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[Transatlantic 1930's] Imagine with me for one moment you are… a tree. An organic being raw from nature itself. We can touch and feel you as a solid being: whole. Time moves forward. You have no sentience or knowledge of yourself yet for you are only a tree rooted in the present moment. Example A: Reality. We will use the terms described by common pop-culture reddit would call “Cuils”. [Twilight Zone 1950's] Cuil 1: you are now a plank of wood. Perhaps you used to once be a whole tree but now you are a part of a whole. Time moves forward. You are broken away from that which you once understood. You cannot speak, grow, or adapt to your world for you have been cut from the head and feet. You are simply a fraction thereof. Time moves forward. [Unsolved Mysteries 1980's] Cuil 2: You are no longer wood alone. You are a Frankenstein culmination of mass steel, bricks, and wood. Time is still. You feel completed yet still feel the ache of your once sawed off pieces. Time is still. You feel your parts made vulnerable with glass and are weighed down by bricks. You are swallowing these moving creatures. Time is still. You beg them to see you, notice this sense of unrecognized pain but...you are not recognized as a living being to them. You are merely structural, functional. Time is... [Morgan Freeman's Earth 2010] Cuil 3: You are time...Irrevocably spanning in two directions stretching in the middle. Your uppermost crown forms antennas that receive radio signals and synthetic waves of knowledge. Numbers absorb into you as binary code that shifts into codexes, serial numbers that identify the appliances inside you such as a device to process empathy of other beings, and IP addresses for secured servers within your organs called rooms. Your roots now dig deep cinder blocks into the earth as you were once familiar with except, you do not feel the soil. You feel cold reinforced steel upon your skin. You see the sky become dark as a mass of metal rain lands, splashing fire around you and burning your bones to ash. Toxic waste suffocates the air and the living beings rot away inside you. The cherry blossoms around you curl away into slime and mulch as the trees shrink to shrub and soon, an imploding blast collects scattered matter into a single form. A sickened seed. You are no longer a building anymore. Something else. Not shifting forward in time nor backwards. Not broken or built. In this moment, you are both the relative connection of everything yet unborn of anything. Is time...is time...It’s time. [direct address to audience] Cuil 4: You race between a speed of stitched-like line within a fabric of cloth that holds a large hue of colors assuming the figure of a clock tower. Time. The dong of your bells ring as the streak of blue, red, and orange spans across the thread you lay upon. Time. It is as soft as the water upon your once growing leaves but as sturdy as your roots struck through earth’s axis. Time. You grow taller than the neanderthal wheel, the sun-wrought sand block pyramid, the bloodied colosseums, and a plantation house filled with bloodied cotton balls. Out blossoms from the dirt, your crown sprouting leaves. Time. Time. Time. [Radio Talk Show] Well, my galactic space travellers, we will soon find out more of the linear extremities of our reality next time here on, “The Outer limits: A Study of Time and Space”. I’m The man in the Radio signing off by saying Good night, and Good luck.

Scene 2:

(as Martin Luther King): I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled "Rip Van Winkle." The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years. But there is another point in that little story that is almost completely overlooked. It was the sign in the end, from which Rip went up in the mountain for his long sleep. When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign had a picture of King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years later the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington—and looking at the picture he was amazed—he was completely lost. He knew not who he was. And this reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history—and Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept through a revolution...

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