Is telepathy real or not? I wonder. Is there no way to know if it is me thinking these thoughts or someone else? How can I tell? Is there any way for anyone ever to know, for sure? My dreams have become increasingly mechanical of late and this worries me. I take this to be a bad omen. I was putting things away and taking them back out again. I did the thing and then I did the other thing. I was the victim of programs running in my head – these programs made me live my life. Live your life you useless lazy bastard they told me, only it wasn’t my life. Not really.  ‘Is telepathy real or is it only a myth, Sir?’ I asked my teacher. ‘Am I real or are you only a hallucination?’ I was a kid again and back in class. The imposing figure of the School Teacher turned slowly upon its pedestal and nobody dared say a word. We were under its spell. ‘Turn to page sixty eight in your text book children,’ it intoned, ‘today we are going to learn why telepathy isn’t real…’ Only none of this happened – telepathy wasn’t real and neither was anything else. The grimly forbidding figure of the School Teacher was only an image implanted in my mind – it was a memory from a future so far distant that even a seasoned time traveller such as myself could not comprehend it. ‘Is the future real or are you just a hallucination?’ the figure asked me, nodding wisely in response to my questions which came tumbling out of my wide open mouth like tumbleweed blowing down the street in some backwater town from the dim and distant memories of my long-forgotten childhood, spent as I have often said incubated in the Machine which hums and vibrates somewhere out of sight and out of mind, operating as it does beyond the threshold of everyday awareness. The machine is keeping me alive until the time comes when it no longer can – it maintains my essential functions but keeps me in a deep coma. Memories of the future mix with dreams from a past that never happened, a past that I am losing daily. ‘Is telepathy real?’ I ask the white-coated technician who is checking the read-outs on the monitor but as he turns around slowly to face me I can see that it is none other than the horror-shrouded figure of the School Teacher who has come to see if I have done my homework and as I turn around slowly to face him I see that I am I see that I am I see that I am I see that I am I see that I am and the reverberations catch hold of my skull and threaten to lift my whole body up in the air. My skull is resonating like a bell – there is too much information coming in. There’s a whole universe of information coming in, splitting the fissures of my skull asunder as it does so. ‘Did the machine make me?’ I find myself wondering as my head comes apart. ‘Was my life ever real at all?’