I told my dad about the dream I had last week about my dead grandmother having dinner with us and he reiterated that he has on occasion had similar dreams about his dad, my granddad Eddie. We put it down to the hypothetical filing system in our brain pulling out the wrong card on occasion and playing havoc with our sense of reason and chronology. When I’m having or about to have a depressive episode I tend to dream about Granddad, I don’t know what that means, something to do with death I suppose. Granddad had issues relating to his experience as a POW during the Second World War, and this included stress and depression which I imagine from what I’ve heard about him contributed to his death from a heart attack at the relatively young age of sixty two. If he could have received help then maybe he would have lived longer, or even still be alive. There was no therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in those days, you were simply told to stop being a big girl’s blouse and get your sleeves rolled up and back in the fight.

When I was younger my dad explained his theory about what we perceive to be ‘ghosts’. There’s no such thing as ghosts (although you are entitled to your own beliefs) or an afterlife as far as I am concerned. I wasn’t brought up to be religious although I was allowed to make up my own mind, so there was never a flash moment when I declared myself an atheist, it was simply that I didn’t believe in the God and all the trimmings. Visions of ‘ghosts’ is actually (in my theory anyway, although it has never happened to me) caused by a hole in time, so the person you see is really there but in a different period of time. One of the most common ghostly sightings is a Victorian child. I know the life expectancy wasn’t great in those days but for the amount of children that get spotted then the human race should have died out. Victorian children are seen (obviously) in Victorian buildings such as houses and hotels, so you are probably standing in his or her nursery. Would the child see you too? Or would you simply not exist to that child because you haven’t been born? There are, as far as we know no records or diaries stating that there were sightings of strange looking people suddenly appearing in children’s bedrooms in Victorian times, but then again nobody believed anything children said back then and an adult would have been carted off to a lunatic asylum and never heard from again.  The holes-in-time theory has been written about before; people disappearing for a week or two and coming back as if nothing had happened and people informing them that the place they say they have been to no longer exists. I once read an interview with a family who drove into a ‘ghost village’ where shops sold products that hadn’t been available for decades. When they tried to return to the village it was no longer there. In Marske, a village just next to Redcar in the North-East, there is a housing estate (named after Barnes Wallis) that was an army base during the war, and people often hear bombs and gunfire, although to be fair that could just be Redcar at chucking out time.

As I’m currently recording the audio book of my brother’s novel Whatever Happened to Nathan McKenzie, the subject moved on to time travel. The theory about holes in time could be the key to sorting out once and for all if time travel is actually possible. If you could pass through into another age and start a new life would this explain the mystery of people who go missing and are never seen again? Jack (my brother not my dog) explores this and re-writes what I perceived to be true about what happens to the person who travels. An example being Marty McFly spending a week in 1955 before returning to the exact point he left 1985, he is a week older so should have returned to his present seven days later to ensure that time travel doesn’t have an ageing effect. In Nathan McKenzie, the characters go missing from their real lives while travelling through time.

As obsessed with the idea of time travel as I am, the only frame of reference I have regarding the ‘rules’ is the Back To The Future trilogy and the sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart. Oddly enough, as badly thought out as Goodnight Sweetheart is, the method in which Gary Sparrow is able to travel back to wartime London is in theory more possible than the building of a time machine. Another theory is that you can think yourself to a different era by simply believing it, as seen in the film Somewhere in Time when the lead character Richard Collier surrounds himself with period artifacts and wills himself back, only to return to his present when he accidentally finds a modern coin. Perhaps the first example of time travel in literature is A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge is shown moments from his past, present and future, but did those visits actually happen or was it a dream? The lead characters in Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes are believed to be living a dream life while in a coma, but the final episode of Ashes To Ashes reveals that everyone is living in a time warp afterlife after their deaths, it’s just that it is eventually forgotten. If thinking is the key to time travel, then maybe research could be carried out to find a link between hypnotic time travel and Alzheimer’s. If anyone has experienced this condition in a family member, you’ll know that the sufferer has a detailed recollection of something that happened on a specific date many years ago but couldn’t tell you what he or she had for breakfast this morning. Perhaps the ‘memory’ of something happening decades ago is actually happening for them, whereas ‘this morning’ won’t happen for years to come. This could also explain an elderly relative not recognising a grandchild because in their internal timeline they haven’t been born or not knowing how a piece of electrical equipment works because it hasn’t been invented for them yet. It’s always happy things that a person with Alzheimer’s will recall, as if this is preparation for death. I’d much rather see out my final years as a teenager or in my twenties and die at my peak than spend ten years in bed not knowing what was happening around me before dying surrounded by people who claim to be family but could be anyone, and I reckon this is why you never see an unhappy Alzheimer’s sufferer. They are the only people who don’t know they are on their last legs.

I’ll come back to this subject soon I imagine, so I welcome any feedback regarding this blog.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please consider showing your appreciation by way of a donation using the PayPal button above this blog. Every penny will be used to create free online content. There are currently plans for a comedy sketch series, an online cookery and music show, a video version of The Sunday Alternative and plenty more including documentaries, short films and podcasts.

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here.