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Okay, so this takes a little while to get to the point, and it may be a little contrived in places, but I swear, it is primarily about the topic of sleep.
When I was little, we would walk around the neighbourhood, up to the park, or the store, or the library. I would sometimes pick up doodads and bits of broken machines and nuts and bolts and things. I wanted to build a time machine. I remember rubbing metal objects on a spool of copper wire to magnetise them. I wanted to be an inventor, and that's what I told people.
"What do you want to be?"
"An inventor," proudly, pronouncing the 'O.'
Magnets were important. They would be mounted all in a circle, and they would spin. I suppose I thought that the magnets and the devices that comprised the machine would create some sort of path, some warp in the fabric of spacetime, that the machine and all that it contained would be set loose from the constraints of one day per day, one minute per minute, one time at a time.
Mostly my desire when I was that young was to see the future, to travel to fantastic times and places where I would witness the pinnacle of human achievement. Nobody, however, is too young for regrets, and at times I would daydream about a time in the future when I would have my time machine, and I would travel back in time and watch that episode of Inspector Gadget I'd missed, or stop myself from killing, for no reason, an ant with a stick, something that haunts me still. As I got older, the time machine became more of an escapist fantasy, as regrets piled up, both mine and others.' That I would come back from the future and make things better, make things right, change the smallest things to make the bigger things better.
But that was adolescent fantasy. I learned eventually to live with regret, and finally, to live without it.
No single thing will lead you to a point, but among other things, it is sleep that has taught me to not desire a time machine, and it has taught me to live without regret. Every night, it seemed, for the longest time, I would be harassed by nightmares. Not the nightmares of a child, shadows of the unknown, things larger and more powerful than oneself relentlessly chewing the edges of your careful world. No, they were of the same ilk, but not the same form. It is a place not far from madness, to not know whether this too is only a false awakening, to wake suddenly, biting your hand to the bone to stop yourself from screaming, and then waking again without a mark on the skin. It is every regret, every stain of guilt, every path not taken, every mistake, every offense. Time machine or not, there is no going back. What has happened is indelible. It is that which is yet to come that is malleable, it is the moment that we hold in our hands that is important. Every dream, every idealised vision of a heaven on Earth, every nightmare vision of an unchangeable hell, every dream comes from that which cannot be undone. Every hour spent unconscious is an hour you will never get back, every second of sleep had better be worth it, for those precious seconds, like diamond sand, slipping from your imperfect grasp, will never come again. This is not a tragedy. Sleep, like the passage of time, is inevitable. This is neither good nor bad. It is merely a lesson to make the most of every moment, for the universe may well be infinite in both size and age, but the moments that have passed will never come again.
If this is acceptable, the next topic is scent.
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