Actual Time

Every dream has a backstory. Rarely, though, can you tie one to the other as neatly as this.

I was on a business trip recently, traveling through numerous cities in a few busy days.  I arrived first in Tucson, Arizona.  The plane’s wheels hit the ground and like everyone else I turned on my mobile phone.  A message on my phone’s screen read, “the time has been adjusted to the current local time.”

Looking again at my mobile phone, I noted a slight problem: the clock had not been set to the correct local time.  The phone’s time had been pushed back by two hours, but it should have been three.  Arizona doesn’t recognize daylight savings time. You would think my big-named cellular provider would know this!

How could I walk around Tucson for the next few days being an hour off?  I knew intrinsically that there must be a function buried deep in the phone’s menu system that would fix this issue, but I was too busy to worry about it, so I opted to live with the confusion.

Later that evening when I checked into my hotel room, I decided that I would need to set an alarm for the next morning’s meetings. Normally I would use my phone’s alarm function.  But my phone was an hour off, which meant that I would have to set the alarm for an hour later or was it earlier? The clock radio in the hotel room was no better.  It didn’t have the correct local time, either.  According to the television news program I was watching it was ten p.m. in Tucson; nine p.m. according to my phone; seven p.m. according to my laptop computer (still reflecting the time at home).  And the clock radio?  Nine twenty-three p.m.  To make matters more interesting, the clock radio was designed so that idiot hotel guests could not change the time and mess it up for the next guest.   

Fast forward a few days and more jet wheels skidded across a tarmac below me. This time I was landing in Los Angeles. I turned on my phone and got the same courtesy message from my cellular provider.  But this time they got the time right.

That evening I bedded down up the coast in Ventura, California. I was quite tired from the day’s traveling and was a bit anxious about getting up early the next morning when I would catch a ferry out to Santa Rosa, one of the islands in the Channel Islands National Park.  I needed to be at the dock by 7 a.m. If I missed the ferry, there would not be another one until two days later.  So, backing out all the time necessary to wake up, shower, eat breakfast, check out of the hotel and catch a cab to the ferry landing, I figured I would need to be up no later than 5:45 a.m. 

I set my phone’s alarm and noted that it needed a charge.  I looked around for a wall outlet near the nightstands on either side of the bed. Nothing.  This is the topic of a different rant, but I will save that for another day. The nearest receptacle, it turned out, was around the corner and out of my sight line.  This would not do.  Plug my phone in one of these plugs and there was a very real risk that in the morning I would stumble out of bed to the buzzing alarm, in the dark, looking for the phone, trip and bang my head against something – something hard and unforgiving.  No, I would have to use the clock radio.  At least I could program this one.  I set the alarm for 5:45 a.m., turned out the lights and fell slowly to sleep.

I slept poorly that night.  The worry of oversleeping and missing the ferry worked its way into my brain.  Over and over again, throughout the night, my dream state would ping my conscious mind setting up those lucid dreams when you are not sure if you are awake or dreaming.

It was under these conditions that I had the dream that I wanted to tell you about.  The dream itself lasted only a moment. All this back story for a few seconds of dream.  Anyway, it went something like this.  In the dream, I was lying awake in bed, thinking to myself.  I was thinking that I had been up a lot in the night, but that I felt surprisingly rested. What time is it? I wondered.  I looked over at the hotel alarm clock. The large illuminated digital numbers read 2:30 a.m.  Wow, I thought, I still have more than three hours to sleep.  But when I looked closer at the clock, I saw another display – much smaller, in the upper right hand corner of the screen. It read: “Actual Time: 5:45 a.m.”  Actual Time?  That got my attention.  I woke up from my dream, which of course was a huge surprise, because I thought I was already awake looking at the clock.  Only now I was awake for real. It was pitch black in the room and I struggled to focus my eyes on the clock.  It read 5:45 a.m.  In the next few moments, the alarm came on with its obnoxious buzzing noise.

I was confused at first, but then the whole story, starting back in Tucson, fell into place.  I knew I would need to write it down.  So, that’s done. I’m also thinking that I may have invented the world’s first dream clock,  a device that breaches the space-time continuum by accurately recording both dream time and actual time.  Perhaps in a future dream I will go down to the patent office and stake my claim.