For long stretches at a time, Hassan believed that he had stopped thinking. That he was all feeling, no thought. But that was wrong: it was more that his thoughts had become feelings, and were now tumbling round his head like butterflies. His thoughts were fluttering things, impossible to pin down. They led to one thing, then to another, and then to a third, which might be the first thing over again, though it was hard to be sure, as by then he’d forgotten what the first thing had been. Whether the root cause of this was fear or hunger or loneliness, he didn’t know. What was interesting—and this interested him in the same way he might once have been interested in the activities of an ant—was that he had discovered a talent for time travel. For fractions of a second, he was able to cast himself out of this cellar and into a past in which none of this would ever happen.
— Slow Horses (Mick Herron), Loc. 3733–40