![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Alternate Universe Dreams
I have a vivid imagination. I’ve come to terms with that. But still I wonder what the limits of it are. A couple days ago I read a mind-bending essay by Philip K. Dick about alternate universes, which I highly recommend. There’s something about the way that guy thinks and uses language that makes parts of my mind burst at the seams from reading it.
In particular, he goes into this big thing in that essay about how he believes that his mystical experience of 1974 was some kind of bridging or overlapping between two (or more) parallel universes - that somehow in his writing, he was dimly remembering and reconstructing imagery and details which actually existed in a parallel life that he’d experienced or was experiencing. The whole thing is rather trippy, as you can imagine. Here’s an excerpt:
So let us ask, Does any one of us remember in any dim fashion a worse Earth circa 1977 than this? Have your young men seen visions and our old men dreamed dreams? Nightmare dreams specifically, about a world of enslavement and evil, of prisons and jailers and ubiquitous police? I have. I wrote out those dreams in novel after novel, story after story; to name two in which this prior ugly present obtained most clearly I cite The Man in the High Castle and my 1974 novel about the United States as a police state, called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
I am going to be very candid with you: I wrote both novels based on fragmentary residual memories of such a horrid slave state world — or perhaps the term “world” is the wrong one, and I should say “United States,” since in both novels I was writing about my own country.
[…] I am sure, as you hear me say this, you do not really believe me, or even believe that I believe it myself. But nevertheless it is true. I retain memories of that other world.
Anyway, where I’m going with all this is that last night I had a dream like this myself. Not that I was living in a 1977-era police state, but that I’d slipped into an alternate universe which had branched off from my own life at some point in the past. And it’s curious to me because this theory isn’t one that I applied after I woke up, but while I was still dreaming. Certain details and people were the same, but certain things were radically different. In my dream I recalled the essay by Philip K. Dick and thought to myself that this must be what’s happening, that I’ve crossed over or connected to one of the other tracks my life could have taken. Or rather did take, but the me that’s writing this did not. It completely fucks me up to think that there are other me’s out there living side-by-side in some kind of fractal dreamscape, but hey, who knows?
If there’s any truth to that theory, I wonder how often we interact with one another, and on what level. How much do we share and where do we differ? Do we all draw from the same well subconsciously? Do ideas and feelings and even memories float back and forth between us? What is the mechanism whereby we split off from one another in the first place? Does it happen at every moment in my life, or only according to key decision points?
And then there are the questions this opens about my imagination: was this dream simply my mind firing off on and running with a neat idea I’d encountered? Did encountering the idea instead enable me to access something that really exists and was there all along? Or rather than enabling me to access it (which presumably could have been happening already), did it enable me to label and understand and consequently remember it?
That’s precisely what turns me on about Philip K. Dick’s work so much, is that it blasts open all these questions, most of which can never be answered, but each of which if carefully studied can transform your thinking.
- Atomic Bomb Dream
- Dreams of the Resistance
- Exploding stars
- It’s All Happening!
- Ursula K. LeGuin Death Reports…
- Prev: He Ain’t Heavy…
- Next: Religious Logic, Part 2
December 6th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
the first thing that occured to me after reading that was the idea of the matrix. the concept of the matrix is that we think we are living in the here and now, when physically we are floating in a tank in a giant warehouse and mentally we are uploaded into a computer generated reality. the second thing i thought about was the many universes theory in quantum mechanics that suggests that our conscious decisions make new universes with each decision we make, an exponential process where trillions of new universes are created each nanosecond. the the question remains; is there a way communicate from universe to universe, or does it happen automatically, sometimes, like in a dream for instance?
December 6th, 2005 at 4:54 pm
The other day I had a dream where I was at a family party and I saw myself sitting in a chair. This ‘other’ me had long hair and a beard (I now have short hair and shave for work) he looked around at other people and then directly at me. I don’t recall interacting with anyone in the dream so I don’t know if “I” was actually there. I too thought about the alter-verse and www.hiddenmeanings.com has an artical When you die you wake up in another ‘verse where you lived differently, kinda like the movie ‘The One’
December 6th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
Tim,
I got your name from over at RI, fascinated with what you’re doing here! I too, am seriously searching for what ‘reality’ is,- thought I had it bagged- being indoctrinated in the Baptist (only true) fundamentalist religion for years.
