How to Travel Through Time

I've discovered how to travel back in time, but it takes a fair bit of advanced planning. The secret is to create a mixtape of songs that are meaningful to you at a certain point of your life. Most of them will be recent releases, as new songs don't carry any existing associations with them. However, if you can find some tracks from the eighties or some other obscure indie act from years ago that you've never heard before, chuck them on there too. Try and consider the current season when picking the tracks.

Once your mixtape is ready and you've arranged the tracklist according to BPM, mood and title you should then proceed to play the mixtape regularly. Put it in your car, and on your iRiver, and listen to that mixtape as often as possible. Pay attention particularly to playing it on your trips to significant events like big parties or doctor's appointments, and on Friday nights and Sunday evenings.

The next step is the most important. Once the Winter, Spring, Summer or Autumn is over you should stop listening to the mixtape. Create another one and repeat the process. You need to not listen to the mixtape again for at least five to ten years.

Once the time has passed, dig the mixtape out again, or throw the playlist onto Youtube or Spotify and listen to the songs in order. There you have it, instant transportation to the season you made the mixtape. If the transportation doesn't feel fully immersive, consider writing journal entries back then as well. It might help. I truly think that journal entries are the greatest gift you can give to yourself from yourself, except for maybe when you pull out an unexpectedly long nose hair.

Okay, you might be a little frustrated right now that you didn't create a mixtape ten years ago and you can't relive the amazing drought of Winter 2006, but what's stopping you from creating a mixtape today? Nothing. You don't even need to restrict it to 80 minutes any more. There's something about the memory of music that scrolling finish to start through your phone's photo gallery can't replicate.