Being nerds, I'm sure most of you here are aware that researchers investigating the "Theory of Everything" postulate that there may be as many as 10 or 11 dimensions, and a consequence of those dimensions is that it allows for the possibility of alternate, parallel universes.
Bear with me for a minute here, because all of the following is going to tie into this later:
Have you ever woken up in the middle of a dream, and discovered that if you fall asleep again quickly enough, that you re-enter the same dream?
Have you ever had a lucid dream? Ever walked or talked in your sleep?
In a quick summary, a lot of prominent psychologists believe that dreaming is a process analogous to the defragmentation of a computer hard drive, random bits of memory are accessed, organized, and correlated to facilitate future access. What this fails to explain is any of the above phenomenon, because if it's truly random, re-entry into the same dream would be unlikely, and having some measure of control over events, as in lucid dreaming, even less so. It also fails to provide a compelling reason as to why the body needs to be paralyzed during REM sleep, and why when that paralysis fails to activate, sleepwalking occurs.
I was thinking about this, and then I wondered if something else entirely was happening. If there are, indeed, many alternate universes, it logically follows that in some of those universes there exist version of ourselves, perhaps slightly different but distinctly "us." What if all of these incarnations of us have a very limited but still very real connection, a sort of partial shared consciousness, and many everyday phenomena are simply flashes of a perception of this connection?
It explains a great deal of things without too much of a leap of reasoning. Our sleeping selves may simply be more attuned to this connection, and dreaming may be akin to tapping into the perception of a copy of ourselves. It may explain why we need to be paralyzed during REM sleep, otherwise we interpret this sensory data as real and would act as if we were awake, which does indeed happen. Sometimes, it's difficult for other people to tell if a person is sleepwalking, they may act mostly like themselves and perform everyday tasks, which would make complete sense if they were simply attuned to a copy of themselves, mostly the same but slightly different.
During our waking hours, these flashes of insight are rare - like the sun washing out the light from the stars in the sky, we're too focused on our own universe to be aware of any others. But a glimpse of the other universes in waking hours could account for all kinds of abnormal behavior, like schizophrenia. Instead of being imaginary, perhaps the voices are flashes of conversations happening in other universes. Autism is generally thought to be the result of extreme sensory overload, but it's unknown why the condition develops - it could easily be a breakdown in the barrier between normally disparate consciousnesses. The same could be said for deja vu, which is, however, only temporary. Lucid dreaming is still puzzling, but instead of viewing it as control over the surroundings in a dream, it could potentially be like a search engine, defining parameters and narrowing the focus to a particular universe in which the desired events are occurring - since it's likely that if parallel universes exist, then there are an infinite number of them, the possibilities are likewise endless.
I can't be the only one who's ever thought of this. Your thoughts, fellow Escapists?
P.S.: This post was not brought to you by hallucinogenic or psychotropic drugs.
Bear with me for a minute here, because all of the following is going to tie into this later:
Have you ever woken up in the middle of a dream, and discovered that if you fall asleep again quickly enough, that you re-enter the same dream?
Have you ever had a lucid dream? Ever walked or talked in your sleep?
In a quick summary, a lot of prominent psychologists believe that dreaming is a process analogous to the defragmentation of a computer hard drive, random bits of memory are accessed, organized, and correlated to facilitate future access. What this fails to explain is any of the above phenomenon, because if it's truly random, re-entry into the same dream would be unlikely, and having some measure of control over events, as in lucid dreaming, even less so. It also fails to provide a compelling reason as to why the body needs to be paralyzed during REM sleep, and why when that paralysis fails to activate, sleepwalking occurs.
I was thinking about this, and then I wondered if something else entirely was happening. If there are, indeed, many alternate universes, it logically follows that in some of those universes there exist version of ourselves, perhaps slightly different but distinctly "us." What if all of these incarnations of us have a very limited but still very real connection, a sort of partial shared consciousness, and many everyday phenomena are simply flashes of a perception of this connection?
It explains a great deal of things without too much of a leap of reasoning. Our sleeping selves may simply be more attuned to this connection, and dreaming may be akin to tapping into the perception of a copy of ourselves. It may explain why we need to be paralyzed during REM sleep, otherwise we interpret this sensory data as real and would act as if we were awake, which does indeed happen. Sometimes, it's difficult for other people to tell if a person is sleepwalking, they may act mostly like themselves and perform everyday tasks, which would make complete sense if they were simply attuned to a copy of themselves, mostly the same but slightly different.
During our waking hours, these flashes of insight are rare - like the sun washing out the light from the stars in the sky, we're too focused on our own universe to be aware of any others. But a glimpse of the other universes in waking hours could account for all kinds of abnormal behavior, like schizophrenia. Instead of being imaginary, perhaps the voices are flashes of conversations happening in other universes. Autism is generally thought to be the result of extreme sensory overload, but it's unknown why the condition develops - it could easily be a breakdown in the barrier between normally disparate consciousnesses. The same could be said for deja vu, which is, however, only temporary. Lucid dreaming is still puzzling, but instead of viewing it as control over the surroundings in a dream, it could potentially be like a search engine, defining parameters and narrowing the focus to a particular universe in which the desired events are occurring - since it's likely that if parallel universes exist, then there are an infinite number of them, the possibilities are likewise endless.
I can't be the only one who's ever thought of this. Your thoughts, fellow Escapists?
P.S.: This post was not brought to you by hallucinogenic or psychotropic drugs.
