title: The Antidote to Time: Lessons from the Dream
author:  Peter David Wilder 
description: Peter David Wilder writes from his home in upstate New York, where he lives with his family. He teaches science at a local high school. Wilder holds degrees in geological sciences, history, and science education. His occupations have spanned a diversity of fields. He has worked as a commercial fisherman, a timber framer, and a NASA intern. Wilder's interests in spirituality derive from his love of the natural world, and a desire to find common ground between different spiritual traditions.
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  The Man in Asbestos: An Allegory of the Future  
    
  
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  # The Man in Asbestos: An Allegory of the Future
  
  
  ### Stephen Leacock
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  
  To begin with let me admit that I did it on purpose. Perhaps it was partly
  from jealousy.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  It seemed unfair that other writers should be able at will to drop into a
  sleep of four or five hundred years, and to plunge head first into a distant
  future and be a witness of its marvels.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I wanted to do that too.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I always had been, I still am, a passionate student of social problems. The
  world of to-day with its roaring machinery, the unceasing toil of its working
  classes, its strife, its poverty, its war, its cruelty, appals me as I look at
  it. I love to think of the time that must come some day when man will have
  conquered nature, and the toil-worn human race enter upon an era of peace.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I lo