Time Travel or a Time Machine?

The idea of displacement in time is basically a narrative trick of quite a lot of fiction, isn't it? So we have flashbacks or we have flash forwards. The good stories don't often go in a linear way, but they kind of jump around in time, I think. Charles Dickens's short story, The Signal Man, which is a ghost story. It's about a signalman on a railway who keeps seeing a vision of a man flagging in an absolute panic,. And to kind of ruin the ending, he's actually seeing himself in the future. That seems to me like a really critical moment in which people are imagining what effects do the future have on us, not just the