From the Vault: Time Traveler Zero, Part 2

My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we are picking up with our our second episode about time travel as a concept, time travel as it appears, especially in Fick Shan and The Human Imagination. The first episode was Time Traveler zero Part one. Uh, then we had a little break and did another episode, and now we're back with Time Traveler zero Part two. Now I thought this was going to be in one, but I guess we wait. Now we're already in twenty one. I

get all confused about years. I thought it was going to be next year, but uh yeah, yeah, but then we ended up shuffling some stuff around so here we are earlier than we thought. Yeah, yeah, so we were just traveling back and forth between past and future, uh

though within the the artificial confines of of our publication schedule. Now, in the last episode, we talked about some of the earliest possible appearances of forms of time travel in mythology and literature, such as in the Mahabarata and in some say Japanese folk tales, where the way you could probably describe the time travel mechanism is something like time dial action.

So uh so, for example, the the story of King Rivada and his daughter Ravatti in the in the Sanskrit epics that would you know, they travel up to the Brahma realm and they stay there for a few minutes. But then they find because time moves differently in the Brahma realm than it does down on Earth, millions of years have passed and whoops, like that, their entire civilization

is gone and it's on to a different age. But I think today we're going to look at a similar but slightly different mechanism that appears in the history of

time travel mythology and literature, which is sleeping into the future. Yeah, and this is this is one of the concepts that's discussed in Paul J. Nahan's book Time Machines Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction, which is a book that I I cited in the first episode and we'll continue to decide from this if you if you're looking for a good time travel book that deals with like the concept of time travel but also gets into some

of the heavier scientific contemplations of the topic, it's a great book to pick up. So Nan discusses the time travel by dreaming was once a common literary device, and yeah, that it's closely related to this idea of sleeping into the future. The and and and this is something I love because this is something that we can all relate to because we all do it every night, right, Well, we lay our head down on the pillow, and you know, there might be a little bit of struggle getting the

time machine activated. But once the once sleep mode is in place, um, you were able to skip forward in time. Now depending on how you sleep in the nature of your dreams. Uh, you know, not every journey is going to be the same. Some of these journeys are a little round about, um, you know, where suddenly we have to you know, stop and um how to to to steal a joke from Mitch Hedberg, we have to let um uh build a toy playing with our boss or

something before getting to our destination. Uh with my landlord was go kart with the land that Um, yeah, it say so. There might be some distractions on the way, but when you wake up, it will be tomorrow, it will be the next day, it will be the next morning. Though.

One thing that's interesting about that is, uh that I think if you ever have the experience of going under general anesthesia and being able to compare that experience to the normal experience of sleep, at least for me, and I think this is pretty common for others as well, the comparison to anesthesia makes you aware that you are sort of semi conscious of the passage of time during sleep in a way that you're not really for the like the pure deep unconsciousness of anesthesia, where I mean

under the drugs, it's just sort of like, you know, you snap your fingers and then you're awake hours later, or at least that that's sort of what I recall. But with with sleeping, you know, you're not really conscious of the passage of time, but you're you're sort of maybe liminally conscious that something is going on. Time is somehow passing, it's not quite as much of a pause and then play as as anesthesia is. Oh, I agree, absolutely, That's been my experience. Um. I guess when you sleep

and when you dream, time gets weird. Uh. And it may it may feel like it passes very quickly, but when you go under anesthesia, UM, time just disappears completely. It is, like you said, just the like the snap of a finger. Um. So, so yeah, that's something important to keep in mind. But but but obviously, you know, people for you know, thousands and thousands of years would have been privy to this, this weird situation. And maybe it's not even that weird because it does happen every night.

Though I would argue that the world of dreams always offers a little weirdness. Uh. People would be familiar with this, um, this phenomenon. And so we see a play out in various stories. Uh. Probably the most famous of these, um still to this day is it is going to be Washington Irving's eighteen nineteen story Rip van Winkle, in which

a man sleeps his way twenty years into the future. Now, of course this this would become a pretty standard trope of of of science fiction, especially when you get into the realm of suspended animation. Uh. This, of course was parodied in the long running sci fi animated series Futurama, where Fry essentially sleeps into the future via cryogenics. But

you all also find it in various other works. One that Naan mentions is um it was is H. G. Wells When the Sleeper Awakes from eight which is is not what I've read, not when I was familiar with. But this one involves a sleep jaunt from the year eighteen seven to the year so you wake up and there are some giant flying machines that look kind of

like skeletal butterflies or something. Oh yeah, there's some wonderful illustrations from this that I was able to look up that I believe we're part of the original published story. And yeah, they're black and white, and yeah, there's like they're like enormous structures. They're these flying machines that look like the they look kind of like the ornithopter is that the Wookies are using in the Star Wars movies. Uh,

really cool looking stuff. There was also a seventeen seventy one tale by L. S. Mercy Or about an eighteenth century sleeper who awakes in the twenty five century. And I just have to say, I love how so many of these time travel yarns they're just really jumping out there. You know, they're going, uh, you know, hundreds of years into the future. I wonder again, I think I contemplated this a little bit in our last episode, like, what does it say about a given time period, how far

into the future time their fictional time travelers are going. Now, one of the things that Nan points out is that sleeping into the future is quite an old trope, and uh, it might well be the oldest time travel concept in human storytelling. I don't think any of the examples we're looking at would go back farther than the Maha Barta, which did not involve sleeping and was more of the time dilation version. But but certainly it us go way back. I'm going to cite an example of sleeping into the

