I woke up this very late morning in that thick, grey space between sleep and being properly awake, and I couldn’t move. Not physically—well, not only physically—but in the way your mind is still half in another country and the real one has not quite let you in yet. I lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, trying to hold on to something and make sense of what had just happened to me in the night. This is what I have managed to pull out of the haze. This is what I think it meant.
The dream was vivid. Not vivid in the way people use the word loosely, as in, “Oh, I had a vivid dream about my old school.” Vivid in the sense that it had architecture, physics, and continuity. It made sense while I was inside it in a way that most dreams do not, and I could feel it even then: this strange double awareness of being immersed while also knowing, somewhere at the edges, that it mattered. That it was saying something. I wanted to stay. God help me, I wanted to remain in it. And, almost in the same breath, I was desperate to get out. I have never quite felt those two pulls so evenly matched.
Here is what happened. In the dream, I coded an app on my phone, in the way I presently have a python-coded app that carries out market trades. Then somehow, through some freak accident, I was transported thirty years into the past. Just like that. And the first thing I felt was not confusion. It was this enormous, flooding relief. My body felt different. Stronger. My eyes wide open. Lighter in a way I cannot quite articulate now, except to say this: I felt as if I had time again. As if the road stretched ahead instead of behind. As if the mistakes I had made in the intervening decades might still be unmade. There was a rush in it: a real, physical surge.
It lasted a while – I was enjoying it – meeting people, being in places, and finding a vigour I have not felt in ages. But, soon after, the counter-pull hit. Because the people I love—the ones who exist here, in the present I had just walked out of—were gone. Not dead, just not in the world I had landed in. And I knew, with that clean dream-logic certainty, that I needed to get back to them. I needed to go home. That was when the horror started. I reached for the phone, the code, and the mechanism that had brought me there, but none of it was available. It could not be. The technology did not exist yet. The Python, the app, and the entire infrastructure that had somehow generated my little escape hatch were all anachronistic. They belonged to a future that this past had not yet built. I was stuck. Genuinely, properly stuck.
And so I walked through landscapes I did not recognise, in that particular dreamlike way where geography keeps shifting just enough to leave you disoriented. I was looking for someone. Anyone. A person who might understand what had happened to me, someone who might have the knowledge to reverse it. I encountered people in different scenes and tried to explain it all to them; some attempted to help, but the dream kept drifting into another space, where a new group had to be told everything again. And then, somehow, I just kept walking, the anxiety gathering, until I woke up in that frozen, immobilised state I mentioned, caught between two times like a splinter between two layers of skin.
But here is the thing. Lying there in the grey morning, letting it settle, I realised the dream was not obscure at all. It was not speaking in riddles. It was saying something quite specific about what it feels like to be where I am in life: about ageing in the middle years, about the escape fantasies our culture keeps feeding us—if only you could go back, if only you could start again, if only you could be young with what you know now—and about why those fantasies are, structurally, traps.
Because here is what I noticed, and it struck me even inside the dream: the escape was not something I chose. I did not sit down and think, “Right, I am going to abandon my life and recover my youth.” The hacking just happened. It spiralled. A technical solution veered sideways into unintended consequences. And I think that is true about how longing works at this age. It does not announce itself. You do not wake up and say, “I wish I had my body back, I wish my knees did not ache, I wish I could feel twenty-five again.” You have made your peace. You are committed to where you are. Then the longing simply leaks through, unbidden: in a dream, in the particular exhaustion of a Tuesday afternoon, in the way you catch your reflection in a shop window and do not quite recognise the person looking back. Calling it accidental rather than chosen may be the only honest way to hold it. You do not have to feel guilty about a feeling you did not summon. It is just there, working its way through.
And when I arrived in that past world, the thing that hit me was not nostalgia. I expected nostalgia. What I actually felt was physical reclamation. I was bigger in that world. Stronger. The world itself felt smaller—less built up, less dense with information and infrastructure, tinged with that slightly oversaturated palette of an older film. And in that smaller place, I loomed. I took up more space. My body felt as if it belonged to me again in a way it does not always now.
