look on my works ye...

"Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds,

and I have come here to destroy all people...

all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain."

A recurring theme in my dreams is the appearance of an old man who lectures me. Usually he is a monk of some Eastern tradition. Sometimes he is a wizard or a priest. Once he was Ted Kaczynski, another time Gregory House.

Last night, he was Walternate from Fringe. AKA Defense Secretary Walter Bishop.

Walternate could time travel and he took me to the far future. We were merely observers and thus exempt from the effects of time, but I was forced to watch everything and everyone I knew waste away and vanish. "Time destroys all," he kept repeating.

(((Side note: that part reminds me of Raistlin Majere, from Dragonlance, who was cursed by the head of the mages guild and thereafter had pupils shaped as hourglasses. He could behold no beauty in anybody, as he saw everyone as the dried out husks they would one day become.)))

She apparently needs to pick up a copy of He's Just Not That into You.

"Time will destroy everything you love," Walternate continued, in the dream. He took me to the far, far future next, and I could see time whittling away at the mountains, drying up the seas.

In my pocket I had hidden a ring with a bright center stone like a diamond in the shape of a star, surrounded by tiny red and purple gems that reminded me of ripe currants. The ring felt very important to me, and I clenched it tight in my fist to keep it away from the effects of time, and from Walternate.

Nonetheless, as he wound forward the clock, I could feel the metal band of the ring begin to disintegrate between my fingers, the bond between the stones vanish, the stones themselves come loose like milk teeth and fall into the creases of my palm. My heart sank and my stomach clenched.

Still I kept the stones hidden, thinking to myself I would reset them in another ring, once Walternate released me from this terrible demonstration. But he smiled at me, knowingly, in a chilling way. And the stones themselves began to shrink and rot from the core at once, as if they were merely sugar crystals under a stream of water.

Stars flickered out in the distance.

"Everything," Walternate stressed. "Everything."

SECRETARY BISHOP: Do you know what it's like... to wake up and just for a moment... think that everything is as it was? And then to realize it's not... that the nightmare you had was real. Soon everyone here will experience loss the way that all those over there did. Air, water... light, even. But you... you will experience loss the way I did.

I don't know... 

Sometimes I miss just showing up to classes in the nude.