future from the ancient world in just a minute here. Well, the one that the name shares is from around six hundred ce Gregory of Tours told a story titled The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who traveled three hundred and seventy two years via sleep whoa sometimes known as the Seven Sleepers. This is a medieval tale told about a group of Christian youths who hide in a cave outside of of the city around to fifty c in order to escape Roman persecution, and they emerge. I think that the exact

number of years they sleep varies. I've seen three hundred, I've seen three seventy two. But they they wake up and they find that the that everything has changed. The city is now a city of believers and um in a in A version of this tale is also found

in the Qoran. Now that's interesting because it shows one of the things that time travel is sometimes used to do in literature and in folk tales, which is to uh to sort of vindicate a person's reputation or point of view, to to show sort of like, yep, the future acknowledged they were right. So these people go and fall asleep in a cave as a persecuted minority and then come out and their side is finally vindicated and

has taken over. Yeah, and and I guess on on a simpler level, it's it's about using the time travel story to compare the past and the future or the past in the present, whichever compare two points of time and have some a character or characters involved as the bridge between the two that can provide a point of view. Yeah, that's right. So the stories allow a level of perspective that doesn't occur in reality. That you know that you can see two things that a person in reality can

can never see both of two different ages. Uh. But I found an example I thought was really interesting because it turns out sleeping into the future actually goes back even farther than the the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. I wanted to talk about a really interesting example I came across in the stories of the first century b CE Jewish scholar and a legend miracle worker named Honey the Circle Maker. Now, I think his best historians can tell

Honey was a real person. This is not like a purely legendary figure, though I think some of the accounts of his life are obviously probably legendary. But but it seems like this was a real guy. He was a real scholar who lived in the first century b C. He's not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible or the Tanock. He he lived after the books of the Tannock were composed, but stories about him are preserved in the Talmud, the collection of of Jewish law and uh commentary known as

the Talmud. And he gets his epithet the circle Maker or sometimes the circle drawer from the most famous story about his life, which which I will tell now. And I'm summarizing the version that appears in the Babylonian Talmud, which I found in full text English translation with a nice searchable online version called the William Davidson Digital Edition of the Talmud. It's got both English and modern Hebrew side by side, so it looks like a very usable addition.

But anyway, the story of the most famous miracle goes like this. So there's this Jewish scholar named Hony Uh and he is living in a time of drought, and the people come to him and ask Hony to pray to God that rain might fall. And Hony seems very confident that he's going to get results, because he tells the people that they need to go and bring their clay ovens inside because there's about to be so much rain that the clay will dissolve. In the downpour. Yeah,

you don't want that happen. So Hony prays, but no rain comes, and in response, Hony steps it up. So he draws a circle in the dust on the ground, and he stands inside the circle, and then he says, quote, Master of the Universe, your children have turned to their faces towards me, as I am a member of your household. Therefore I take an oath by your great name that I will not move from here until you have mercy

upon your children and answer their prayers for rain. And apparently it works, because a little sprinkling of rain then begins, but it's a weak rain. So Hony is not satisfied, and he prays to God again, saying quote, I did not ask for this, but for rain to fill the cisterns, ditches and caves with enough water to last the entire year. So then the rain picks up and it starts to

pour violently, mightily rushing rain. Uh. And Hony isn't quite happy with this either, so he says, quote, I did not ask for this damaging rain either, but for rain of benevolence, blessing, and generosity. I kind of like that. He's uh, He's kind of standing up to the Hebraic God in a way that you know, you don't see in in various other stories, certainly you don't see and say, like the Book of job right, there's a very different attitude. Yeah, with Tony here and and his sort of almost rudeness

with God. Is is something that does come up in a controversy in the epilogue to the story. But just to quickly finish the story, uh, the narrative says quote Subsequently, the rains fell in their standard manner, but continued unabated, filling the city with water until all of the Jews exited the residential areas of Jerusalem and went to the Tipple Mount due to the rain. So he calls for rain and God provides it. But then there's sort of

an epilogue where there's like controversy about several things. First of all, the people ask is it raining too much? Should should Hony pray to God to make it stop now? And they have a back and forth about that. But then also it's the question is raised, you know, was there kind of something wrong with the way Hony was

was nagging God for rain? Like the text actually the English translation, I was looking at uses the word nag, but ultimately the scholars conclude that, you know, Hony is okay because God responded to his please without repre manned, And so it seems like Tony's relationship with God is good. Well, he was like a member of his households. Yeah, exactly, they go way back. So that's Hony the circle maker. But how it becomes relevant to time travel is there

is actually a story of Hony sleeping into the future. Uh. And this story is also from the Babylonian Talmud. It is attributed to a Rabbi Johannon, and I just want to read it here and then we can talk about it a bit. Quote all the days of the life of that righteous man Hony, he was distressed over the meaning of this verse A song of a sense. When the Lord brought back those who returned to Zion, we

were like those who dream Psalms one one. He said to himself, is there really a person who can sleep and dream for seventy years? How is it possible to compare the seventy year exile in Babylonia to a dream? One day he was walking along the road when he saw a certain man planting a care u tree. Honey said to him, this tree, after how many years will it bear fruit? The man said to him, it will

