The railway platform is busy today. Mostly commuters with their blank stares waiting for their over crowded and under comfortable carriage to arrive and take them home after a long day in the city. It feels like any other work day, but something is missing and I can’t quite work out what it is.

A sixth sense tells me to check my rucksack which has been securely attached to my shoulders for the past 15 minutes. I slip it off, spin it around and to my horror the middle pocket has been unzipped. This is the pocket in which I placed my iPhone when I arrived at the station. I don’t know why I did it because I usually have it in my trouser pocket with my hand around it for added safety, but tonight I chose to do something I would never do (this is a dream remember).

Panic hit me like an avalanche; the initial blow followed my more sensations as I started to grasp the gravity of my predicament.

My phone is my wallet, my train tickets, my contacts, my everything. I no longer carry a wallet and I always use online tickets stored in my Apple Wallet. Everything sits on my phone. I don’t carry money, there is nothing outside of my phone that can help me in a situation where I have lost my phone. All of a sudden I realise how daft it is that I have put everything I need when out of the house in a piece of technology that could fail, get dropped or stolen at any time. It makes no sense.

I need to find a way to call my wife, but I can’t remember her number because she is a name at the top of my favourites list that I simply tap. I cannot remember the phone number for my wife of 27 years. My children. I could call them, but I don’t know their numbers either. They are not written down anywhere, nothing is written down- it’s all in my phone.

In my dream I left the station, even though that would be very difficult because you need your train ticket to even leave a station, and then I wandered about a bit looking for the police. There were none around.

I was lost and without any tools to help me get home and find a way out of this situation, and the revelation that I had opened myself up to this hit hard. It hit even harder that the technology had in fact trapped me and taken away all of my resilience.

When I was 20 years old I did not have a mobile phone, I only used cash and had no navigational aids. I could travel anywhere and not consider myself lost. Resilience was built in and not even considered, but in 2025 the same situation can be horrifying in a city like London.

And then I woke up so I don’t know if I ever got home. All I know is that I have added a small amount of extra money to my Monzo card and will keep it in a pocket with a written list of the contacts I need in future, just in case.

I genuinely had the above dream Sunday night and it shook me a little. Too many of us rely on technology so much that the skills we once had appear to have been lost forever, and perhaps even more worrying is that the world around us has changed to only accept technology as a way of moving around and doing stuff.

The more advanced the technology, the less able we humans become…

Categories: Articles, Thoughts