WASHINGTON.

"Waking to cool 1970-style music from a tiny phonograph built into her pillow, the housewife yawned, flicked a bedside switch to turn on the electronic recipe-maker, then rose and stepped into her ultrasonic shower.  While sound waves cleaned and vigorously massaged her, breakfast got itself ready in the kitchen.  The recipe-maker, taking its cue from a menu coded on a punch card, perked the coffee, dropped six eggs from the egg compartment into a bowl, mixed them with a dash of milk and scrambled them.

"Breakfast done, the housewife turned on the central vacuum cleaner which sucked dust from all the rooms through special ducts.  She switched on the video phone, scanned the list of groceries and prices which appeared on the screen, and..."

Well, that's enough; we get the idea.

THE BEGINNING of the housewife's average 1970 morning, described above, is not taken from a science fiction parody, but rather from Newsweek's recent special issue devoted to "The 60's."  Newsweek was only one of dozens of magazines and newspapers which, within the past few weeks, devoted all, or part, of an issue to the next decade.  If nothing else this period is already the most self-conscious decade in recorded history.

Julian Huxley, in an article, "The Future of Man," which appropriately enough was the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists'  "next-decade" approach, said that if you likened the evolution of man and his biological past to a stack of postage stamps as high as St. Paul's Cathedral, the time since the beginning of agriculture and the settled life is the equivalent of one postage stamp flat on the top of the stack.  Furthermore, with any luck, man can look forward to evolving through at least another stack of stamps as tall as St. Paul's.  This must also be approximately the number of stamps we use each year on Christmas cards -- the latter observation being original and not Mr. Huxley's.

But the point is that viewing man and the next decade with Mr. Huxley's perspective, the frantic fanfare which accompanied our transition from one piddling little decade to another can only be looked upon as further evidence that we will leap at any editorial gimmick to talk about ourselves.  And our impatient haste to revel in this introspection is borne out by the fact that we didn't even let our little old 1950 decade (about 1/500th of a Huxley postage stamp thick) have its last year before rushing helter-skelter into the next ten-year slice of stamp.  The experts tell us that the next decade doesn't really start until next year, which I suppose explains why I do not feel much different after 20 days in the Soaring '60s.

THE TRUTH IS, that regardless of whether the '60s started soaring 20 days ago or won't really take off until next Jan. 1, we probably won't feel, act, or think much different then than we do right now.  I make this penetrating statement only after having read about every turn-of-the-decade article published in the last month.  I am not unmindful of Mr. Huxley's observations that "man-like creatures" (I suppose he used that phrase to permit even the inclusion of some of the bearded followers of Mr. Kerouac) have existed on earth for about one million years and can reasonably expect to be around for another two thousand million.

Boiled down to one over-simplified observation about the '60s, our experts seem to agree that the good things about our society are going to get better or, at least, increase in the next decade and, unfortunately, the bad things are going to continue to get worse.  Preoccupied as we are on improving our gadgetry and balancing our budget, we do not appear much interested in exploring the expanding universe but only our own little universe which is apparently going to expand all over the place in the next ten years.

THE SAGES who have been asked to predict what's ahead for the U.S. agree that everything is going to get bigger:  Our cities, the farm surplus, our slums, the Bomb, production, the population, consumer spending, the welfare state, inflation, traffic jams, smog, the school crisis, ignorance, leisure time, advertising budgets, the missile gap, and television, which will be boomed into your homes in living color on a wall-size screen.

No doubt, headaches will be getting worse, too, if that's possible, although there is some question.  "I think the day will come," said Dr. George Mangun for Newsweek, "when people will be taking mood pills like they take aspirin today," which may or may not suggest good-by to headaches, but does hint at the arrival of something even more horrible.  Moodaches?

ACCORDING TO Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in the Saturday Review, another thing which is getting bigger every day is the I've-had-it Gap, defined by Dr. Krutch as "the gap between those who find the spirit of the age congenial and those who do not..."  With everything booming, expanding, getting bigger and better -- and worse -- in the next decade this I've-had-it Gap may become a real problem.  Take, for instance, my Gap with Al Capp, who commented on the next decade for Esquire:  "The most dramatic event on the comic page in the next decade will be when editors discover that the reason for a slight falling off in the readership of the comic page (which is still the best reading page in the newspapers) is due, not to the lessening quality of comic strips, but to the fact that they are now so reduced in size that nobody can read them."

Or take, for instance, every red-blooded American office worker's Gap with the Secretary of the future, as described in Newsweek by Lyle M. Spencer, president of Science Research Associates.  "Even the cute little office secretary," said Mr. Spencer, "may be displaced by a machine... and there won't be much incentive to chase a machine around a desk."

WELL, MEN THE future is upon us.  With mechanical secretaries at the office and mornings at home with the wife singing in a soundless, waterless, soapless shower while a punch card is fixing our bacon-smell-less breakfast, one can only wonder whether Eric Goldman shouldn't think twice about his "decade" article in Harper's "Good-bye to the '50s -- and Good Riddance."  But there is still hope.  As Bill Gold observed in his Washington Post column, the Fabulous '50s started out just about the same as the Soaring '60s, with a lot of gee-whiz magazine articles describing all the miraculous, push-button things our wives were going to be doing around the house in the next decade -- none of which, fortunately, ever came to pass.