Time flows like a river. Bullshit. A river, unlike the water in it, is mostly unmoving.
It’s always between the same trees, always starts from the same lake. We are
not drops of water all flowing through one of the same unending courses. Time
literally is: Perception. A minute is never sixty seconds long. The years of our
lives are not all equal to the time Earth takes to orbit the sun. Time passes the
way you think it passes, no matter what the clock says. Though a movie may
claim to be 121 minutes long, as far as you’re concerned those 121 minutes
were just the opening credits. Have you ever been playing a video game and
said you were just going to play for ten minutes, and when you finished it was
the next day? You stopped playing when you were aware that ten minutes had
passed. The world around you simply moved at a faster pace than you and your
console. They say that history repeats itself. This does not mean that another
great European empire will follow Rome, or that the birth of a child will be the
exact same as the birth of its child. True deja-vu happens when you perceive
your world in the exact same way you perceived it before. I can be thinking
about a certain TV show while looking at the pattern in a tablecloth and know
that I have thought about that show while looking at that pattern before. This
happens to me once a week. But these are trifles. They are meant to mean
nothing. A person’s life is measured not just in years, but grades, marriages, and
even musical genres. But some of the most important moments in a person’s life
can last for less than a second. I can be watching a brilliant movie about Kevin
Spacey going through a mid-life crisis, all the time being a certain kind of person
with certain agreements with the movie, and in a split second realize something
about myself I never knew or chose not to know, and be totally someone else
from then on before I even finished cracking a smile. It doesn’t need a real
reason, such as a similar revelation being made in the movie; it just happens
randomly and on it’s own accord, and that’s why it’s always right. Sometime time
takes on the form of noise and movement and begins to swirl around me, making
me dizzy and unbalanced, not like the result of some drug but as a complete
lack of stimulation. Those times I feel like I’m in a dream. Dreams do not even
exist in time, rather it exists in them, as a slave. On rare occasions, if I sleep
without dreaming I wake up from nothing aware that so much time has passed
because I was in the real world the whole time. But if I do dream, and I always
do, I am no longer in my bed or even my house. I am in a place that does not
exist in our universe, and I can be there for weeks before I wake up from seven
hours’ sleep. What gets me more is that when my alarm clock goes off I hit the
snooze and go back to sleep, but before the nine minutes are up I’ve spent
another day on vacation where every move I make with every part of my body
moves only inside my head. I read somewhere that the average dream lasts 1 to
2 seconds. In my life the average thought lasts even less, because the
imagination is merely a heightened sense of perception. And time is not the rate
at which things move, but the rate at which we think they move. Time is:
Perception.