Anyway, Alistar & Daniel make a good point about quantum theory.Coincidentally I am readingJenny Randles ‘Breaking the Time Barrier’ (2005),
has much of what has already been said.
This might be my Baptist roots growing to much, but, …..
if ‘Time’ is indeed a closed system as Christianity and other faiths suggest, and if there is a ‘penalty’ for doing evil(which I believe is true-called Karma), then that evil would be inherent in each aspect of the millions of your personality in mutitple universes……
Therefore giving a person no excuse at the time of
**(judgement) * for using words like ‘if only’…..
just a thought.
December 6th, 2005 at 6:43 pm
Yeah, PKD addresses that in the article. He believes that in the alternate universe which he participated in, he was captured and killed by the police state. But as sort of a reward for his laboring on behalf of God and the good, he was allowed to integrate here into our world and live on.
December 6th, 2005 at 10:53 pm
I also read this essay yesterday, more or less all in one sitting…quite the mind-blower indeed. Like Tim, I also had some unusual, intense dreams last night, though nothing that I can recall that seemed specifically related to the essay. In one, I woke up in the middle of a scenario where I had been somehow mentally corrupted/enslaved by some sort of “evil sorceress” figure, like we were “joined at the mind” or something, and I was trying to keep a group of people I was friends with (we were all apparently fellow students at a school I didn’t recognize) from finding out.. the really creepy thing was, when I first woke up, it was like I was still joined with this woman, and she was aware that I was waking up, and didn’t want me to go! I don’t recall that ever happening before. Not really related to alternate universes per-se, but it spooked me, so I thought I’d share. No more PKD before bed…
BTW Tim, love the site.
December 7th, 2005 at 12:03 am
[…] s dream about six weeks ago and hadn’t posted it yet. However, Tim has a post up on dreams and parallel universes, so I figured it was time to share […]
December 7th, 2005 at 12:13 am
I had an interesting alternate-universe dream about six weeks ago where I met an alternate version of myself. I wrote about it on my blog rather than clog up the comments here.
(btw, did you turn off trackbacks?)
December 7th, 2005 at 12:13 am
(Whoops, never mind.)
December 7th, 2005 at 12:55 am
This infinite parallel universes/me’s theory is something I believe in firmly. It’s practically the basis for my whole afterlife scenario, in fact. I won’t “wake up” as another me in a different dimension when I die, however. I’ll simply be able to . . umm, it’s way too complicated to mention in one of these comments boxes. It has to do with time-travel, temporary states of amnesia (coming back with my consciousness from “heaven”), and jumping between/creating new dimensions at will.
Suffice it to say, I think that . . on a deeper level, beyond the countless “me’s” that exist in different dimensions, there are me’s that have chosen to look/think/and act completely different. And there are about six and a half BILLION of these me’s coexisting with THIS me on the planet, right now.
I think you see where I’m going with this.
December 7th, 2005 at 1:09 am
Yeah more or less. I just watched Lost Highway which really kicked me over the edge, thinking about all this slipping in and out of universes….
December 7th, 2005 at 1:16 am
Ha! very interesting, Pete, and I sorta share a similar view.
I found it interesting that yesterday I had a vivid, but brief dream about getting a traffic ticket due to seemingly illogical or improper maneuvers. The interesting thing is that I made my decisions logically, but when I actually went to act (drive), the conditions had changed, and I was thus out of order with “reality”. This led to a police officer writing me up for a ticket (and me being very confused). As soon as the word dream popped into my mind, I immediately, and rather suddenly, woke up. It disappointed me a little because I was hoping to become lucid and perhaps have some fun, but oh well.
December 7th, 2005 at 8:20 am
i just watched donnie darko
we see you
hi