If you’re following my story in the left sidebar, you may have noticed that what’s happened to me over the past 3 years is different from every fictional time travel story you’ve ever read or seen on TV or in the movies. My experience seems to be of two distinct types, corporeal and…well, non-corporeal. In other words, sometimes I travel bodily, where the “me” I am now somehow moves to a different time while other times only my consciousness makes the journey. It’s puzzling, and for obvious reasons, fictional treatments of the phenomenon confine themselves to one or the other method. Examples:
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Bodily travel only. Henry disappears, leaving his clothes fluttering to the ground when he travels in either direction.
Back to the Future – Bodily. Thanks to the Delorean, Marty takes everything, including his 1980s clothes into the past.
The Butterfly Effect – Consciousness. Interesting in that when the main character returns to the time period he originally travels from, his consciousness shoves aside whatever “him” that was residing there. See this earlier post of mine for some discussion of this situation.
Journeyman – Bodily. Dan Vasser seemingly is able to take everything attached to him (clothes, stuff in his pockets, cell phone) when he blinks out into the past.
Obviously, the bodily-only travel is the most common in fictional accounts of time travel. In my case, I seem to be experiencing both kinds of travel, with differing result. When I found myself standing in my home office 18 days in the past, I was able to interact with things there and make a change that persisted after I returned from the time I had departed. My experiences in 1976 are obviously consciousness-only, since when I woke up in my old bedroom in Indianapolis after my accident, I was in my 17 year-old body. Interestingly enough, what happened to me back there seemed to have some effect on my present-here, but I’m not sure how much is cause and effect and how much is just psychological.
Clearly, later this year, it looks like I’ll be bodily traveling back to 1933, the trip that started this whole adventure, and after that, I haven’t the foggiest idea what will happen.
Or what has happened.
I know, I know. Sometimes these posts raise more questions than answers.
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Time Travel, Journeyman, Back to the Future, Time Traveler’s Wife