But—and this is the part that broke the dream open, the part that made it devastating rather than merely pleasant—I could not unknow what I know. I had the body of a younger person, but the mind of who I am now: the established professor, the person with three decades of accumulated knowledge, habits of thought, and intellectual architecture. The tools that had brought me there—the coding, the technical fluency—belonged to a future. They did not work there. And so the escape was incomplete from the start. You cannot actually go back because you are no longer compatible with what came before. You would be a living contradiction: a present consciousness in a past body. That is not a return. It is a kind of exile.
And the professional stuff sits right in the middle of this; I cannot pretend it does not. Thirty years ago, I was deep in doctoral work: capable and driven, certainly, but still nascent. No standing. No publications. No centre to direct. No fellowship, no honours, no accumulated networks. The field I work in now—radicalisation studies—did not even exist as a coherent discipline. And now I hold my third chair. I direct a research centre. I have been recognised in ways the younger version of me could not have imagined, and perhaps would not have believed. I am proud of that. I want to say it plainly: I built something. It matters to me because it is substantial, and because it took time, effort, and thought.
But the cost of that accumulation is that I am watching my body change in ways I cannot negotiate with. And I am watching my parents decline. Both of them. Complex health conditions that thirty years ago were only abstract future possibilities, the kind of thing you vaguely assumed would happen to someone else eventually. Now it is happening, in real time, to the people who made me. The trade was never negotiated. Nobody sat me down and said, “You can have the career, but it will cost you your body’s youth, and you will watch the people who raised you lose themselves slowly.” It simply unfolded, year by year. And I think the dream was touching on that: the anxiety that perhaps we have been sold a story in which achievement, status, and intellectual accomplishment compensate for the losses time inflicts. Maybe they do, partly. But no fellowship reverses a joint. No publication slows what is happening in my parents’ brains. The dream’s frustration is the frustration of someone who got exactly what they were told to want and discovered that it solves none of the problems that actually keep you up at night.
And my parents. God, my parents. They appeared in the dream as they were thirty years ago: dark-haired, upright, capable, before the slow erasure. Seeing them like that was not sweet. It was not a sentimental trip down memory lane. It was a confrontation. Because what I was looking at were the people who used to be the fixed points: the ones who contained the certainty that things would continue, that there was always somewhere to go back to, that someone was holding the structure up. They are not that anymore. They are becoming fragile, less reliable as anchors. And I am the generation holding the line now. That is frightening in a way I do not think I had fully admitted to myself until this morning.
That may be the real midlife anxiety. Not losing your own youth—you manage that, adapt, and make your peace. It is watching the people who were supposed to be permanent become impermanent, and knowing you cannot fix it. There is no app for that. There is no code.
And the dream knew this. Its most honest moment was the one that said: you need to go back. You need to return because they are there. Because you are bound to them. Not by choice, exactly, but by love, obligation, and the simple fact of attachment. The past is seductive, certainly. But even in fantasy, it turns out to be incompatible with who you have become. You cannot live there. You can only visit, and even the visit is a kind of grief.
So I walked. In the dream, I just kept walking, looking for help that did not exist, and the searching itself became the anxiety. The knowledge that there was no solution. That the escape was permanent only in its incompleteness. I could neither stay in the past nor return to the present, and I was suspended in this horrible in-between, unable to move in either direction.
And I think that is what midlife actually feels like, if you are honest. Not a crisis. That word is too dramatic, too cinematic. More like a chronic, low-level hum of anxiety about irreversibility. The past is gone. Not as a cliché, but as a structural fact. And the present, however full and accomplished, is haunted by what it has cost. There is no hack. There is no workaround. There is no clever piece of code that resolves the basic, stupid, unfixable problem of being alive in time. We age. The people we love grow older. The world shifts under our feet in ways we did not choose.
And maybe the most honest thing—the thing the dream was asking of me, in its blunt, architectural way—is not to solve it. Not to fix the anxiety, optimise my way out of it, or reframe it into something productive. Just to let it sit. Unresolved. To say: yes, this is the price. The price of being conscious, ambitious, and attached. The price of caring for people who are mortal. The cost of building a life you can feel proud of while knowing it is built in a body that is running out of time.
I am still a little hazy. The coffee has gone cold. But I think I needed to write this down before it faded, before the dream smoothed itself over and became just another strange night’s sleep. It was not. It was trying to tell me something. And I think what it was saying was this: you cannot go back. And you do not have to. You just have to be here, in this, with all of it—the ache, the pride, the love, and the irreversibility. All at once.
And that’s enough. It has to be.