What If Time Didn’t Flow Straight?

Thoughts on Time, Memory, and Choice

Time is supposed to move in a straight line. That’s what we’re taught. One moment leading to the next, everything progressing forward—birth to death, cause to effect, morning to night. Simple. Neat.

Except… it rarely feels that way, does it?

Some days stretch endlessly while others disappear in a blink. Memories sneak up on us out of nowhere, fresh as a wound or warm as sunlight. Entire years vanish into a blur, and single moments linger for decades. And then there are dreams—strange, looping, folded things that ignore the laws of time altogether.

I’ve always been fascinated by that—by the idea that time isn’t as linear as we pretend it is. That maybe, beneath the surface of our clocks and calendars, something else is going on. Something messier. Something more human.

This post isn’t a theory. It’s a meditation. A gathering of thoughts shaped by writing, dreaming, photographing, and living in the blurred overlap between past, present, and what might have been.

Living Inside a Loop

When I began writing Dreams Don’t Always End, I didn’t know it was a book. I just had this recurring dream—a crash on the M4, a Luton van, time slowing down as though something enormous was trying to break through. That dream didn’t behave like a memory. It behaved like a message. But from where? From who?

I still don’t know.

What I do know is that the more I explored that dream, the more I noticed how time worked differently in my own life. It wasn’t just that days dragged and years vanished—it was that the same themes, same choices, same forks in the road kept reappearing, wearing different masks.

Moments didn’t vanish. They looped. They whispered back to me when I thought I’d moved on.

Writing the book helped me notice that. But I don’t think I was writing in order to understand time. I think I was writing because time was trying to understand me.

Memories With Edges

There’s something strange about the way memory works. It’s not a perfect recording. It’s more like a sketch—a mood, a tone, a distorted shape that changes every time you look at it.

Some of the scenes in my book were drawn from real places: an office I used to work in, the flat I lived in and later renovated, a corridor that may or may not have existed. But when I wrote about them, they changed. They didn’t just reflect how things were—they reflected how they felt. And that feeling was often tied to regret, longing, or choices I didn’t fully make.

In that way, memory isn’t passive. It’s active. It reframes the present. It casts shadows on the future. And sometimes, it tries to warn you.

We like to think the past is behind us. But what if it’s not? What if memory isn’t just a window—it’s a doorway?

The Weight of Unmade Choices

One of the quiet threads running through my writing—especially in the upcoming second and third books—is the idea of the unchosen path. What happens to the version of us that didn’t make it out? The one who stayed? The one who turned right instead of left? Are they gone forever? Or do they linger, just out of reach?

Sometimes I think time is less like a road and more like a room full of mirrors. You walk through, making decisions, but behind each reflection is a version of you that hesitated. That backed away. That didn’t find their way out.

Those versions haunt us—not in a ghost story sense, but in the quiet moments. When we stare out of a window and feel like we’re missing something. When a place we’ve never been feels familiar. When we wake up from a dream and can’t tell if we’ve remembered something or imagined it.

I write about those feelings because I live with them. I think we all do, in different ways.

Photography and the Pause Button

My photography is mostly landscape-based—open spaces, weathered textures, stillness. And yet, some of the most meaningful photographs I’ve taken don’t directly relate to any plot or scene in my writing.

What they do relate to is time.

A photograph is a moment held in place. But not just any moment—your moment. The one you chose to notice. The one you stood still for. And sometimes, while writing, I’d think of an unrelated photo—mist over a hill, a lone tree against a heavy sky—and realise that it had somehow influenced the mood of a chapter I was working on.

Those images weren’t illustrations. They were memory-anchors. They helped me feel time differently. And maybe that’s what I’m always trying to do: not just capture a moment, but inhabit it. Understand its weight.

Dreams as Clocks That Don’t Tick

The more I explore this idea in my books, the more I return to dreams—not as plot devices, but as signposts. In dreams, time doesn’t behave. It repeats. Rewinds. Jumps ahead. Sometimes you arrive before you leave. Sometimes you never arrive at all.

In Dreams Don’t Always End, time bends and shifts like that. It’s not a gimmick. It’s a reflection of how I’ve experienced certain phases of life. Grief. Depression. Recovery. Falling in love. Losing touch. Moments when a minute felt like a year—and years vanished with barely a mark.

If you’ve ever felt like time was broken, or like it was trying to tell you something, you’re not alone. I believe that storytelling—whether in words or images—is one way we respond to that sensation. We shape narrative not to control time, but to walk alongside it. To make peace with the loop.

A Thought That Keeps Returning

What if time doesn’t flow straight?

What if it coils, loops, branches?

What if memory is not the past, but an alternate present that didn’t quite bloom?

These are questions I don’t pretend to answer in my work—but I ask them often, and I write from the place they come from. That place is personal, emotional, and hard to pin down. But I know it’s real, because it’s shaped everything I’ve created—and everything I’m still trying to create.

Final Reflections

I’m currently working on Books Two and Three—slowly, organically, the way the first book grew from dream and memory. These new stories will stand alone, but they’ll share the same strange gravitational pull: toward memory, toward mirrors, toward doors that open both ways.

If you’ve ever sensed time folding back on itself—or felt the weight of a choice you didn’t make—then I hope something in these stories speaks to you.

Until then, I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep photographing. And I’ll keep wondering about the shape of time, and what it means to live inside it.

Thanks for reading.