not produce fruit until seventy years have passed. Honey said to him, is it obvious to you that you will live seventy years that you expect to benefit from this tree? He said to him, that man himself found a world full of carab trees, just as my ancestors planted for me, I too, am planting for my descendants. Okay, so you know it takes this tree seventy years to grow. He's but he's not planting it hoping to reap the fruits himself. I guess these would be legum pods that grow off

of the carob tree. Um. You know, he's planting for for future generations, his his descendants. But the story goes on. So it says Honey sat and ate bread. Sleep overcame him, and he slept. A cliff formed around him, and he disappeared from sight and slept for seventy years. When he awoke, he saw a certain man gathering caribs from that tree. Honey said to him, are you the one who planted this tree? The man said to him, I am his

son's son. Honey said to him, I can learn from this that I have slept for seventy years, And indeed he saw his donkey had sired several herds during those many years. Hony went home and said to the members of the household, is the son of Hony the circle Maker alive? They said to him, his son is no longer with us, but his son's son is alive. He said to them, I am Hony the circle Maker. They

did not believe him. They went to the study hall, where he heard the sages say about one scholar his halicott. And I think this word means um like religious laws or writings of or about religious laws. His halicott are as enlightening and as clear as in the years of Hony the Circle Maker. For when Hony would enter the study hall, he would resolve for the sages any difficulty they had. Hony said to them, I am he. But they did not believe him and did not pay him

proper respect. Hony became very upset, prayed for mercy, and died. And then it offers a bit of commentary. Rava said, this explains the folk saying where when people say either friendship or death as one who has no friends is better off dead. Oh wow, I thought this was a really interesting story. And so there are a bunch of things about it. One is that it ties into a common theme of sleeping into the future, which is the passing away of everything that one cares about in the presence.

So Hony sleeps seventy years into the future, but he's not confronted with You know, when we think of like time travel and science fiction going into the future, a lot of it is it is like people want to see amazing new types of technology or some kind of noticeable progress or or you know, or regress, you know, something some kind of change in the world that is notable. But but I don't think Honey really notices any um change to the scenario of the world. There's nothing to

be amazed at. Instead, it's just that the unnoticed passage of time is lost and life without your friends and family is not worth living. Yeah, it's it's a nice it's a nice message. Um. Yeah. But but it's interesting too, Like you say that the world hasn't really changed. There's no indication that technology has changed. Um, And I guess for a lot of people throughout history that probably seemed

to be the case. I mean that the basic technology you're using and your understanding of the world has not changed. This is just the way things are. These are the tools we have. The things that will change, and you know that they'll change, will be um, you know, the the lifespans of of a human activity. You know that that people will will live and die and be born

and grow old. And then also you know that, uh, there's a good chance that as as people live and die, so will king's, so will rulers, and so there will be the you know, the ob and flow of dynasties as as well as wars and so forth. Right. Another interesting thing I thought about this is that Hony gets to see his own posthumous reputation as a scholar, which

apparently is going very strong. Like he goes and finds in the study hall that people really appreciate the teachings of him, of Hony the Circle Maker, but he can't really enjoy that that positive reputation now because people don't believe he's really that guy that they respect. In principle, that raises an interesting question about what we value in reputation. Like most people want to be I want to have

a good reputation want people to like them. But would it be would you be happy to have a good reputation if people didn't recognize you as yourself, if they didn't connect you in your current body to the bearer of that reputation. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty pretty interesting. I mean, it's it makes you think about like legendary people and indeed, what if you had time travel scenarios where they got to travel into the future and they're like, oh, yeah,

I'm famous. But also that that image of me has grown so and is and is so revered that you know, me just standing here, they're not even gonna identify me with that person. Well, so, anyway, I think this story would not be as old as the time dilation story in the Mahabarita, But otherwise I think this may be the oldest time travel story that that I've been able to come across, and it's definitely the oldest sleeping into the future story that I've found. Now, this wouldn't know,

this wouldn't be older, but I did. I did run across some some interesting additional time weirdness stories here. Um uh. In between the publication of Part one in this series and the recording of part two. UH listener by the name of Ahmed wrote in, Ahmed has written in before with some interesting content, but this time Ahmed wrote into share a couple of time travel tales related to Islamic tradition. One of them and he ends up mentioning the Seven Sleepers. Again.

We had not actually recorded this episode yet, so he did not know that seven seven Sleepers were coming. But he also shared the following us. So I'm going to read from Ahmed's email quote. According to Muslim tradition, Mohammed ascends to Heaven from Mecca on the back of a winged mount with the angel Gabriel as his guide. There, he individually meets with the prophets who came before him,

ending with Moses and Abraham. Finally, he has an audience with God, who tells him to instruct Muslims to pray fifty times per day. After some back and forth at the urging of Moses, who says that fifty is far too onerous, Muhammed leaves with the current five day prayers for Muslims. Notably, many Muslims sources say that when Mohammed turns from this journey, his door is still swinging back and forth, suggesting either a complete stoppage of time or

at least a considerable dilation. That is very interesting. And the plays once again on the idea that that time passes differently in the heavens or in the realm of God or the gods than it does here on earth, that maybe you know that you know, I guess it's similar to the idea that a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day. Yeah. So there's something about the story that was like, Okay, this this sounds familiar. I think I've I've read this before,

or I've I've heard something like this before. So I looked into it a little bit and then I realized, oh, yes, there is a there's a wonderful creature involved in some of these tellings. Um and and again um um. Ahm Ed mentioned that there's a winged mount uh that that the prophet rides on, and this creature is sometimes described as Alba rock um, which means the shining or resplendent

