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While driving in their plush sport sedan at the stroke of midnight, the unsuspecting couple suddenly find themselves at the helm of a horse and carriage - right smack in the middle of the city, on streets that have become narrow and bumpy with cobblestones. His sport coat and khakis have metamorphosed into black suit and suspenders, her red dress and pumps into hoop skirt and button-up boots.

Bewildered, they rush back to their Victorian home, which now appears to be nearly brand new. Inside, they find that the CD player has been transformed into a gramophone and the microwave into a pot-bellied stove. The cell phone is now a wind-up wall model; the computer, a grammar-school abacus. The TV and VCR have - gasp! - vanished; in their places, inexplicably, is a piano and a stack of books.

The year 1900 is coming, and we had better be ready.

For the last few years, we've heard nonstop about the dread millennium bug and the havoc it will wreak on our digitized society if our ubiquitous microcircuitry fails to recognize 2000 and believes the year is 1900. Municipal utilities, the stock market, paper-churning federal and state bureaucracies, the corner grocery - any public or private entity could experience computer malfunctions. A failure is possible in any number of small links, compromising the entire chain that holds our lives together.

Most of us have greeted all the hysteria with deafening yawns. It's tough to get all worked up about computer problems when you have to worry about getting the kid off to school, fixing the busted water heater, and getting the oil changed in the car. But when talk turns to how the Y2K bug might affect our consumer conveniences, that's a different story. We don't like anything messing with our time-savers and our toys.

The Y2K paradox is this: When it comes to the gizmos that grease the skids of our daily lives, we fear time-warping backward; but when it comes to leisure and pop culture, we are more enamored of the past than ever.

Look at the hottest movies of the past few years: Shakespeare in Love catapulted us back to the Elizabethan age, when people had beautiful clothing and everyone except Gwyneth Paltrow had bad teeth. Modern Titanic mania sprung from a 1912 maritime disaster that continues to fascinate. Saving Private Ryan shot us back to The Great War, the single most defining event of the 20th century. We like our escapism with a good dose of history. History comforts us with warm and nostalgic images and reminds us of mistakes that we should not repeat.

Fashion trends look backward for inspiration-witness the Frankenstein shoes and bell-bottom pants from the '70s being worn by every kid too young to remember those styles the first time around. The classy, knee-length women's blazers on department-store mannequins recall a time when men wore waistcoats and carried walking sticks.

For R&R, we flock to B&Bs that evoke a simpler, bygone era through antiques and home-baked breakfasts that we no longer have time to make ourselves. We take horse-drawn hay rides in fall, sleigh rides at Christmastime. Heirloom flowers such as foxglove, hollyhocks, and larkspur are the rage in gardener's summertime backyard beds.

We like to fantasize about the past. It's a bauble, a pretty snow globe, that we can pick up and enjoy, then put back on the shelf when we're done. The past is a nice place to visit, but we wouldn't want to live there - unless we could afford indoor plumbing.

Our ambivalence is enough to make you wonder what we fear more: being thrown into the past or facing whatever comes next. We stand on the foggy brink of past and future, the Great Divide between one century and the next, armed to the teeth with cell phones, fax machines, Palm Pilots, and video games. Perhaps the fear comes from realizing we have too much stuff, too many toys, and we feel guilty about being so addicted to our electronica. If everything goes haywire at once, it might serve us right.

Perhaps some of us would secretly relish the chance to stop keeping up with the Joneses - whether they live next door or in our TV sets. And perhaps those of us who only half-heartedly try to keep up will enjoy a sardonic laugh when the cell phone belonging to some loud and pretentious jerk suddenly vaporizes during the time warp.

Time travel is a staple of sci-fi TV shows and movies, where, thanks to a machine, a special portal, or a rift in the time-space continuum, the characters are able to zip back and forth in time. It's all so H.G. Wellsian; so Star Trek. And though the Y2K issue serves as a vaguely uncomfortable reminder that computers are only as reliable as the human beings who program them, there is an opportunity hidden within crisis and chaos. After all, visiting 1900 sounds like a great escape; the ultimate adventure vacation.

If January 1 brings time travel, my steamer trunk is packed. mm

Susan M. Barbieri is managing editor of Minnesota Monthly.