The Terms of Trade – a short story (Pt V)

[Part IV here.]

That such a sequence of events, with its particular names and places, should present itself to me in a dream, over 145 years later is not easy to account for with classical cause-and-effect physics.  

My dream, which I had on the morning of Sunday 3 May, was unlike the run-of-the-mill dreams I'll have most nights. The three unities are preserved; time (1880), place (the City of London, Luxembourg) and action (a court case arising from an ambiguity in a telegram). The dream was vivid – the names 'Gormally' (who was Irish) and 'Kuhn' (who was Jewish) came through loud and clear; I could feel the atmosphere of their office in Victorian London; I could see them flicking through maroon-bound books of law in the courtroom. I felt that Gormally's career had taken off very suddenly, and that the commodity that these traders specialised in was salt. The dream also spoke of anarchists, whose actions may or may not have led to the issues that ended up in court.

I had the framework of a story; automatic writing. Not something I'd made up; something that had come to me in a dream. This is the fifth such case. Previous dream-inspired short stories have taken me back to London in 1964, London in the 1950s,  Heathrow Airport in 2023, eastern Poland in 1831 and Moscow in 1952. This phenomenon is fascinating. There is no effort required on my part to devise a story; all I needed to do was to have recognised the significance of the dream on waking and jot down as much as I could remember.

So on Sunday morning (coffee first!) I opened my laptop. I made extensive use of AI (ChatGPT and Google Gemini), cross-checking one against the other to avoid hallucinations or confabulations, grounding the basic points from the dream in historical facts. Yes, said both AIs – the places, the dates, the plot – all were historically plausible. My dream had got them right! I just had to beat the story into shape. I add some details; freemasonry, the Magic Flute. Both plausible, historically accurate. I'm still in the flow.

But where from the dream? The setting – the City of London, Bricktorian Britain, 19th century railways, I can feel the atmosphere. I'm thinking of the opening pages of Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands with its description of London as Imperial capital. The setting is familiar. But the narrative? Did it happen as I dreamt it? 

And here I get metaphysical. In an infinite universe, yes, the events must have unfolded exactly as I described them in some parallel world. Mathematically, infinity would be able to encompass everything that happened.

Did something leak through to my consciousness as I slept?

One writes it down, and one leaves it there.

This time three years ago:
Transitioning from Owl to Lark
[Woke up today at 05:30!]

This time four years ago:
Hills... I gotta have hills

This time five years ago:
Flashback to a Dream - subconsciousness and memory

This time 15 years ago:
'Old school' = pre-war

This time 16 years ago:
Britain chooses a coalition government

This time 17 years ago:
Landing over Ursynów

This time 18 years ago:
On being assertive in Poland

Music as a vector of civilisation

 [On waking at half past one am with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' I'll Second That Emotion on my mind.]

– Civilisation came to an end a few centuries ago. Was it all-out nuclear war? Was it an asteroid strike? Various folk tales persist. The evil one, 'Shmumptin' was to blame. The rebirth of historiography as a profession is low on people's priorities as they struggle to survive...

If we are to look at those humans as they work hard to rebuild, based on little more than the myths and legends they tell one another, what feature of their future-primitive society would be most recognisable to us today?

It is music. 

Unamplified (electricity has not yet been reinvented), but played to an amazingly high degree of fidelity by competent musicians, who have had passed down to them tunes stored in the memories of survivors. Drums, wind- and string instruments, crafted with ever-greater care and precision, to make sounds that conjure up atavistic resurgences of emotion. Not only the tunes, but the lyrics. Passed down orally from generation to generation, sung to children, sung aloud, sung together. Language persists and evolves through song.

Men and women, young and old, gathering to make music, attract crowds of tired humans who have finished toiling to feed, clothe and heal the slowly growing population. They come to listen, to sing, to dance, to engage in the sense of shared culture and tradition.

Some anthropologists claim that singing predated speech, that songs encode information in a more memorable way that disseminates easier and deeper than spoken or even written instructions.

So, imagine the year 2175, a clearing in a post-apocalyptic glade; the harvest has just been brought in, flagons of fruit wine are passed around by people seated in a semicircle, and the musicians enter, taking their places on a raised platform with their hand-crafted instruments at the ready. To your early-21st century ear, the melody seems familiar – some of the lyrics even – could this be Bohemian Rhapsody evolved to fit post-apocalyptic social landscapes? [AI image by Grok – once again beating Google Gemini 1.5 Pro at the task.]

