This book is old, you guys. A good 24 years old.  And it’s refreshingly good.

At 144 pages, Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams is a quick but heavy read. Lightman uses Einstein’s musings on time as source material, taking the many drafts of Einstein’s early work on the theory of relativity and building new worlds where time works in strange ways.

In one of my favorite worlds, we see time functioning like gravity,  growing increasingly concentrated and dense as we travel closer to its epicenter. To the observer,  two statuesque lovers kiss for what seems a lifetime. The lovers are wrapped in the sounds of their unified hearts’ slow,  laborious beating.

In another world,  time moves differently for each person in the presence of others.  A mother sees her little boy meeting a woman at a cafe while the boy feels himself aging fasterror and faster in the company of the woman he is sitting across from in the cafe.

What’s truly fascinating is,  though these worlds are mere fantasy, crafted from the crumpled and discarded pages of a theory, they all seem to relate to the human condition.  I caught myself relating to some of the eeriest representations of time.

Pick it up or buy it on your favorite ebook app and let me know which versions do you feel you relate to most! Let me know in the comments!