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Cell Phone Time Machine Dream – (This is a great dream with amazing detail that i had in 2002)
 My dream started off with my mother calling me to the guest bedroom that she was cleaning during summer break. She said, “Jonathan, I was cleaning out the guest bedroom and found a wrapped Christmas present addressed to you from me. I must’ve hid this a long time ago and forgot to put it under the Christmas tree. Oh look, there is a copyright on the gift tag that says 1985.”

She laughed that she spent money buying a present for me only to forget that she bought it and never put it under the Christmas tree and she was going to give it to me now after all these years. She looked at the present, looked at me, and laughed again, and offered it to me and said, “Well, it’s about 17 years late, and we’re in the middle of summer, but Merry Christmas honey. I can’t wait to see what it is. I guess its one gift that you never got.”

I opened up the gift. It was a glossy hardcover book entitled Star Wars 5½. It felt different than a regular book. It was heavier and felt like there was metal in it. She remembered buying it for me and said, “These were a short term fad back when I got it. This is an interactive book where when you open it up, you actually get to go inside the book and experience what is happening. You get to live the book. It’s all simulated but it seemed to be a pretty cool idea. I couldn’t believe this technology could exist in 1985. I don’t know why they stopped making it. On TV they said the experience was too intense for young kids to handle and they’d cry and parents got upset and they stopped selling them. But, I guess you’re old enough now.” She laughed again, and said, “Sorry so late, but hey, better late than never.  Enjoy.”

I was so fired up. I had so many questions about what happened between

Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. (Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones had just opened in movie theaters at the time of me having this dream.)

I opened up the book and was sucked into it and then reappeared in the scene of the book I was reading. It was a battle scene somewhat like the Hoth Battle in Empire Strikes Back and the Endor Battle in Return of the Jedi but it took place on a different planet. There was green grass, snow and

desert sand all in my view. I didn’t have much time to enjoy the scenery because there were Imperial Walkers coming my way. In addition to the walkers there were Rebel Alliance fighter ships going after the walkers. I was wondering which side I was supposed to be fighting for and who I should be

running from. The Imperial Walkers seemed to be shooting at me and coming my way so I guessed I’d better run from them. The laser explosions that landed nearby me seemed extremely intense and real and I began to wonder if I could actually get hurt in this book experience.

Just as I was considering trying to figure out a way to close the book before I got hurt to research the side effects of reading books like this, my friend Jeff showed up. Jeff walked through the whole battle scene like it wasn’t even happening. He had a cell phone in his hand and was doing something on it and looked like he had something really interesting to tell me.

He said, “Hey Jon, you gotta see this new cell phone AT&T just released. It’s got time travel technology built into it.” He showed me the screen of the phone and began typing in numbers. “You just type in the date of where it is you want to go to and then press call and it takes you there. This is the first

generation of them so we can only go back in time but the next gen release I heard you can go forward in time. After that I heard they’ll have some dimension sliding capabilities.”

I was only half catching what he was saying because I was more concerned that we were in the middle of an intergalactic war in the Star Wars Universe and pointed that out to Jeff. He kinda shrugged it off by saying, “Oh yeah this is the Star Wars 5 ½ simulator? Those things were cool back in the 80’s. So where in time do you want to go?” I never wanted to travel back in time, only forward so I let him choose.

Our bodies vanished and we ended up somewhere in time. With us, my buddies Mike, Matt and Smokey were all there too. I asked how they got there. Jeff said he had invited them and picked them up on the way to my house. I thought that was cool. There were five of us. I was wondering how all five of us were all able to travel through time when Jeff was the only one with a cell phone. I thought we’d all have to have the same phone.

Jeff pointed out, “OK. Here is the best part: We can do whatever we

want, and anytime we need to leave we just enter another date and we’ll

transport there. I can always just end the call by pushing END CALL.”

So the five of us walked through towns dressed in our 2002 A.D. clothing

and spoke loudly about tales from the future, made fun of the people

because they didn’t have modern technology and acted like real jerks.

Anytime angry people would attack us for being mean, Jeff would just enter a

new date and we’d disappear.

One time we went to a duplicate time period and the people remembered

us and attacked us before we realized we had already pissed them off and Jeff

had to enter a date really quick into the phone and transported us.

We ended up in the new time period and when Jeff checked out the time

period he entered into the phone he started cursing. “Crap, crap, crap.” We

were wondering why he was upset. We asked if he was hurt. He said,

“There’s something I forgot to tell you guys. Since this is still in beta testing,

there are some blackout dates.”