The first portent of civilisation's rebirth will be its music. The last will be streaming services to disseminate that music across humanity.

"Just be thankful for what you got."

{{ I dreamt of a German writer with the surname Ulitz, with connections to Poland, and wondered whether a street had been named after him, Ulica Ulitza. Turns out there was such a guy, though no street in either Katowice or Wrocław yet bears his name.  }}

This time five years ago:
The Inequality Paradox: a summing up

This time six years ago:
Familiarity, tradition and identity

This time seven years ago:
Black-hat merry-go-round 

This time eight years ago:
Skarżysko-Kamienna and Starachowice, by train

This time nine years ago:
The world mourns the loss of David Bowie

This time 11 years ago:
Where's the snow?

This time 13 years ago:
Two drink-free days a week, British MPs urge

This time 14 years ago:
Depopulating Polish cities?

This time 15 years ago:
Powiśle on a winter's morning

This time 16 years ago:
Sunny, snowy Jeziorki

Precognition – the future foretold

I was sitting at my kitchen table one morning last week, writing an article for work, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes a thought: "3:30 at Kempton Park." A random thought, stochastic misfiring of neurons – or what? Not an auditory sensation, no sound 'heard', not a voice. Just a thought. 

I've never been into horse racing – the last time I was in a bookmaker's shop was back in the 1980s to place a speculative bet on the Derby. Since then, I've not bet on horses or indeed anything. But I am intrigued; curious. What's this all about? Firstly – do they even race at Kempton Park in January?

It turns out that indeed they do. 

I googled it; yes, there's a racing at Kempton Park this afternoon, and there's a race at 3:35 (rather than exactly 3:30). I look down the race-card, scanning the list of runners and riders for one to back. My eye is drawn to just one horse – Magic Fluke (my favourite opera is Magic Flute). The rider and the trainer are both called 'Marco'. Starting price 7/2.

As I said, I haven't placed a bet for over 35 years, and I've never placed one online. I was put off by the profusion of logos and confusing offers, and in any case it's a working day, so I had no time to work out how to do this, set up an account with a bookmakers, logins and passwords – all too much. 

However, about an hour later, I happen to be on a call with the managing director of a financial-services company based in the City of London. At the end of a half-hour long business conversation, I casually mention to him the story of how the words "Kempton Park 3:30" popped up in my mind out of nowhere. "Worth placing an each-way bet on Magic Fluke in the 3:35 at Kempton Park!" I advised him, jokingly. He thanks me for the tip, and goes on to place an each-way bet on Magic Fluke online – and it came second.

An each-way bet means you get a smaller percentage of the odds should the horse come second or third). Had he put £10 on Magic Fluke, for example, he'd have walked away with £17.40. Or £34.80 for a £20 bet.

Magic Fluke. The very name...

"Magic (noun) – practice intended to summon a tangible effect in the natural world by breaking the laws of causality; invoking a physical effect without a physical cause" 

"Fluke (noun) – a lucky or improbable occurrence, with the implication that the occurrence could not be repeated."

Is this nothing more than a coincidence? Richard Feynman's ARW 357? Or did I pick up a weak signal from the future? If so, how?

If so... yesterday, lo, I dreamed... I foresaw myself living here in Jakubowizna until the age of 85 (in 2042, you will understand), and then move into a 20th-floor flat (though not in a city!). And still in the dream, I am in my old office (when it was on the 9th floor), sat around a large boardroom table with half a dozen of my colleagues. I am telling them about this dream I had in which I am living in Jakubowizna until the age of 85. One colleague says "That's an interesting dream – I'm sure it will come true!", whilst another says "It's just neurons in your brain misfiring." So in this dream I find myself critiquing the dream along with my colleagues! Furthermore, in this dream I carried on to dream that I would live on for another 18 years – to the age of 103! Maybe there's more to dreams than meets the eye...

See too this post about retrocausality.

This time last year:
Levels of Detail, Applied
[More dreams!]

This time five years ago:
Dreams of birth?

This time six years ago:
Foggy, icy, slippery day in Jeziorki

This time ten years ago:
Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil

This time 11 year ago:
Snow scene into the sun

This time 12 years ago:
More winter gorgeousness

This time 13 years ago:
New winter wear - my M65 Parka

This time 14 years ago:
Winter and broken-down trains

This time 15 years ago:
General Mud claims ul. Poloneza

This time 16 years ago:
Just when I thought winter was over...