MAGIC BABIES AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Dreams of what might have been

Not many people know this about me, but I am actually a prophet. I know this, because I once dreamed that my shoe broke when I was running for the bus, and the very next day, when I was running for the bus, my shoe broke. Take that, beardy dusty men wandering around the bible talking about magic babies and the end of the world. You may have foretold the coming of the Big Baby J, but did you ever predict anything that might be of practical use? Like, anything about footwear? Exactly.

Of course, it would have been a lot more useful if I’d dreamed that my shoe broke and then a thunderous voice boomed from the sky: GEORGINA! YOU NEED NEW SHOOOOOOEES! But this only serves to demonstrate one of the problems with prophetic dreams, which is that you don’t really know they’re prophetic until after they’ve come true, by which time it’s too late, and you’re waddling around an office full of high-heeled, pencil-skirted legal secretaries with one of your shoes stapled together and strapped to your foot with sellotape.

This was rather a mundane prophecy, I grant you, compared to the biblical ones that were all boomy and doomy and portentous with burning bushes and thunderclaps. Then again, maybe I should have heeded it as a sign. Maybe the dream was telling me that I was living the wrong life – a life that I did not have the literal or metaphorical footwear for. Or could it be that my broken shoe set in motion a series of random events that, much like the plot of a Tom Robbins novel, led in some tangential way to a seemingly entirely disconnected outcome? Maybe the new shoes I should have bought were purchased by some other young woman, an impoverished genius who had won a scholarship to Harvard, and who, simply by walking past Mark Zuckerberg in her smart-casual work shoes from Shoezone in West Bromwich, inspired him to create a website for rating the hotness of the girls at his university, which then led pretty much directly to the epidemic of mental ill health that blights our nation’s children. (My dream, sorry to say, did not mention any of this.)

It’s tempting to believe that if we knew the future, we’d know what to do about it. But if history teaches us anything, it’s that every great forward stride of progress is going to have some major unintended consequences. No one could have known, for example, that the invention of the internet would one day cause a generation of twelve-year-olds to regularly weep into their cornflakes. Or that the invention of the printing press would eventually lead to me getting kicked out of the cinema in the middle of Twilight for yelling HE’S A VAMPIRE, YOU IDIOT at Kristen Stewart every time she wobbled her head in bewilderment at her creepy sunlight-dodging boyfriend. (“Some of us are actually trying to enjoy this,” tutted an angry middle-aged man as I was escorted off the premises.)

It’s silly to imagine that there’s any practical application of clairvoyancy that wouldn’t end in disaster. Even if we can see the future, we don’t know what any of it really means until we look at it from the other direction, in hindsight. Even then, meanings tend to proliferate uncontrollably. The invention of the motor car means freedom and travel – and also some twat in a BMW with a numberplate that says T1TS cutting you up on a dual carriageway. Oh great, you think, automated self-service machines in the supermarket. Beep beep! Then five years later your husband leaves you because he’s fallen in love with the lawnmower. “It’s not about looks, it’s personality,” he smirks, as they ride off together over the rhododendrons.

Progress doesn’t go forwards in an orderly fashion, one good thing leading to the next until we achieve utopia. More often than not, you find yourself looking back and thinking, man, if only we hadn’t bothered leaving the caves in the first place. Now I have to fill in this fucking tax return.

Likewise, it’s only in hindsight that we can clearly see our mistakes and wrong decisions. It’s possible that I would have had many more prophetic dreams if only I’d taken the shoe one seriously. I could have been one of those people secretly employed by the CIA to remote view the Russians. I might have retired at the age of forty with a fantastically generous pension and the unspoken agreement that one day I would be subject to the fatal attentions of an astral-travelling psychic assassin. Or maybe I could have been an astral-travelling psychic assassin myself. We just don’t know.

The only thing we can say about the future with any confidence is that there will be some really annoying things in it. And the only consolation is that maybe there’s no such thing as the future, anyway. Time, what even is it? According to popular science fiction novels (which is where I get all my scientific knowledge) no one really knows. But they suspect that there’s no such thing and everything is just kind of happening all at once. The past, present, and future are merely hallucinated constructions designed to keep us from getting our crinolines caught in the spaceship doors.

And if time is weird in waking life, in dreams it’s even weirder. Complicated situations that unfold over hours or days or years apparently play out in a few flickers of your eyelids. There are people who will tell you they lived full lives in other dimensions before waking up one morning and discovering it was all a dream and they actually don’t have three kids and a dog in a house in Nashville, but a moody boyfriend and an overdraft in a bedsit in Preston. This naturally begs the question: what is real? Is this life all a dream? Is it a dream within a dream? Will I wake up one day and try to recall the events of my life and find them all in a muddle? A girl whose boyfriend is a vampire, a broken shoe, a ghostly chicken haunting my house… Vague and fleeting impressions of beaches and bedsits and car crashes and awards and bags of crisps, all quickly sinking into the black lacuna of unconsciousness when I open my eyes. It all seemed to make sense at the time, I’ll say, but I can’t make sense of it now, there’s no story to lead me through the events, and now that I’m wide awake, all I am left with is the strange compulsion to go shopping for new shoes.

Those slides are not suitable desert wear.

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