I asked, “Blackout dates? What the heck is a blackout date?”

Jeff explained, “A black out date is a date in time where the satellites were

offline for maintenance and upgrades. Whenever they did any maintenance

on these satellites, they had to take them offline for an entire day.”

I had some serious questions. “Satellites? F’n satellites? When the heck

were the satellites put in space? What the heck year are we in?” I looked at

his cell phone. It read 1317 A.D. I continued, “1317 A.D.! 1317 A.D.!

There were satellites orbiting Earth in 1317 A.D.? As far as I’ve been taught

the Space Age is a relatively new thing that started in the 20th Century! When

were these satellites first put into space?”

Jeff looked down, and then looked up at the group and said, “The

satellites . . . the satellites were always there.” We all looked at each other

confused as all hell. Jeff understandably realized we were confused and said,

“How do you think we were able to travel through time? The satellites beam

the data back and forth to a data storage facility on the moon. The moon is

Earth’s natural satellite. Obviously the moon has always been there. But

listen, guys, we’re in deeper trouble than you all realize. We’ve been time

traveling all day, and even though we can return to our time period at the

same exact moment we left so that nobody will know we even left, we can’t

leave here for twenty four hours, until the satellites are back online.”

We all briefly assessed the situation and I said, “Alright, big whoop. So

we have to spend a day in the year 1317, big deal. That’s not so bad. We’ll

return back to right before we left and it’ll be like we didn’t lose any time.

We’ll age but we won’t lose time.”

Jeff said, “What you fail to realize is that my cell phone battery is going to

die before then. We’ve been time traveling all day. My battery has taken a

beating.”

I said, “Just turn it off.”

Jeff pointed out that his battery loses a significant portion of its power

when it’s turned off and back on. The battery was designed to just always

stay on. He pointed out that even though he had his charger in his pocket,

AC electricity doesn’t exist in 1317 and won’t exist for a few hundred years.

Furthermore he demonstrated that we’d have no frame of reference for time

because all of our wrist watches were spinning backwards trying to catch up

with the time period we were in and we’d have to wait in real time as if we

were winding the watches with our hands. Our cell phone clocks were all

showing “no signal” on the displays.

Jeff continued to explain that because we will have no reference of time

when he turns off his phone, we will have to wait extra long, maybe longer

than twenty four hours to not run the risk of turning on the phone too early

only to have to turn it off again and kill even more battery. Frighteningly he

explained that he needs a certain amount of battery power per person to

transport them through time and he was worried that when we turned it back

SIMULATION THEORY 85

on there wouldn’t be enough to transport all five of us. None of our

cellphone batteries were compatible with his phone.

I asked him if he was absolutely sure about the rules of time travel

through the AT&T Wireless network. He assured me that he had gone to all

of the meetings for demonstrations on how to use the new phone. (He

worked for AT&T Wireless at the in real life at the time.) I then asked, “If

this time is blacked out, how did we travel to it?”

Jeff said, “I know, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I think what

happened is, the servers just went offline about two seconds after we got

here. So we checked in right before server maintenance kicked in.

I let him know, “Alright that’s the situation we’re faced with. Let’s just

turn off the phone and wait it out and hope for the best tomorrow.” I

turned to the group and said, “So, what do you guys want to do now that

we’re stuck in a time period where all of the things we like do not exist?”

We found a castle that we assumed was the equivalent of a hotel. We paid

the guy with change and told him we were explorers from The United States

of America and that our currency was very valuable. The guy saw we had

good hygiene compared to the people of their time and believed our story

but wondered “where the heck is The United States of America?”

Our castle room was pretty bare. The walls were made of stone.

There were two couches of some sort and some chairs and a table. The guy

who admitted us into the castle hotel gave us bananas and we ate them

because we were hungry and we didn’t want to have to go kill an animal

because we didn’t really know how. We sat around and talked about all the

stupid things we did and how sucky our lives will suddenly become if we get

stuck back in time. We did postulate that we could become very rich and

teach people how to build some of the modern technology that we have

today by providing the ideas even though we didn’t have the engineering

know how. Basically that is how we spent our time. We went to sleep and

woke up and couldn’t believe we were still back in time. Somehow we

thought maybe it would end when we woke up but it didn’t. We figured a

long time had passed by, probably enough so that the satellites were working

again and we decided to go have a look around to see if we could find any

methods the people of 1317 had of keeping time, maybe a sundial or

something. Our watches were still turning.

