I had spent the early hours of the morning working out my day so that all my appointed tasks could be accomplished at a given hour, but alas so agitated my brain that I could not sleep, which meant that my careful plans were likely to be thrown off track.
I was thinking about a programme I saw the other day about how many Victorian scientists were slightly obsessed with contacting the dead and many inventions (like the Cathode Ray tube) were partly being investigated because of this research.
It got me thinking about whether it is possible to contact the decesased and why the people who claim to do so spend most of their time getting them to verify stuff we already know, rather than using their powers to solve crimes and great philosophical questions. "I don't care that this person's gran used to collect blue vases - can you tell us, which religion if any got it right?"
In the moments before sleep I began to imagine the chaos that would ensue if someone invented a telephone to the dead, but if the dead only had one telephone between them. Imagine the queues as they waited to get through to the living - the same thing used to happen in college in the days before mobiles, I remember one guy I was waiting behind to use the only phone in the building spent an hour and a half on his call, even though there was a queue.
Realistically most of the people the dead would want to contact would die themselves before the ghoul was likely to get to his turn. It would be quicker just to wait. You know unless you wanted to tell them that the will was in the suitcase or who had killed Lady Di, in which case sitting on the info would just make it useless.
I managed to quite scare myself by thinking of all the dead people who might want to contact me and didn't sleep til really late, which meant that I didn't get up at 9 as planned and suddenly my whole day was out of kilter.
I hate the dead. They ruin everything. They are just jealous of us because we still have out flesh and stuff.
