An academic named Shevek invents a new theory of time that allows time travel. The price you pay, his theory says, is that to gain freedom of motion thru world-time, you lose some other dimension. But you can trade around--switch the one lost.

He tests the theory on himself. A bizarre voyage: his subjective universe narrows to a small room, the elevator of time, with just him and a one-ton weight. He chose MASS as the dimension to lose. So he retains his local time and three spatial dimensions as he travels back. But when he reaches his target era, (the 1950s?) he switches the lost dimension to time itself! Physically freezes, but he kept one thought in mind as he switched--a vivid visualization of the one-ton weight appearing in the quad of a local college. So when the time-trip ends, the weight mysteriously stays behind. A thought held so firmly has to become true: he impressed it on spacetime, took advantage of the freezing to lengthen his visualization!

I always knew Shevek was clever.

On his next trip, he takes back small inventions. Leaves them in the quad of a big-city college, where someone'll pick them up and recognize their implications. They'll spread quickly.

And it works. No one knows quite who invented them, but Shevek's little time-gifts become part of the fabric of society 30-40 years sooner than they would. It's the only way he could think of that enriches society and alters history without any traceable agent. He's cautious.

But, strangely enough, he hopes to profit from all this; it's not altruism. I don't see how can he make money off it, but he thinks he does.

But Shevek has forgotten one thing--we're all in someone's past! Someone from HIS future, knowing his own technique (I suspect it's a later, wiser Shevek) comes back to now, and discreetly seeds Shevek's era with ideas and inventions that make Shevek's own changes irrelevant!

His meddling is canceled out, though I don't see quite why...

Then I realize there may be NO reason, and no future time-cop or social worker protecting the past. Maybe it's just inevitable--a sort of entropic force.

If you push time, does time push back?

If you tweak time, does time tweak you?

Chrono-homeostasis!

NOTES IN THE MORNING...

Time travel = I go back to face my horrible childhood.

One-ton weight = grief, anger, fear? Succeed in leaving it in the past--putting it behind me at last!

I'd like to go back in time, plant my insights in the past, relive my life with present knowledge. But I can't revise my history--sabotaged when I try. My FUTURE self blocks change, counters all my moves. The PAST isn't resisting it! But my future sees my present self as meddling irresponsibly, selfishly? Or it's an impersonal process, preserving my past as it was, no matter how shitty...

Or maybe my changes are just too big.

This whole dream comments on Ursula Le Guin's anarchist utopia, THE DISPOSSESSED and its physicist-hero, Shevek. I got nervous that Le Guin linked human ideas of time to commitment, even to love--I have mostly in the Now, like an animal. Does that mean I can't love? Animals certainly can. In the book, the Terran Ambassador says 'We ruined our world, we survived only thru total rationing; we forfeited our chance for your anarchist freedom.' Shevek the anarchist, for whom freedom is absolute, scolds her: 'You armor yourself against hope by preaching irreversability. You don't understand time.'

You might suspect the dream owes a much directer debt to Gregory Benford, for IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT, his award-winning novel on scholars sending messages decades back from an eco-crash to save the Earth... But the truth is, I still haven't got around to reading it.

HOMEOSTASIS means a living organism's regulated, flexible stability... negative feedback loops smoothing and damping chaos, yet allowing change. So chrono-homeostasis means: time's regulatory agency, allowing change, even of the past... as long as it's flow, not fracture.

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