We got up and left our castle room and got almost to the outside

where we were confronted by some king looking dude with a bunch of

knights. They looked angry. He spoke out with authority, “Time travelers

from another time invading our time? Fancy people from the future coming

back to our time to mock our primitive way of life? We shall punish you to

live in our time for the rest of your lives and then you will see who has it

best. You will be stuck in our prison, our prison of time. Having to wait it

out knowing what you no longer have, never to have it again.”

We ran away to our room and put the big wooden lockbar on it.

They ran after us. They were at our door yelling while Jeff was fumbling his

phone out of his pocket. He said, “Alright man, I guess this is our only

chance.” He tried turning his phone on.

I asked, “How the F do they know we’re time travelers?”

Mike said, “Gee, do you think our appearance gave it away? Do you

think the f’n coins you gave them that were minted 1998 and 2001 and 2002

gave it away?”

I said, “Yeah, no, but, it’s like this isn’t the first time this has

happened to them. It’s like someone else had come and made fun of them

before or something.” Jeff was still working on getting the phone to connect

and said, “alright almost got it, almost got it. Crap, there is still a few

minutes left.”

The medieval time people were still banging on the door and jiggling

the handle and trying to bust it down. We were all getting really scared and

hoping that enough time had passed by so that we can get out of that crappy

situation. We had been in bad situations before, but this was the first time

we weren’t able to just time travel out of it. Suddenly our friend Huda

appears in the room. We all ask at the same time, “Huda, what the hell are

you doing here?”

Huda, catched his breath and said with his New York accent, “Thank

God I’ve found you guys, I’ve been looking all over for you. Hey wait a

minute, you ask what the hell am I doing here? What the hell are you guys

doing here? You guys are going through time acting like a bunch of assholes

pissing everybody off. What’s going on right now? Yeah, I bet those people

outside are trying to bang down your door because they’re offended by time

travelers right? Yeah. You wanna know why? It’s because you guys have

been traveling through time upsetting everyone. It’s worse than you think.

It’s not like someone being hated in their time period or after their death like

Adolf Hitler. People before your existence hate you.”

Huda started dancing, “Hey look at me, I’m from the future! Hey

look at us; we have shaved faces and nice haircuts. Look at our comfortable

Nike sneakers and look at your uncomfortable sandals. You guys ruined

time traveling for everyone. Because of the things you’ve done to the time

space continuum now, people of the past pass down stories that time

travelers are immoral people of the future who have life so good with our

electronic appliances and free time but are so bored with the free time that

they go back in time to ridicule the people of the past who don’t have the

privilege of reading books and watching documentaries on Discovery

Channel and all of the nice things that we have because they don’t exist yet.

What the hell is wrong with you guys?”

Jeff said, “Huda, yo, we’re sorry, but, how the heck did you travel

back to this time, isn’t it blacked out right now?”

Huda replied back, “Listen up there slick. I don’t know why you

would cause all of the problems you do traveling through time and then

travel to a blacked out period, that seems pretty smart there pal, given your

track record. But see, I’m actually your buddy Huda from the future, not the

present that you all time traveled from. I’m Huda from about 5 months into

the future from your departure date, so I know things you don’t know. How

does that feel Mr. Time Traveling Man? I have the upgraded AT&T

cellphone model that is able to override the blackout time periods by

simulating the data it has from before the blackout and after the blackout by

differentiating what had changed. Thus, I have full range of time travel

without the fear of entering a blackout zone.”

Huda continued, “So how does it feel there you man of the past? I

know who wins the Superbowl this season. You don’t. And I’m not going

to tell you. I know what games come out for the Xbox and I’ve played them.

You haven’t played them yet. You haven’t even seen the previews for them

in the magazines. I know things you will do in your life that you don’t know

yet because you haven’t lived it yet.”

Jeff said, “Huda, that’s great. But you see, there are some Crusading

Roman Empire looking guys on the other side of this door that want to

ensure that none of us get to take warm showers ever again. I don’t know

why you’re being such a dick. We need your help. My phone only has

enough juice for two people. Can you take the others back?

Huda agreed, but only if we agreed to go undo what we did after we

get back. We agreed. I went with Jeff and Smokey; Matt and Mike went

with Huda. At this point I woke up.