There’s a game called Snakes and Ladders that we used to play when I was a kid. This is the name it goes by in most of the world, apart from the United States (and occasionally in Canada), where it’s known as Chutes and Ladders. This is because Milton Bradley, the company that popularized it over here, thought the chutes (slides) would be more appealing to children (silly Milton Bradley, is all I can say).

A standard Snakes and Ladders board typically has 100 squares, arranged in a 10×10 grid. The squares are numbered in a serpentine fashion from 1 to 100, zig-zagging from left to right and then right to left, back and forth across the board, starting in the bottom left-hand corner (square 1) and ending in the top left-hand corner (square 100).

The goal of the game is to be the first to reach the last square at the top of the board. You start at square 1 and take turns rolling the dice to move forward. If you land at the bottom of a ladder, you get to climb up (that’s good luck!). But if you land on a snake’s head, you have to slide down (uh-oh!).

Did you know that this game originated in India as Moksha Patam. The idea behind this initial incarnation was fundamentally about morality, life choices, and destiny. The game was spiritual and philosophical, designed to teach children about virtue (good deeds), which are rewarded by ladders that take you closer to moksha (liberation from the cycle of rebirth), and vice (bad deeds), which are punished by snakes that drag you back down into samsara (the cycle of suffering and rebirth).

OK, hold an image of a Snakes and Ladders board in your head. Now, imagine that the world is sprinkled with time tunnels, whose entrances and exits are located in out-of-the-way, infrequently visited places.

These tunnels are one-way only. Some take you from your current time back into the past. Others transport you from your current time into the future. The exit end of each tunnel is fixed in time (give or take a couple of months), while its entrance end moves through time at the same rate as the rest of us. That is, I could enter a tunnel now in 2025, someone else could enter the same tunnel in 2035, and we’d both end up back in 1870, or wherever that particular tunnel terminated. Also, the entrances to the tunnels don’t stick around indefinitely. Some exist for only a few days, while others persist for decades.

Now, imagine that you are in possession of a “tunnel detector” (a bit like a Star Trek Tricorder). Wherever you are in time, your detector can help you locate the entrances to time tunnels that lead to the past or future. It can also tell you in which direction (past or future) and for what duration (how far) each tunnel will take you.

In a way, this reminds me of the Time Bandits movie, which tells the tale of a young boy taken on an adventure through time with a band of thieves who plunder treasure from various points in history. I’m also reminded of the British TV series called Primeval, in which a team of scientists is tasked with investigating the appearance of temporal anomalies across the United Kingdom through which prehistoric and futuristic creatures enter the present.

In fact, the time tunnel concept I just mentioned is at the core of a book called Yestertime, which I’m currently reading. I’ll report back further when I’ve finished. Suffice it to say for the moment that this is proving to be a cracking good read.

However, the real reason I’m waffling on about all this here is that I had a dream last night. This may have been inspired by my reading Yestertime, possibly influenced by "The Red Pill or The Blue Pill" scene from The Matrix.

I know, I know… if you want people to be as impressed with your dreams as you are, then don’t tell them you are talking about a dream until the end of the story. But we digress…

In my dream, I was offered the one-time chance to take a pill that would instantly transport me along with whatever I was wearing and carrying 200 years into the future. But that’s all I was told. I had no idea whether I would arrive in a paradise, a dystopia, or an apocalypse.

I’m proud of the fact that my first thought was how my disappearance would hurt the people who know me. I’m not proud of the fact that my second thought was that they would all have been dead for close to 200 years by the time I arrived in the future (hey, it was a dream, and at least I’m being honest).

What would you pack for a trip like that? What would you wear? And, assuming you ended up in civilization rather than devastation, what would you do to earn a living?

I’ll close by leaving you with one further thought. One thing that people rarely consider when zipping back and forth through time is the risk of contracting or carrying diseases. Suppose I were to travel 200 years into the past. Even if I’m not showing symptoms, could I be unknowingly carrying COVID-19, for example? Conversely, if I took the pill and leapt 200 years into the future, would I be instantly felled by some monstrous malady that is unknown to us today?

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on anything you’ve read here. Do you sometimes wonder about the possibility of traveling to a different time? Would you go if given the chance?