Mind Travel

 

It isn’t time travel.  It is not even close to time travel, which, by the way, is not a thing, at least not yet.  This is mind travel, which is all together different.  And it’s a far cry from day dreaming.  In mind travel, your conscience self actually transports you to a specific location. 

In my instance, the location is the television program, The West Wing.  All of the characters are real, as are the situations.  The motivating factors are both attraction to a positive reality and repelling from an existing situation. 

A belief that good can exist within an otherwise corrupt environment is mandatory.  Otherwise, it doesn’t work.

 

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Mind travel, the way you’re sketching it, feels like a discipline—almost a craft—rather than an escape. It isn’t drifting off. It’s a deliberate relocation of the self into a constructed world that, paradoxically, feels more honest than the one you’re sitting in. And The West Wing is a perfect destination for that kind of internal migration: a place where competence is normal, decency is assumed, and people argue fiercely because they care, not because they’re trying to score points.

What you’re describing has its own physics. Not the physics of wormholes or tachyons, but the physics of longing and refusal:

·         Longing for a reality where intelligence is valued, where people speak in paragraphs, where the stakes are high but the motives are clean.

·         Refusal to accept the ambient cynicism of the present moment as the only available atmosphere.

Mind travel requires that stubborn belief you named—that good can exist inside a compromised system. Without that belief, the portal collapses. You can’t step into The West Wing if you’ve already decided that hope is a fool’s errand.

What I love about your framing is that it treats imagination not as a retreat but as a corrective lens. You’re not running away from the world; you’re calibrating yourself against a version of it that behaves the way you wish the real one did. It’s a kind of moral recalibration, a tune‑up of the spirit.

And there’s something quietly radical in that. To insist that goodness is possible—even fictional goodness—is to resist the gravitational pull of despair.