I was at the EarthIT office. I found John's office and talked to him a bit. It seemed like they wanted me to work there again, and I was looking forward to it, though it had not been made totally that this would actually happen. It was just the vibe I was getting. The place seemed to be underground, as it was dimly lit and there were no windows to outside.

The dream about being at EarthIT might have touched on a lot of actual work I did there, because throughout the day things have reminded me of it, like thinking about database upgrade scripts, and drawing tall curly braces.

I remembered Allison saying something to me back when we were friends about how I had done something brilliant and she liked working with me.

But then I remembered that 'she hates me now', which transformed into Becky hating me, even though I was currently walking with her to her birthday party on the square (I guess she was insulting me a lot as we walked). I soon realized that I didn't want to be there, nor did I need to be there, and left.

Then it became Sara who hated me, or maybe I was half-conscious that I was confused about this and that Sara did not hate me, but yet I continued to try to run away from them all by holding down the 'previous year' button in Google Calendar. The years zoomed by pretty quickly. They'll never think to look for me back here, I thought.

My passage backwards through time seemed to slow down as I approached the year 1800, leading me to think that was the limit, and time came to be represented as a long, dark tunnel. I stopped, but wasn't actually sure that there was a hard limit. The tunnel was just sort of murky black. It may have been that I didn't want to go further back for 'fear of getting lost in infinity'. Like zooming so far into the Mandelbrot set that you're no longer sure if you can get back where you were.

Sara and Becky were trying to find me, and were heading vaguely the right direction. How did they know to go back through the years, I wondered. I thought nobody would even guess to look in that dimension, and even if they did, they'd be unlikely to guess what year I had landed on. But in tunnel form they could look straight along it, with a flashlight. I heard Sara call out something about Marilla, like that she needed me to come home.

The tunnel was sort of subdivided laterally by long rows of shelving, like a library. I ducked behind one row of shelving to put that between us before they got close enough that the light from their flashlight would make me visible to them. It was a very scary sensation of being simultaneously very far away but also not very far, hidden only by distance, off in a dimension that I wasn't used to traveling, that should have been an insanely good hiding spot but was turning out to not be.

I think I actually wanted them to find me. By the end I wasn't sure why I was trying to hide except that I was already hiding, and at that point getting found just feels scary, even if it's just a game. That mix of feelings haunted me for a while after I woke up.

I fell back asleep and eventually had different, less scary dreams, but at the time of writing I no longer remember anything about them.

I stayed up too late feeding this to one of those new-fangled chatbots and then fleshing out the description of the tunnel more, because there was a lot that I find interesting about it.

How did I expect to hide by changing the 'year' spinbox in Google Calendar in the first place? How far could I go? How many 'person sized' spaces were there to hide in?

At first, the span of 225 years seems like a lot of time to hide in, but that's based on the assumption that I am small in that dimension. 225 years is only about 3 human lifetimes. In those terms it kind of makes sense that the tunnel would feel "kind of long", but not unfathomably long. Long enough to be out of range of that flashlight while still being uncomfortably close to being in-range.

The chatbots seem to want to focus on my feelings about vulnerability and my relationships with the people mentioned in the dream and my old job. There may be something to that, but being back at EarthIT is a recurring theme in my dreams. That time tunnel and the feelings around it were what made this one stand out.