one um. Those were those translations were were provided by Jorge Luis Borges and his book Imaginary Beings and Carol Rose the Folklore's also provides the translation the lightning. So it's kind of a winged centaur in many artist depictions. You can look up images of of this. It's you know, sometimes spelled bu r a q or b o r a k in English, and rose ads that it is. It's generally described as being pure white. Uh. Sometimes it's covered with jewels and precious stones that might be of

varying colors. Its breath is perfume, and it can understand human speech, but sources on are split on whether the creature can actually talk itself or if it can just understand um. But I wanted to read just a bit from boges book here. Uh. He shares a bit about about al Baraq. Quote. One Islamic Haadith tells us that is Baraque flew upward from the earth. It kicked over

a jar filled with water. The prophet was taken up to the seventh Heaven, where he spoke with each of the patriarchs and angels that reside there, crossed the oneness, and felt a chill that froze his heart when the hand of God patted him on the shoulder the time of men is not the time of God. When he returned to earth, the prophet caught the jar before a single drop of water had spilled out of it. Wow. That Yeah, that's time dilation again. That's amazing. Yeah. Yea,

the door is still swinging back and forth. The jar of water that was dropped has not yet hit the ground. Uh so so yeah, I love this account and I love that we have ah, this wonderful uh fantastic beast here. Um. By the way, if you pick up a copy of the Book of Imaginary Beings, the version that's imprint right now with illustrations by Peter Siss, al Baraq is on the cover, or a depiction of Albaroq is on the cover.

But but also look up some of the various art art artistic ways that this creature has been brought to life in different is Lament cultures. Because it's pretty fabulous. Yeah, this illustration is great because it is it's almost like a mix between a pegasus and a megalithic sculpture. Yeah. Now, another possible example of time travel and old texts UM can be found in the sixteenth century Ming Dynasty text

from China Journey into the West UM. And I actually had not thought to look here until you mentioned it. To Joe, and so I ended up uh checking it out see what exactly the Monkey King was up to. Uh that relates to time travel? Oh okay, So I think I came across a mention of time travel in the supplement to the Journey to the West. But there, but there's time travel in the original as well. Um. Yes, both to a certain extent. So, um, so if if

you're wondering, yeah, Journey into into the West Chinese classic. Uh. This is a classic work and has been adapted many times in many different forms. Uh. And and it generally concerns the exploits of the Monkey King or Sun will Kong, the Great Sage equal to Heaven. Um, so there's uh uh and that's so that's the main work. But yes, there's also this supplemental work supplement to the Journey to

the West and uh. In both cases, the episodes concerned the time warping experience of dream so in the In the original, there's basically just a section where um years of training for monkey are compressed by a time trance. But yeah, when you get into the supplement, that's where things get really interesting. This second work is also known as the Tower of Myriad Mirrors and its which I think Borges would would would surely have loved that title.

Uh And it takes this fantastic travelog style of the original and gives us even more time weirdness. I was reading about this in an article by Dr II ching Wang of the University of Liverpool titled Tower of Myriad Mirrors, and so I want to read just a quote from

this quote in the narrative. Upon leaving the Flaming Mountain, the monkey uh i e. Monkey King or Sugu and Kong is trapped in a hallucinatory world of mirrors evoked by ching Fish, a monster epitomizing desire and a negative force proportionate to the monkeys innate morality, though a tower

of myriad of mirrors is in disparate identities. The monkey embarks on an array of adventures to various time points, ranging from the immemorial Chin to Twe through two oh six BC dynasty to the Song through twelve seventy nine dynasty that is preceded by the story setting i e. The Tang dynasty six eighteen through n d. Upon returning to his own era, the monkey discovers that his master, the priest, defies the abstinence from sex and becomes a general,

and the monkey is entangled in a gargantuan war, during which he encounters his own offspring. In the end, the monkey is awakened by the original time traveler and kills the ching fish as the embodiment of desire that entraps his altruism, thereby eliminating the negative traits from his psyche or self. Okay, so if this counts as a type of time travel, you might say that it is time travel as a weapon, like a weapon of distraction against

the hero of the of the story. Yeah, yeah, And I guess in this, I mean, in this it reminds me a lot of of the time travel that we see in a Christmas Carol, right, because it's all within a dream essentially, it's all within the nighttime headspace of a character. Uh. Though in the case of the Christmas Carol it is um it is being pulled off by a ghost in order to try and save that individual from damnation and and uh. And in this case it is being orchestrated by a demon in an attempt to

u to distract and corrupt our our hero. But so, because this novel, the supplement to the Journey to the West is written in the future about a previous era. It can have its protagonist at least in this hallucinatory distraction thing going through the air, looking through these mirrors, are going through these mirrors and journeying two times into the past and future from where he began. Yeah, it

sounds pretty pretty interesting. Um again, I have I haven't I haven't read I have not read this work, but I was running across some other papers that we're talking about. UM. Time travel potentially being used in some of the Monkey King films that have come out, and there have been many. Again, there have been many Monkey King films and TV shows, uh, and the adaptations of Journey into the West. So if anyone out there is has seen a bunch of them,

I think I've seen one or two. I don't remember there being any time travel narratives, but it stands to reason that time travel pops up in some of those adaptations. So if you've seen one, that's pretty cool, let us know. I'd love to know about it. Well, I'd at least say that this is also notable for being um even though you could say that there's some big caveats on it because it's like a hallucinatory kind of thing. But to the extent that you would consider this time travel.

