A Primer on Alternate Realities and Transdimensional Travel
Listen along to the audio version:
A Primer on Alternate Realities and Transdimensional Travel
It has been said that, at any given moment, there is an infinite number of alternate realities. Some scientific masterminds have compared the effect to standing between two mirrors. Others have said that a better description would be to think about your reality as a novel. However nonsensical or believable the characters and plot might be, it is the reality that you perceive at the moment. You travel from page to sequential page, from beginning to end. You begin the novel innocent and unaware and you’re led along, word after word, to a preset, final end. When you reach the end, there are simply no more words in the book. You close the book and return it to the infinite afterlife of the bookcase. But, imagine that in the middle of reading this novel you go to the bookshelf and take down a completely different book. You open that book in the middle and begin reading to find the same characters that appeared in the pages of the previous book. You’re reading about the same moment in time, but the details are brand new, as if out of another author’s mind. Where a character was a thriving philanthropist in the first book, he has been written as a desperate criminal in the second.
It’s been suggested that each of these alternate realities are mapped on a large web of counter-balanced polarities and symmetrical juxtapositions – that for every reality, there is an exact mirror inverse that reflects the harmonious order in the cosmic design. Every black has a white, every up has a down, every left has a right, and every Gene Simmons has a Richard Simmons. And it is this order that sustains the continuous momentum of the entire cosmic vastness. These same theorists have suggested that crossing these perfectly balanced polarities would result in a total collapse of, well, everything. Basically, one false move and everything we know, and everything in each of these infinite alternate realities, just ceases to be. Stephen Hawking’s third cousin, Darryl Shatterson, wrote that black holes were trace evidence of that very occurrence. He proposed that each black hole represented what used to be an infinite sea of parallel realities.
But there are just as many well-intentioned scientists that insist that each of these alternate realities is random and incidental, being spawned at unpredictable moments by splintering from other realities like ripples in a pond or branches on a tree. These experts see no sign of order in this vast ocean of dimensional multiplicity. The vast winding of these timelines is like an urban developer who builds new roads that run parallel to older traffic ways and at other times builds roads that go in no logical direction at all. The roads twist and turn where they need, beginning and ending without warning, crossing at unlikely intersections, and running here and there without winding up where any rational motorist would expect. Many experts insist that these countless alternate realities are even more chaotic and senseless, suggesting that some are not even completely whole. Fragments of some of these dimensional variations have gone missing or are stuck in other realities. This theory has provided substantial scientific explanation for a wide range of phenomenon: time travel, alien abductions, spontaneous combustion, ghostly hauntings, zombification, and Siegfried and Roy, among others. These same experts suppose that something unexplainable in our particular reality would make perfect sense in some other. It’s simply out of place.
A man in Iowa even suggested that what appear to us to be alternate realities are, in fact, vertically stacked 4×6 note cards in a large cosmic inbox waiting to be sorted.
Theories on transdimensional travel are as varied as those on alternate realities. Some instruct the curious to sit in a comfortable position and hum while opening their minds to the alternate possibilities until they find themselves aware that they have transcended their reality and are crossed over into another. Witnesses that have applied this approach report two basic outcomes: headaches and leg cramps.
In a seldom-referred-to spiral notebook labelled “Al and the Pimipicists,” a young Albert Einstein theorized that alternate dimensions could be reached by spinning around in place really, really, really, really fast. His formula claimed that Spin + Fast + Fast + Fast + Fast = Poof! In the margin of his notes the phrase “Transdimensional travel rocks!” is written, suggesting to some that access to other dimensions might involve rocks and stones of some kind.
In general, transdimensional travel is difficult not because we don’t know how to find them (they sit right on top of our own dimension), but because each unique dimension is protected by an invisible cosmic “skin” that keeps it self-contained. If the skin were not there, elements of the dimensions would float back and forth between dimensions, with no stability or predictability to the universe. The skin is like a Thermos for the infinite alternate realities.
It is this dimensional dermis that accounts for the resistive nature of transdimensional travel. There are physics at work in this skin that scientists have only recently begun to explore. It seems that within the dimensional dermis there are entirely new, unknown laws of physics. Something similar to gravity (but entirely opposite) is at work, taking any movement through the skin and reversing it, a lot like bouncing off an invisible rubber wall at the circus.
Many scientists died trying to permeate this dermal covering. Deadly electrical charges build up when in close proximity to the dimensional skin. It’s this electrical phenomenon that causes the occasional static electrical charge that builds up in our body as we graze the “safe zone” around the dimensional skin. This safe zone is referred to as the dimensional epidermis. This epidermis extends into our dimension, attracted to large bodies of water, congested urban areas, the Scottish highlands, supermodels, ivy league universities, and shag carpeting.
For nearly one hundred years, scientists have accepted that freehand drawing a perfectly round circle would create a vulnerability in the skin of our own dimension, and punching it really hard would open up a portal out of our dimension. From there, they guessed, you could draw circles and punch open doorways into all sorts of dimensions.
Dr. Hannah Pitt-Partridge, along with abstract artist, Fabio Mario, created a perfectly-drawn circle on the wall of her laboratory in 1985. After carefully considering what to do next, she smashed the photocopier against the wall for an hour until it broke through. She dove into the opening and seconds later yelled back at her assistants, “The void between dimensions looks just like a bathroom!”
What you find in this book should not prove or disprove any scientific theories on transdimensional travel. Rather, it should suggest that there may be many diverse ways in which to get from one reality to another.
– Excerpt from “Earl’s Potato Salad” by Will Wood.
Narrated by Alex (Apple Text-to-Speech).
