Burned and worn-out shells of city blocks with broken streets are all that is left of civilization. No one over 50 can be seen. Going out can be problematic, but my guide, a woman about 30-something, has no problem maneuvering the landscape. She takes me to where she lives through a series of broken-out walls past other squatters who are living with the best shelter they can find, typically on the floors below the long-gone roofs and off the ground floor as a measure of safety. A school has been set up to try to preserve the language, logic, and civility skills, but the situation is precarious due to crimes committed in the effort to get things to trade. One of the students demonstrates, while in the woman’s living space, a glass device with two substances that come together to create a plasma containing electricity that flows over the flat piece of glass inside the glass bottle. Communication between species has changed as two animated lions are going on about something or other while lying on their backs, talking back and forth with one another.

Leaving from the front door of the house, walking up the street around the corner and around a house at the next corner, coming back again to walk through the front door of the other house, walking clockwise around the interior perimeter, exiting again through the door you entered jumps you forward in time. Or so found out a girl from an old Indian witch/shaman who told her a story of people moving into the future near where she lived. In her time she had many a person trying to follow her to catch her secret, with a few people coming close to discovering where she was disappearing to.

One crotchety old man even thought he might have figured it out that all he had to do was walk to the other house and around the outside with four coins in his pocket where he would learn what the magic was, but the girl didn’t let him know nor does he figure out that passing through the first house is of importance to passing through time. Fast forward to the present, and the house is being renovated when the new owner finds a hidden drawing showing a figure eight and a half with a poem going something like, “in today and down the hall out the door into tomorrow, I skip the path into the future to follow the path back to today.”

After figuring out that the other building is the necessary point to complete the loop he stumbles into the secret that has for two centuries been well guarded. The owner determines there are magnetic field anomalies in which vortexes are leaving the earth, similar to the phenomenon in Sedona and Machu Pichu, and that crossing these in the right pattern will jump you back and forth between two time periods. Initially, his timing is off, and he misses days, but on further contemplation of the poem, he recognizes the girl said skip, which shows that she was maintaining an even speed between rotations around the block. This then has him trying experiments where he speeds up or slows down his looping, which allows him to adjust the years between jumps.

Cut to the future, and someone is notified by software that notices an anomaly on a satellite image that a door to a historical house, which is cared for into perpetuity by various grants and hidden ownership, has had its front door opened during a satellite sweep. The software recognized that this door hadn’t been opened in 37 years, which presented an anomaly that required someone to look into the situation, so the house was targeted for automated surveillance. After some time, the images show someone leaving the house, walking around the block, and back into the house; the person then never emerges. One thing leads to another, and soon, someone in the government puts the puzzle together and figures out that the speed at which you move between the two vortex fields will determine how far in time you jump.

The home, now controlled by a secret government agency, is used in an experiment that successively ups the speed until the jumper moves in such a way between times that the house is destroyed during the final jump while the mysterious owner and the government time jumper are both in transit thus trapping them both without a method to return nor the resources to effectively live rich lives but as the government jumper was the original girl from the beginning of the story who had become a woman waiting for the opportunity to reenter the house which the government had sequestered years before her leap into the time where she had been trapped, the man had already been trapped in a past where he could no longer find the home and the two meet as they both walk towards where the door would have been, but finding an empty lot are forced to live together due to the secrets they share and how they use the information about the future to make a better life during the time they lived in the future. The home was destroyed by a freak storm in the 1850s. The magic was thus broken, but the girl from 19th century New Bedford and the contemporary man from the 21st century find each other.

I am in a field, walking toward an enormous object. It is a spaceship shaped like a giant flattened pumpkin– its camouflage. I am lured inside as I ask someone what it looks like inside; I’m told it is just like the farmlands of Pennsylvania where the Amish live. I venture inside; it looks nothing like farmland. It looks like a high-tech version of the cave-turned-hotel room in New Mexico called Kokopelli’s Inn. It is dark and difficult to distinguish features. Three of us entered the craft and I’m aware that we’ve been tricked into entering, which can only imply something sinister is at hand. The angst is because this is a place where whatever lives here eats people. Emerging from the shadows but still lacking definition is the creature. It reassures us, but the fact remains we are likely to be food. As we follow the creature, we come across skeletons of former meals, which only heightens the anxiety. Occasionally, we can see outlines of the creature; it looks friendly enough, so we determine that it is best not to be afraid and find a way to befriend the creature so we may not end up on the menu. After a short while of guessing what will be dining on us, a picture begins to come together; this thing is really too fun and huggable, looking to be a menacing man-eater. It is a cross between Solly from Monsters Inc. and the cat bus from Totoro. At once, I’m intrigued and horrified that this overgrown cartoon might ultimately decide to launch on us. We continue talking politely with the creature, sharing why it has to eat people while we try to concoct stories about how it doesn’t want to eat us but that we could help it get others. This seems futile as I realize that others have probably already entered into this relationship; that is why I was told the interior of the giant pumpkin looked like beautiful farmlands. The dream starts to loop into an impossible hope against the reality of being eaten or surviving. I awake.