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Do not imagine that the device is silent. I was careful not to reveal the content of my dreams to my doctor, especially not their obsessive quality. The end result is that, at night, I am condemned by my temporal ironies to remain a dreamland bachelorette, while, in my bed, I am doomed to remain truly single and unattached, not due to time, but due to medicine and its attachments.
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In addition to those insignificant faux pas that desynchronize men and hearts without decoupling their watches, my previous dreams indulgently welcomed a plethora of missed opportunities, often drawn from bedside novels or classic movies. But everything has changed since that terrible dinner with those young whippersnappers, one in particular with an advanced mathematics degree and a soapbox who, instead of just playing a few scientific games that might brighten a gloomy evening, spent his time describe the temporal inequality of France before development of the railway. He invited the guests to imagine the consequences – sometimes minor, sometimes severe, sometimes shocking, but rarely fortunate – of these disconnections meaninglessly imposed upon each village, each farm, each traveller by a slippery temporal mindset leading to endless aborted encounters, trains caught by a nose, by a whisker, or when the passenger was too sure of himself, thinking he had won the race with the locomotive and could jump on a step and open the door. Unfortunately, often out of breath, it was not uncommon for him to slip or find his footing too precarious and end up on the tarmac, or, scarier still, under the train’s wheels. It was obvious to this learned interlocutor that there had been a great many deaths during those disparate times and that this hecatomb had been swept under the rug and there were thousands of dead and train-maimed, martyrs of a time warp about which he understood nothing.
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