It is one of the earliest examples I can think of we've looked at that involves traveling backward, because all of the others we've looked at so far, the time dilation or the sleeping into the future, tend to just involve traveling forward relative to the normal uh rate at

which time would pass or at which you would age. Yeah, and it's um, it's interesting to sort of try and and and figure out like why that is the case, and I the best I can come up with is it is probably what the author is um is touching on here, the dynastic progression. Uh, the idea that like that that history is important enough that you would want to comment on it through through time travel. Um. Um.

So yeah, I don't know that. I'm sure there's more to the story there, but but at any rate, Uh, here's the here's the Monkey King popping up as a as one of our our many older time travelers. Maybe

not time traveler zero, but if it's still notable. You know, while we're on the subject of um Chinese conceptualization of time, this reminds me of an interesting email that we got, so maybe we can we'll do a couple of listener mails within this episode itself, which is actually, I think very cool that the time gap in between part one and two has allowed us to incorporate some listener feedback into part two itself here. But um, so, so this

is a message we got from Born. So this is responding to the part of part one of this series where we talked about visualizing time as a type of space, which appears to be extremely common, maybe even universal, or if not, it's nearly universal across languages on Earth. Uh. That that we talk about time as if it were a type of space, or a dimension of space, or

a sort of range within space, and uh. And then Rob, you and I ended up talking about how how common it is to discuss the future as if it is physically in the space in front of us, in the past as if it's physically in the space behind us. Uh. This also appears to be pretty common cross culturally, but apparently this is not universal. And this is really interesting.

So Bjorn was passing along some comment from his girlfriend who is from Hong Kong, and she apparently says quote When you think of the future, you see it as something in front of you, something you are moving towards. The past, on the other hand, is something you have left behind in Cantonese. In the Cantonese language, the concepts are reversed. The past is in front of you because these are things which happened and you can now see clearly. The future, on the other hand, is behind your back.

You can sense it but not perceive it with any clarity. So I thought that was really interesting. I don't know if I don't know how common or if that's near universal for Cantonese speakers, but I would be interested to hear more about that. Uh. And that that makes its own logical sense in a way, so you would still be conceptualizing time as a type of space, but just flipping the polls with respect to your body. But but certainly, I mean, we were talking about metaphors in the first episode.

You know, it's like the way we talk about time, uh, and in the way we think about time, like these these are the things that end up affecting the way we construct our time travel narratives. Well, it makes me wonder like if this is it, if this is actually more common or there are. There are at least some languages in which it's more common to uh to build metaphors where the space behind you is the future, in

the space in front of you is the past. With that effect, how people who speak those languages design uh time machines and science fictions? Are they less likely to be sort of forward facing vehicles like you you often see in you know, the DeLorean and stuff like that. Yeah, that's interesting now, you know, thinking back to us, specially talking I was talking about this, but also talking about

not dreaming and sleeping. Um. For the most part, we're talking about baseline human experience here kind of extrapolated into into the fantastic um. But obviously, if you've add various other conditions and substances into the mix, uh, time can seem even weirder. I know there's at least one time travel story that Nayan mentions, uh, some early work of literature in which somebody's hit on the hill. Oh, no, I know what it is. It was, of course, Mark

Twain's Confederate Yankee and King Arthur's Court. I believe the time travel what did I say, Confederate Yankee Confederate Yankee? Well, yes, um, Connecticut Yankee. Rather uh in In uh In in King or this court uh that book which I think I read a long time ago. I've forgotten all of it, but but I believe time travel is achieved by that character being hit on the back of the head with something. I think he is the foreman in a factory and one of his workers wax him on the head with

a wrench. I think that's right, m and then travels back in time. So but it is a reminder that, yes, when you start talking about altered um, altered experiences of the brain, that adds a different dimension to your contemplations of time travel. Um. And you know this is the case too when you start throwing in various substances. Uh. You know, we did a whole series on psychedelics a couple of years back, and one of the commonly sided

effects there is the altered perception of time. And you know we see this in literature as well as far back as like Thomas de Quincy's Confessions of an English opiameter. Oh yeah, Now, Nan doesn't spend a lot of time with this. He points out the quote smoking marijuana or taking amphetamines and or LSD to achieve a nonlinear hallucinogenic

experience of time travel. Uh. He says that sometimes used by writers as a way of exploring the concept of time travel, but it's not something that he set out to explore extensively in the book. So I was thinking, well, who who might have talked talked about psychedelics and time travel? I was like, Oh, I wonder what Terence McKenna had to say about this. So I started looking around for

Terence McKenna talking about time travel. And the weird thing was is I ran across an interview with McKenna from nine in which he mentions that he is currently reading Nayan's book on time travel. Oh that's weird, I thought. For some reason, I thought that that Naan book came out in like two thousand one. Well, there have been different editions of it. Oh okay, yeah, let me see okay, first published ninety three, Okay, okay, okay, okay, So it

is possible. Good, maybe the interview is from eighty nine, right, right, yes, and the book would have first come out. Sorry for all the unnecessary time traveling, uh listeners, but any rate, Uh they the short too late for the short version on this. But basically I found it amusing that that McKenna was talking about the very book that I had

been reading for this episode. Um and, I don't know, thinking it didn't have a lot ex extra to add, but he did talk a little bit about time travel and some of his talks mentioning that he liked the idea that you can only travel back as far as the time machine exists, So you can only go back as far as like day one of the time machine existing as a time machine. Um and and you know then to explore it as kind of a fantasy scenario, but he also lays out a scenario in which time

