Time machine dream

(Since I referred to the San Francisco game in the last entry, I should confirm that the 49ers did indeed lose to the Colts on Sunday, 28-3. But at least the 49ers sort of made a game of it; considering who they were playing, they were lucky the score wasn't more like 52-3 (the score of the Green Bay win over New Orleans this week). But enough sports...)

I only remember a fragment of a dream from last night, but it was amusing to reflect upon after I woke up because it featured a time machine and the character Phil from the Disney series Phil of the Future. As I recall, I was looking at the machine (a relatively small device about the size of a small desk, with a bank of controls on top) when a disembodied voice like the narrator of a science special began to explain that a time machine was impossible because it would allow a person to travel back in time and prevent his own existence. However, the voice said, a person could travel backward in time as long as he only affected his own existence, which was when the Phil Diffy character appeared as an unexplained example of the phenomenon.

The dream was at least partly inspired by an episode of the show I saw the night before, and I have to admit it's one of my more favorite shows on the Disney Channel (despite being aimed at an audience more than 20 years younger than myself); I would attribute that to chemistry among the cast, but I also like the light-hearted feel of the show, which doesn't spend too much time thinking about how its futuristic technology actually works, or if its actually plausible. I can't help but wonder, though, how the Diffy's could have gone missing from the future for as long as they did without someone from the future (the Time Patrol, perhaps?) coming to look for them, before they go and completely screw up history. Pim, alone, would seem to be a menace to the entire world. Or do the people of the future just take it in stride that history is frequently re-written by accidents committed by time travelers in the past? Or could it be that the Diffy's ventured into a parallel universe when their time machine malfunctioned and thus are only capable of screwing up the history of that parallel universe rather than their own?

I doubt any of those questions will ever be addressed, but I still like the show. And how can one not like a show in which the utterly sweet Debbie Berwick (in the Halloween episode) was revealed to be an evil android from the future? Good stuff indeed.