It's all a dream

The very fact that we can dream events which are lifelike, and on occasion, can be precognitive, begs the question: Where do dreams come from?

Trying to answer the very question physicist and science-fiction writer John Gribbin, seized upon the possibilities offered by two related theories: The quantum theory for describing the behaviour of matter at a sub-molecular level, and the many-worlds theory of John Wheeler.

The former theory implies that at a sub-molecular level, everything that is possible, also happens, while the latter, states something very similar, but on the scale of the entire universe.

So, according to Wheeler (and the quantum theory for micro-molecules) there is not just a single world, but an infinite array of all possible worlds, including some in which we do not exist at all. Everything that can possibly happen at every instant of the day and night does happen and statistical possibility is only dictated by the inability of our awareness to cross the divide between all these worlds and see that indeed this is so.

This divide, whatever it may be made of, is what restricts our awareness to a single world. The car, that nearly ran into the back of you on the motorway this morning, for example, did in fact ran into you, in one of those other worlds, only your awareness (and this is a thorny issue in its own right) was focussed on a world where that possibility did not materialise, which brings us full circle to the argument that the mind is capable of ‘shaping’ reality.

Gribbin says, that if the many worlds do exist ,in such an infinite array, then, occasionally our minds may be able to come in contact with our ‘doubles’ in these other worlds.To use a rather naive example, the three course meal you dreamt you were having, rather than being the result of your feeling a little peckish as you went to bed, may have been the result of your double’s activities in another world.

By the same token however, this double (or infinite number of doubles) must occasionally dream of our activities and puzzle where their dreams come from.

Wonderfully mind-bending staff as all this may be, its implications are clear enough. Either there is no such thing as fantasy and everything we can possibly imagine actually does happen (which puts paid to the concept of the creativity of fiction writers) or else we are all equally insubstantial.We, in our concrete, tangible, world enjoy no less a statistical probability to exist than the world of our dreams. To us, certainly, this world is solid enough, or at least it appears to be so. But to those inhabitants of those other myriads of parallel worlds we are just a dream, and the further away we move from the worlds on either side of us, the smaller becomes the possibility of our existence and the less substantial we become to those trying to envision us.

So, next time your head hits the pillow you may be heading not for the oblivion you think you deserve for having put up with the daily rote of traffic jams; cash-flow problems; and the constant wear and tear of work, but for a magical jaunt through space, time and the universe. Mathematicians of course, have been doing this for some time now. The beauty of it though is that they have been doing it without the benefit of sleep.