I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time

“I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I'd have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank.” – Jeff Mangum

In this haunting and tender confession, Jeff Mangum, the visionary artist behind Neutral Milk Hotel, speaks not as a musician, but as a dreamer burdened by compassion. His words open the window into a heart that cannot bear the weight of history’s sorrow. To dream of saving Anne Frank is to dream of rewriting the tragedy of humankind — to rescue innocence from the jaws of cruelty, to reach back across time and undo the irreparable. It is a yearning born not of fantasy, but of empathy so profound it transcends the boundaries of space and reason. In Mangum’s vision, the time machine becomes not merely a vessel of science fiction, but a symbol of the soul’s eternal wish — the wish to heal what has been broken, to reach the unreachable, to redeem the past through love.

The origin of this quote lies in Mangum’s personal awakening to the story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who perished in the Holocaust, yet whose diary immortalized her courage, her wit, and her unyielding hope amidst horror. When Mangum read The Diary of a Young Girl, he was so moved that it invaded his dreams, shaping the ethereal concept of his band’s 1998 masterpiece, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The album became his elegy for Anne — a surreal, poetic act of mourning and resurrection. His longing to “save” her through time travel was not a literal fantasy, but a spiritual response to suffering: an artist’s instinct to reach into the abyss and call back the lost, even if only in song.

In Mangum’s words lies the paradox of the empathic imagination. To feel so deeply for another’s pain that one dreams of altering history — this is the mark of a heart both blessed and burdened. Such dreams remind us that compassion, when fully awakened, does not stop at the boundaries of one’s own life. It stretches across centuries and oceans, reaching toward every victim of injustice, every silenced voice. But it also reveals the tragedy of the human condition: that love alone cannot undo cruelty, and that time, once past, cannot be rewritten. In this tension between love and impossibility, between the yearning to save and the acceptance of loss, we find the profound beauty of Mangum’s vision.

Consider, for instance, the story of Oskar Schindler, a man of conscience who, unlike Mangum, did not dream of saving Anne Frank — but lived in the same time and chose to act. Through courage and cunning, Schindler rescued over a thousand Jews from extermination. He could not stop the war or heal the wounds of history, but within his reach, he defied time’s cruelty with compassion. His deeds, like Mangum’s dreams, remind us that while we cannot traverse the past, we can still stand against the evils of our present. Every act of mercy, every stand for truth, is a form of time travel — a rewriting of fate, one soul at a time.

When Mangum dreams of moving “through time and space freely,” he voices a universal yearning: the desire to be unbound by the limits of mortality and circumstance. Every human heart, when faced with injustice, cries out, If only I could go back… If only I could change it. But this dream, though impossible in the physical sense, carries an emotional truth. We cannot alter the past, but we can bear witness, remember, and let remembrance guide our actions. Mangum’s song for Anne Frank is not an attempt to resurrect her body — it is an act of resurrection for her spirit, ensuring that her story, and the stories of all who suffered, live on through art and memory.

Thus, Mangum’s longing becomes a mirror for our own. Each of us has moments we wish to change, people we wish to save, tragedies we wish to prevent. But though we cannot build a time machine, we can become what Mangum became — a vessel of remembrance and compassion. We can study history not to escape it, but to honor it. We can act in the present with the awareness that every small kindness, every defense of the vulnerable, is an answer to the sorrows of the past. The true act of saving Anne Frank lies not in rewriting her story, but in ensuring that no one’s light is extinguished in silence again.

So let this be the lesson: Let your empathy move you to action, and your grief become creation. Dream, as Mangum dreamed, not of changing what was, but of healing what is. Use your imagination not as an escape, but as a bridge — between ages, between hearts, between the living and the lost. For to remember with compassion is to defy oblivion. As long as we carry the dreams of the dead and turn them into deeds of mercy, the time machine lives — not in metal and gears, but in the boundless heart of humanity.