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...and in this dream I was at a fancy-schmancy dinner party being thrown by an aristocrat in Victorian England.

I was dressed the part, and my table manners were adequate, but my accent had piqued their interest and other dinner guests want to know where I was from.

To which I replied "I am from the future".

They lapped that up, eyes brightening across the table, and a stream of questions were asked immediately, which I attempted to answer with the greatest possible cordiality:

Tell us, how is England in the future?
- "My dear Lady, although no longer an Empire, England remains the model of decorum and taste in the English-speaking world."
Do people still die?
- "Oh yes, but at a later age perhaps, and generally more healthy."
Is there still War in the future?
- "I'm afraid so, of a nature so dastardly and low that I would be remiss to answer with any detail, even away from the dinner table."
Do people still fall in love?
- "Oh yes, with greater ease and frequency, and sometimes even with the same depth of commitment."

...And then there was a question that stumped me:
Is the future then better, or worse than today?

I stammered a moment, thinking of an answer befitting an ambassador for Tomorrow, and then replied:
- "The future is neither better nor worse. It is.... more... more SINCERE. And as such, it has a greater potential for savagery, as well as greatness."

At that point, the dinner party grew quiet, pensive, and perhaps a little nervous. War did not scare them, neither did death. SINCERITY frightened them into an uneasy silence.

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It is one of the few dreams that has stayed in my memory so strongly. I can't get it out of my head.

So, I began to think of HG Wells and his Time Machine. I think my dream echoes some of the precepts in the novel, especially that as human civilization progresses, there is less and less adherence to a unified code of politeness, a single moral platform, and eventually the whole process breaks down into a savage polarization of Haves & Have-nots, in this case the Morloks and the Eloi. Social pretense is out the window,and the ruling class enslave and eat the defenseless working class.

This is a simplification of the theories of Marx & Heggel, who were writing their now-famous manifestoes at about the same time.

All of these literary works reflect the underlying concern of the era: The power of the Industrial Elite over the quickly growing masses of the Working Class.

.... And I remember thinking about this in my dream, that it is a function of the Upper Class to question the future, because they are the only ones with any free time to do so., which is why traditionally countercultural & revolutionary instigators have tended to be educated children of the Wealthy Elite.

So in this way the Master Caste sows the seeds of its own destruction. It's a story repeated over and over again in history.

And seeing how HG Wells was not just a writer of fiction, but actually one of our most successful prophets (he predicted credit cards, cellular phones, two world wars, nuclear weapons, globalization, space travel, and environmental crisis before there were even words for these things), I'm kinda concerned for the end result of Human civilization.

Because it *is* becoming more sincere, and that's not necessarily a pretty thing.