travel is more hyper spatial rather than linear. And uh and N asked, like, what have you pushed the button on your time machine and it's simply simply made all future events seem to occur at once. Uh So the time machine would be more like a doorway to eternity rather than a gateway into the future. Oh so, rather than actually transporting you, it just like breaks the person

inside perception of time. Yeah, in a way. You know this this reminds me of the movie, uh Jack Frost that we just recently talked about for Weird howth Cinema um in in that there's you know that wonderful scene where she uh, where Nastinka begs ruby ruby finger don to reverse itself, like gets the sun to to go back down over the horizon so that she has a

little more time to finish her chore by dawn. And uh and there's a lot there's a lot of fun to be made on mysteray science theater riffing on that about oh, well, you know this is going to bring about tidal waves and global destruction to have the sun suddenly stop uh and reverse itself or the planet you know, reverse itself whichever, uh, you know, just to totally screw up the celestial mechanics of everything. Um in a way you could you could say, well, maybe it would be

the same thing with the time machine. Say you did somehow create a machine that allowed you to travel in time, that allows you to uh to move around like this. Well, what if it just wrecked everything? What if it just or if it didn't wreck everything, you just like permanently

screwed up your human perception of time. Well, this is the idea that uh, that we talked about with Daniel Whiteson where he was saying, you know, if you were really trying to think about a machine that would allow you to travel into the past and try to make it work. He says, it would make more sense the machine reverses the flow of time for the entire universe

around you than that it does anything for you. So time continues to pass normally for you, but somehow it it makes time go backwards for the for the entire rest of the world. Now. In the book, Nan goes into greater detail with lots of examples that are definitely worth looking up for for fans of old school time

traveler yarns. But I think it's safe to say that you know they're there are older ideas and perhaps even ancient ideas, you know, understanding that time passes in weird ways, and if there's something particularly human about reflecting on the past, worrying about the future, and engaging in patterns of thought and systems of behavior that can connect us to different times and even deliver us to different times, certainly in the and when we when we sleep into the future now,

um Naan writes a little bit about time machines, of course, and uh says the machines entered the scenario because they represent reason and of course science, and they indicate the belief that there may be some sort of way to make possible what it is to varying degrees thought possible, at least under certain circumstances. Um, particularly if you're talking

about time travel into the future. Yeah, this is interesting, and this brings me back to um some thoughts that that I was reading and listen to an a lecture by a scholar that I mentioned in the previous part who is a professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech named Lisa Yazik, And you know, she draws some connections between specific developments in technology and not just technology, technology and transportation infrastructure in the late nineteenth century that

sort of push forward the idea that you could create a time machine. Now, of course we know that H. G. Wells The Time Machine published in eight This was a hugely influential work of science fiction that I think would inspire a lot of the time travel stories that came afterward. But it was by no means the first story about

time travel. But one thing you can say is that almost all of the time travel stories before Wells, we're not really science fiction, and that the time travel mechanic was almost always a sort of inexplicable, uh, fantasy thing, and it was like the action of a god or an angel or some kind of supernatural imposition, or it's some type of time dilation by going to different planes of existence or something. But but with Wells you get a time machine, a vehicle that is created by science.

Now I think it's not even the very first example of that that I want to mention another example I came across that that I think is very funny and it will be fun to read a little bit from. But I was just watching a lecture by Yazik where she she mentions a couple of things. One is that before you get to the time machine, um, a number of the time travel stories from the nineteenth century that involved traveling through time based on some kind of device

used not vehicles but clocks. And a classic example here is a story called the Clock that Went Backward by Edward Page Mitchell that was published in eighteen eighty one. And this is about this is also kind of a fantasy story. I mean, it's not like a clock that was designed to do this by and a scientist, inventor or something who wanted to travel through time. It's just like there's a weird clock and when you wind it up,

people nearby can get sent back in time. But the thing that I thought was interesting was that Yazick mentioned, you know, these stories about technological time travel arising in an age of standardization of time measures, uh for for

industry and politics. So in this era of industrial zation, coordination of rapid transport through train stations and shipping ports in in the late nineteenth century, Um, something happens in people's consciousness that makes them think about time differently, and this maybe helps give rise to the proliferation of time travel stories that would follow than now. I was also reading a short introduction that that Laci Azik wrote to a recent new edition of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.

It was the dred and twenty fifth anniversary edition, So yeah, I guess that would have been last year, right, and published in eight came out in Karence McKenna read it in Yeah exactly, Okay, you come more of an inside joke for us, okay, uh But so she writes about how so the Time Machine the novel was published in eight U and that was sort of the work that launched H. G. Wells literary career. He was born in eighteen sixty six, so I guess he was only like

twenty nine at the time that it came out. Though The Time Machine the novel was actually based on a short story that Wells had written seven years before, called and I Love this the chronic Argonauts. Have you read this one? Rob? I have not. I have not either, So it's it's sort of, I think, a shorter, earlier version of the Time Machine where the hero is not

so much a hero. He's more of a mad scientist who gets into trouble by creating a time machine and unleash his havoc that goes on for thousands of years. But interesting fact I learned from from Yazig's intro here. Apparently Wells published this story in his college lipmag. So let this be an inspiration to your college lipmag editors out there. Yeah. Yeah, it could be the place where you, um, you published the garbage version of your future it. Um.

