Comms And Time Radio: A Dream Protocol

A fragment written in 2016:

…I retired to bed with the new Paul Kingsnorth book, BEAST. His previous book, THE WAKE, was written in a remastered form of Old English. I’d previously finished Walter Benjamin’s diary, ONE-WAY STREET, which is shot through with Surrealist-style dream protocols.

Last night I dreamed that it was discovered that time travel was only achievable robotically – I kind of blame Nicola Barker’s THE CAULIFLOWER for this, too. And so we sent tiny fly-sized drones into the past, devices that could be biodegraded or self-incinerated to preserve the timeline. Video was difficult. But we could transmit audio back up the line. Archived sound recording has been in my head since a tour of the basement levels of the British Library a while back, in pursuit of an abortive spoken-word project about radio.

In the dream, in my head, I could hear Old English being spoken in the 10th Century, amongst the crackling of old fires and the lapping of buried rivers.