Idle Musings on Time

I’m not sure what brought this on – maybe pondering the Mayans yesterday, as they were masters of time tracking and calendars – but an abstract thought has clattered around in my head sporadically throughout my life (cue the sound effect of the Yahtzee cup). Exactly what is time, as a thing? How is it structured? Where does it come from, and where does it go?

Is it in a straight line? Or is it … layered?

Have you ever been driving along in your car, and you go under a bridge or past a transmitter tower or move from one broadcasting range into another, and for a few moments you kind of pick up two stations at once? Or for you old folks/kids deprived of cable in their youth like me, remember the days before cable, when you had to tune in UHF stations? There could be several stations on that same UHF channel, but you had to twist the knobby around and wrangle the antenna to find them. What if time is layered in frequencies like that? What if different points in time or different dimensions all kind of occupy the same space, but on different levels? What if the beings we call ghosts or the experiences we call premonitions or visions, are just glimpses of another “program” or “station” that we get by accident?

Maybe time is organized like the pages in a book. Different points in time are actually lying very closely together, but are separated by the thin opaqueness of the page. But think back on, say, the encyclopedias in the school library. Remember sometimes there would be transparencies in there? Like the invisible guy where you could lay his nervous system and his muscular system and his vital organs over top of his skeleton and see all the layers simultaneously?

Could a setup like this explain déjà vu?

Or, maybe time does just go in an endless line in both directions, and I simply spend way too much of it conjuring up such nonsense in my head. But it’s just kind of fun to think about weird stuff.