But yeah. So in subs went years, Wells revised and expanded the short story until it developed into the novel that we know today. Um and so. Wells apparently wrote in later years that he believed there was a rule for writing good science fiction. I'm not sure if I agree with this, but but it's interesting. So he says, to have good sci fi, you need to give the story only one fantastical element and then make everything else as grounded, realistic and human as you possibly can. So

how would that apply to the time Machine? Well An example is that in the original short story The Chronic Argonauts, Wells had the protagonists living in a gothic mansion in the countryside, and so I think the implication here is that it would invite readers to think of other tropes of Gothic literature, the mysterious, the uncanny. I think the association I would have would be with like Charlotte Bronte

and Jane Eyre. But in the Time Machine and the novel version, he he rewrote it to uh to locate the protagonist in bourgeois neighborhood of London, basically as mundane and uninteresting as setting as he could think of. But you go into this mundane uh, you know, bourgeois household, and here's a time machine. It's interesting how you don't think about the setting of the time machine being mundane today because it is. It is now an historical work.

So the idea that it's it's set uh in um in this neighborhood in London, like that's part of it's such as charm, it's appeal. Like essentially you have you have two different elements that are that are foreign to the to the reader, or more than two. But the time Machine becomes a novelist full of a strange and

wonderful places that are not our own reality. Right. I guess the idea today would be like, uh, what if you went into a house like a McMansion in the suburbs and in the subdivision here and here it is, here's a time machine. Now we've already mentioned that the time Machine is by no means the first story to

depict time travel. Obviously, if you include time dilation and sleeping into the future, time travel stories can be found here and there, well into the ancient past, and even some stories of more direct time travels, such as being delivered documents from the future. I think that's something that happens in a story called Memoirs of the twentieth Century, written by Samuel Madden and published in the eighteenth century.

I think this was like seventeen thirty three and basically the story is an angel appears from the future and deliver some letters from future people to people living at the time. Yeah, from the years nineteen seven and nine. And then of course you get these nineteenth century examples we've been talking about, like the clock that went backwards and stuff that there are still and UH and Christmas Carol and connect a Yankee and King Arthur's Court that

are still basically fantasies. But yas it makes the distinction that the Wells is really the first to popularize time travel as a convention of of realistically grounded science fiction, and to popularize the idea of the time machine as a piece of technology, specifically a vehicle that is deliberately designed to allow people to navigate time in the same way that people use regular vehicles to navigate space. And I think she says, you know, the obvious comparison if

you look at this uh, at its historical setting. This is in the eighteen nineties. This would have been when we're seeing bicycles and early automobiles, So so there's a lot of vehicular consciousness at the time. But I was wondering, Okay, are there earlier examples of actual time machines like science fiction time machines. Well, it depends on what you count, Like do you count the clock that went backward? It's probably not really, that's just kind of a weird little

fantasy object. Um. But I did find at least one thing that looks pretty much like a conventional time machine that does just barely pre date Wells. And this would be the nineteenth century Spanish author Enrique gas Bars novel l Anacronopete, which was apparently published one year before Wells story The Chronic Argonauts, so this would have been in

eighteen eighties seven. And this novel describes a an inventor who creates this device that I think is basically a giant sealed metal box that is equipped with huge pneumatic apparatus is that allow you to travel through time, including

traveling backwards through time. And I haven't read this novel in full, but I was scanning through an English translation and I came across a part that I thought was so good that I wanted to share it here because it's it's where the inventor is explaining his theory of

time via the example of sardines and canned peppers. Robert Are you ready for this, Okay, So the inventor says, it's common knowledge that to preserve sardines from nantes or peppers from calahora, we must remove the air from their

tin cans. Wrong, we must remove the at atmosphere, and consequently, the time you see the air is no more than a compound of nitrogen and oxygen, whereas the atmosphere, in addition to consisting of eighty parts nitrogen to twenty parts oxygen, also contains an amount of water, vapor, and carbonic acid elements that are never left behind when forming a vacuum. But never mind the science, let's speak to common sense. Imagine the world is a tin of red peppers from

which we have not extracted the atmosphere. What happens when the can is sealed without this precaution, Time begins to exert its influence and carry out its work. First, a few molecules adhere to the sides of the container, agglomerating and solidifying, only to petrify with the passage of years and yield those substances in which we would find the mineral beginnings of primitive rock. We then note that the substance is covered with a kind of scum that is

none other than rudimentary vegetation. And finally, microscopic organisms in the water vapor come to life, reproduce and develop like maggots in our tin of preserves, enriching it with the unending variety of the animal kingdom. Can you still doubt that the atmosphere is time? This is one of those things that's like wrong but genius. Yeah, like this is it's he really thought long and hard. Uh and well on this this this thoroughly uh incorrect mechanism for time. Well,

