When I was about fifteen, I had been sick, and my mother woke me around three in the morning to give me medicine. Her voice pulled me out of an unusually vivid dream—bright, colorful, and so strange that it stayed with me long after I opened my eyes. In the dream, a girl was directly in front of me, dancing upside down. Only her head and chest were visible, close enough to feel present. Her blonde hair was rolled neatly at the back of her head, and behind her was a wall glowing an intense, luminous blue, as if made of translucent plastic lit from within. Beneath her head, a thin white squiggly line—about the size of a pencil—moved steadily to the left.
The next afternoon, on the way home from school, I described the dream to my mother and brother in detail. The girl’s hair. The glowing blue wall. The upside‑down dancing. The white line drifting beneath her. It had all been so unusual that I felt compelled to share it.
When we got home, we sat down in front of the television and turned it on. As the old color set warmed up, the picture appeared—and there she was. The girl from my dream. Not similar. Not close. Exact. The same face. The same hair. The same framing of head and chest. And because the show was live, no one—not even the studio—could have known in advance what would appear on screen.
The special‑effects equipment flipped her image upside down, just as I had seen. The wall behind her glowed the same bright blue, intensified by our television’s color setting, which made it look as though light was shining from inside the wall itself. And then, as if to seal the moment, a news bulletin scrolled across the bottom of the screen, forming the same white squiggly line I had described earlier, moving left beneath her head.
Every detail matched. Every movement. Every color. Even her spontaneous dance motions were identical.
I had seen the future—clearly, precisely, unmistakably.
Yet even with all this, my mother and brother refused to believe me. They insisted it must have been coincidence, or that I was remembering the dream incorrectly. They had not seen my dream, and my mother wasn’t paying attention to the television at the moment the image appeared. All they had was my word, and that wasn’t enough for them.
But it was enough for me.
This experience opened something in me that has never closed. It showed me that the future already exists—complete, precise, and fully formed—yet not as a rigid destiny imposed upon us. Rather, it exists because we are already there, living it. We are not moving toward the future from the present; we are present in every moment of time simultaneously, just as alive and conscious in those future moments as we are now. The future is not “set” because choice is absent, but because choice is already being made—by us—everywhere, all at once.
Years later, I was driving home while listening to a fascinating episode of Radiolab from WNYC Studios. The program, titled “Beyond Time” (also known as “A Simpler Time”), featured an artist and a physicist discussing the nature of time. Both argued that the future already exists and that time, as we experience it, is an illusion.
At the 22:20 mark, the artist David McDermott of Dublin, Ireland, explained:
“Time is here, has always been here, and always will be here. This moment you’re experiencing has always existed and always will. As you listen to my voice on the radio, this moment is a permanent fixture of the universe. I have always spoken these words, and I always will. You have always been listening, and you always will be listening.”
I laughed out loud in the car—not because it was funny, but because it was familiar.
Yes. I understood exactly what he meant.
It wasn’t just the television that had shown me this truth. My own experience had revealed it long before I heard anyone articulate it. And it was reassuring to know that others—artists, physicists, thinkers—had reached the same conclusion.
Even if my family couldn’t believe me, great minds could.