Here is a sentence I’d like to reorganize to fully understand it
We can now travel to far-off places that we couldn’t have dreamed of visiting hundreds of years ago.
I’d like to reorganize this sentence to full conditional sentence to make sure I fully understand this sentence. There are two things that I’ve come up with.
A. We could not dream of visiting there if we were living hundreds of years ago.
It implies that we can dream of visiting because we are not living hundreds of years ago.
B. We couldn’t have dreamed of visiting there if we were living hundreds of years ago.
I’d like to know if it implies that we could (were able to) dream of visiting because we are not living hundreds of years ago. The reason I think this way is because this sentence is the same logic as A sentence.
This is all I can think of to reorganize the original sentence. But, I’m not sure. So could you help me transform the original sentence to full conditional one?
Answer
Often, such a sentence goes like this:
Today we can travel thousands of miles in only a few hours, something people living hundreds of years ago could only have dreamed of doing.
Their dream is our actuality. But your sentence says they could not even have dreamed of doing so:
We can now travel to far-off places that we couldn’t have dreamed of visiting hundreds of years ago.
Hundreds of years ago we could not have dreamed of traveling to far-off places. Today we can actually go to those places.
So there are three “states”:
not even a dream
a dream
a reality
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : jihoon , Answer Author : Tᴚoɯɐuo