I like that. It's it's sort of making the intuitive connection again between time and entropy, which we talked about in our interview with Daniel, because it's saying like, okay, so things in a can they don't rot. You, if you don't know any better, you might presume this because the time has been removed from the can and it takes time for things to rot. Well, you know, it's coming back to that that idea of of time as

a as a measure of change in the universe. And if in the can things are not changing, what does that say about about time? Uh? In a way it kind of serves as a nice you know, it's it's ridiculous, and it takes a second to really think about what it's even trying to say with with this atmosphere as time. But but in a way it kind of serves as an It kind of throws you off out of your your your back of the future line of thinking, where you think about time as this linear thing that you

could conceivably move about in um. But but this is an entirely different model. So I had a hard time finding scrolling through the book trying to find details on exactly how how the time travel itself works, like when you're going backward. I couldn't find that part. But at least according to the wiki summary, what it says is that the machine flies backward through the atmosphere against the rotation of the Earth, and this is what allows time

travel into the past. That would seem to fit with the other part about the atmosphere, but I'm not positive on this. So but maybe one day I will just read this book in full, because it looks like it might be kind of bad but pretty fun. Yeah, I mean that that concept is pretty uh, it's pretty crazy. I like it. Also, just while I'm on the subject

of of l A An Acrono Pete. I gotta say that I skipped ahead to the end of the story to see what happens, and it apparently involves the inventor going mad and accelerating the time machine all the way back to the beginning of time. Oh wow, do you mind if I read this part too? Yeah? No, I want to know what he does there? What do you?

What do you do? Okay? So I guess he's arguing with the other passengers in the in the time machine, and he says, it's useless, continued the lunatic, laughing convulsively. Don't you see that our speed is increased fivefold? Nothing can stop us. I have destroyed the controls and l Anacrono Pete runs headlong into the primordial white hot essence. And then people cry out horrors. Death awaits us in

the chaos. K us look, and then it says, and indeed through the porthole glowed a dim light that marked the beginning of the natural world and the end of formless emptiness. But continuing backward, chaos gradually but persistently increased, and soon not even thick port glass would be enough to hold back the flood of water, earth and fire all agitated in a suspension of air via periodic violent collisions that propelled the floating vehicle through that incandescent matter.

The inalterability procedure that they had all undergone had lost its potency. Asphyxia was overtaking the travelers. The walls could no longer stop the heat, and finally the glass melted, letting forth a torrent of igneous substances with the boom of a hundred volcanoes. And then there's like a like an eight line ellipsus, and then and then, uh, the inventor wakes up, having fallen asleep at a play and

it was a dream. And I'm not sure if I'm not sure if the entire novel was a dream, or if only part of it leading up to that end point was a dream. I don't know. I'll have to go in and read the whole thing someday. I mean, it's almost like there there used to be a law that's said, look, you can explore the concept of time travel all you like, provided everything takes place within the space of a dream or vision. Why are they always doing the dream? I mean, why does it need to

be a dream? Again? I guess it comes back to just the basic understanding that the dream dreams or where time is weird. Therefore that's where time travel is going to happen. I mean, does the author think, Wow, if people get to the end of this book and I don't say it was all a dream, They're gonna think I'm nuts. So I've got to just say, well, that didn't actually happen. Or maybe they were thinking, look, they're gonna actually invent time travel in like ten fifteen years top.

And I don't want my work to them the day. But if it's all within the context of a dream, you can't say I got it wrong. That's good, that's very good. So let's see. We've looked at various concepts of time travel. Here, time travel by machine, time travel involving um manipulation of the atmosphere, time travel by magical beast, time travel by a drug, by head wound um. Oh man, there's so many ways to think about it. Time travel

by cave, time travel by sleep. The cave is an interesting one too, because, of course the cave also makes one think of the tomb uh. Time travel via via death and it um. Yeah, and I guess it also reminds me of like all these various other stories of like characters venturing into realms beyond life for realms, even beyond death, venturing into the underworld or into you know,

or to purgatory or paradise. You know, they're all these fantastic stories about somebody traveling elsewhere, learning something and then eventually coming back or trying to come back anyway, and and ultimately, like time travel stories are of the same mode, right, It's about somebody traveling into the fantastic realm and then returning. And that fantastic realm it might be hell, it might be um, the nineteen fifties, you know, it might be uh, you know, seven years into the future. It might be

all a dream. But let's hope it's not. But regarding the l n Acrono Pete, I do want to say, well, it looks like a great story. And while it does appear to predate wells short story by one year, I think it's probably still fair to say that that Wells is probably the major popularizer of of the idea of the time machine as technology and science fiction. Yeah, Wells as Wells time machine is hard to be. Like we said before on the show, like it's it's a great book.

It's still very readable, very enjoyable. All right, well, we're gonna go ahead and close this episode out, but obviously we'd love to continue to hear from everyone out there insights you have about time travel stories and myths and legends, traditions, and of course books and movies. What are some of your favorites right in? Let us know, uh, you know, the smartest time travel or to time travel stories that are just a lot of fun, even if you you

don't dare think about them too hard. Can you find earlier examples of of of intentionally created vehicles for time travel? I want to know, does it go back earlier than yeah, yeah, or other time traveling magical creatures. Obviously I want to hear about that. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, you can find them in the Stuff to Blow your

Mind podcast feed, available wherever you get your podcasts. We have Artifact episodes on Wednesday's, Core episodes of the show on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Monday's we do listener mail, and on Friday we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious matters and just focus in on a weird film. And we do occasionally cover time travel films. There we did, uh, we did what troys and transfers to time after time? And was there

another one? I don't know if you count Morosco with the Sun going backward, but well we'll take Well that's that's three time travel movies and I'm sure there will be more in the future. Guess what's coming up next. Transfers nine uh, transfers nine uh. The atmosphere is time where they where they put Jack Death in a sardine can. I would do I would do. Transfers three, Trancers three is pretty fun anyway. Huge thanks as always to our

excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, this is the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. Past prop