Bed time prescience

Warning: Sci fi content
Warning: Novel (Children of Dune) spoilers
Warning: Dubious parental content choices



Arrakis. Dune. Desert Planet.


I’ve got the first three Dune volumes in a single book: Omnibus. Paperback. Brick.


Years ago I read the first book - Dune, then recently when the new movies came out I went again and then read the sequel - Dune Messiah. By the end of that I needed a break, it’s a lot of philosophy, space future, religion and mind altered political intrigue. There are plenty of creatures, technology and stylised warrior veneration moments. Mostly though, it’s prescience.


"I know the trap of prescience. My father's life tells me what I need to know about it. No, grandmother: to know the future absolutely is to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future".


Things like that as the protagonist undergoes a transformation into a future sighted, empire bestriding ruler.


"He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed".


In a dubious snap decision I started reading Dune to the 8 year old on our house as a bedtime story. This has been engaging, if confusing, and has lead to me starting book 3, Children of Dune at my bed time while concurrently reading Dune at the earlier bed time.

Omnibus. Paperback. Brick.

In the course of every night I read about 16 year old Paul Atreides as he makes his first steps into the secretive desert society on Arrakis, the Fremen. Then hours later I’m travelling with Paul’s children who’re growing up native to the sand a generation later. These children were born exposed to The Spice, prescient ability and are in touch with thousands of ‘living’ memories of the generations who’ve gone before them. Including their father.


On some days of reading Paul is alive with accurate visions of his children, while also being dead and history having ‘walked into the desert’ and also alive again having surfaced as a consciousness inner human writhing the same children he was able to predict during his life due to prescience.


When Paul came back from the desert in book 3 as someone who both was, and wasn’t Paul Atreides, now ‘The Preacher.’ His son Leto had a conversation with his father, and the living memory within of his father, reflecting on learning the prescience on Dune, and earlier in the night I had read the scene of Paul first tasting the mind-altering Spice melange and plucking the future strands that spread out before him. It was involved. It’s getting very convoluted.




Last night I had a dream about a ritualistic Fremen knife fight that took place on the back streets of Glebe in Sydney in 2026. It woke me up at 2:30am. I was not ok.


I’ve realised now that maybe the material isn’t really appropriate for the 8 year old. I also have a memory of Dani telling me that same fact a month ago when we started reading. How did see know? Prescience…