Insomnia has its positive moments.Without the distractions of TV, phones, or books and aided by night time one gets to moments of critical pure reason (yes I Kan).

My Rosemary tells me that I live in the past. I work, as now in my, oficina surrounded by filing cabinets that contain most of the photographs that I have taken until perhaps yesterday.

Hell according to Sartre was not being able to ever close your eyes. Einstein said in his theory of special relativity that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. Approaching the speed of light, a person inside a spaceship would age much more slowly than his twin at home. Under Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity can bend time.

I believe that hell and time can be personal and one can manoeuvre or bend it as one wishes. Hell to me in high school was a boring class before lunch. Time never ended. Eating that first potato chip is a glorious instant of time that cannot be brought back by eating more of them. 

Every once in a while, when I stare at my venerable Filipino Timex while in my tub, I have noticed that randomly the second hand will stop. I do not believe that the watch is failing mechanically. I think it can stop simply because free will is not only a human trait. That my Fuji-XE3 will suddenly want to take double exposures without my command is an example of inanimate free will.

So last night this insomniac was thinking that today slips by and instantly becomes the past and the awaiting of a thought represents that future that soon will be a present that slips into that past.

But that past past, when remembered, becomes a present reality. If I think of my father hugging me, I am dragging that past memory into the present and I experience it right now with the persistence that only memory can accomplish. 

With film we have the concept of the latent image. You take a picture. Your concept (or at the very least if you are any good at it) will be (safely stored?) in that negative or slide until it is developed. Somehow that latent image of the past becomes a present reality when it appears in the developer tray of a darkroom.That developed negative or slide when put into the filing cabinet becomes an instant past.

Is remembering an occurrence of the past a similar example of latency? When I remember something from my past am I developing it?

We know that a photograph can never really bring us more than two dimensions. That latent image is in two dimensions. But remembering the taking of that photograph in my mind brings in not only that third dimension that is depth but also the smells and sounds of the event. 

As I read all the above I know for a fact that my thought process last night somehow is not stated accurately.

Emily Dickinson famously said, “To travel far, there is no better ship than a book.”

I can only humbly add that thought is just as good as a book.