How to Survive the Wrong Timeline

Dreams are the worst. My kids, Sasha and Sandy, are still at the age where, when they have unusual dreams, they want to tell me every single detail of the dream, rather than just summarizing the thing with a quirky, surreal detail or two. (I’m too nice a father to tell them no one ever wants to hear about another person’s dreams.) Dream sequences are even worse: Whether in written fiction or in film, they stand in for actual storytelling without doing any storytelling—they’re easy-to-manipulate symbols at best, cheapo freaky-deakiness at worst. Only A Nightmare on Elm Street has ever gotten them right¹.

Now, let me tell you about a dream I had! A friend and I had somehow managed to fall into an alternate reality, one where Al Gore had won the 2000 election and, because of that, basically everything was better. The planet was cleaner and cooler, the economy was fine, and people overall were just more chill—no one was angry or anxious like they are here. As we settled into this timeline, my friend (modeled on no one I know in this reality) found his groove, and was able to enjoy the fruits of a better world. One night he brought me to a party, where a friend of his asked me to hold her new baby, and that’s when I realized: Back in my own original timeline were Jean, my wife, and Sasha and Sandy, and although things were royally fucked up there—i.e., here—I’d rather be with them than in this saner, safer, ostensibly happier place. I woke up full of sadness and regret.

(Thanks for bearing with me. I promise I’ll never do that again².)

I’ve been thinking about this dream a lot lately, because the election, duh. It feels like we’re once again at a major turning point, where things could either get moderately better or a whole lot worse. And, depending on the outcome, we might wish we lived in a different timeline, instead of what increasingly feels like the worst of them all.

I’m not here to say this wish is misguided. I’m not going to tell you that things turn out for the best, even when they seem to be going awfully fucking awry. You should not have faith in god or man; you should not trust that the arc of the moral universe bends toward anything remotely resembling justice. I’m not going to warn you that the other, better timelines we dream of might hide the pitfalls of mass-market sci-fi³: children locked in cages, slavering reptile overlords, orbital habitats modeled on the city of Boston.

I’m not here to offer you any type of solace—except for this one thing: The best part about the future is we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can use all our reason, we can game things out, we can imagine a billion different scenarios, and still, events can and will unfold in ways we never thought to foresee. Perhaps better, perhaps worse, but fundamentally unpredictable. The randomness that so often torments us could also save us. This is why I, and probably you, spend so much time and brainpower thinking up scenarios for Election Day and its aftermath, and the aftermath of that, and the aftermath of that—so that none of them will come to pass. If you dream it, I’ve always believed, it definitely will not fucking happen.

And yet none of us wants to feel powerless in the face of the unknowable, unavoidable future. So we do what we can to sway things—to nudge the butterfly of chaos into the right breeze. Which is why, as these words of mine are winging their way through the ether to your inbox, I’m driving from Brooklyn down to Richmond, Virginia, to help ferry voters to the polls on Election Day. It’s not a lot, I know, but it makes me feel like I’m doing something to bring about the future I’m dreaming of. If things go the way I hope, I can take credit; if not, at least I can say I fought the future we find ourselves in. It might not truly change anything, but it will change the way I feel about it all.

Because whichever timeline we wind up in, I have to live there, and so do you.

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Notes

1. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams is a distant second.

2. I might be wrong about that.

3. Dark Matter, which probably no one watched on Apple TV+, had a smart, satisfying, and (as far as I know) unique resolution to the problem of multiple, infinite timelines. Check it out if you get a moment.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt