Dreams Qf Nightmares

Prologue

Weird Science, Quantum Aliens
And the Unreality of Reality 

            Hey, did you know the face you see in the mirror every day might not always be your own every day? Well, believe it or not, that familiar face staring back at you one of these days could belong to a stranger. One of a whole lot of strangers. So many, they're way too many to count.

         What if I told you these countless strangers have been living your exact same life in a whole lot of other worlds exactly like our own. What's more, they all look exactly alike. And, yes, every single one of them looks exactly like you, as well. And, no, I'm not making this stuff up.

         Would you believe, all those otherworldly beings have shared every breath and step you've taken since the day you were born. And they're still sharing everything with you. Like your bowl of corn flakes in the morning and your bed at night, not to mention everything else in between.

          All these distant doubles of yours, of course, are sharing your life in galaxies a gazillion light years away from you. What you likely don't know if you don't have the right security clearance is that these beings have materialized at times here on Planet Earth. We don't don't know why. We don't know how. Not always when, either. Some things just can't be explained. Not yet anyway.

         You're probably thinking that everything I just told you is a whole lot of you-know-what. But here's the thing. A number of rockstar physicists have taken a quantum leap forward in scientific research by taking a closer, ultramicroscopic look at what makes our world and its universe tick.

          And they've been able to do that by leveraging several theories of quantum mechanics, the futuristic phenomenon perhaps better known as quantum physics. Its radical, often mysterious scientific theories, as well as the inventive applications derived from them, are totally amazing.

         There's absolutely no reason, for instance, why you can't travel through time; what goes up doesn't always come down; and nothing actually exists until someone actually interacts with it somehow. Sounds more like science fiction than the real deal, huh? But the real deal of modern science can sometimes seem more like science fiction than science fiction itself.

        Google it, and you'll get a pretty good idea why quantum physicists believe that we have a humongous number of mirror image versions of ourselves. They're convinced that we co-exist with all these countless counterparts of ours in the vast array of parallel universes that stretch endlessly, as Buzz Lightyear might say, to infinity and beyond. And, seriously, how cool is that!

        Still with me? Awesome. Because here's where it gets real weird. Sci-fi sorta weird. You see, another mind-bending but widely accepted theory basically says there's no "real" in reality. It could be that you imagined everything you believed happened in the past. Maybe it was just a dream. Even Einstein once said that reality is nothing more than an illusion.

        So is reality really real or not? Well, it may seem weird, but another theory says reality is like one big mixed bag of all the uniquely different ways we perceive it. But if perception is reality, as the saying goes, your reality is yours and yours alone. No worries. You're not really alone. All the rest of us, like you, are constantly busy processing our own realities, just more or less differently.

        What all that means is, you're viewing what you assume is real through the prism of illusions created inside your own head. That could also mean the chair you're sitting on; this book you're reading now; and all the stuff around you that you'd swear were really real, could be figments of a vivid imagination. Then again, your imagination is also the stuff your dreams are made of. And every dream, they say, tells a story.

        I happen to have a recurring dream. A rather eerie one at that. You'll be reading more about it later on. This dream of mine unfolds like your typical sci-fi story about the opposing forces of good and evil. With a twist. Because it also tells an ominous tale about the illusionary unreality of reality. My dreamed-up "plot" is about a young teenager named Jack who encounters one of his own doubles for the first time in a lavatory mirror at school. Imagine that.

        Okay, now Imagine this. Jack is told he exists solely in the dreams of this mirror image twin, who likewise claims that he's always lived only in Jack's dreams. And because their reflections appeared in the same mirror on the same day at the exact same time, their dreams were fused together. And their lives, as a result, will be linked forever as though they were one, Go figure.

        But wait, there's more. A whole lot more. Jack gets this strange feeling that nothing now is  really what it is anymore. Everything now seems to be what it really isn't anymore. Even worse, horrible nightmares begin to haunt him during the darkest hours of darkness just before dawn, when these frightening fantasies finally wake him. But always in a feverish panic of cold sweat.

      Now it's time for you to turn the page. I hope that you enjoy my dreamed-up story. It's still a work progress, with more words about my dream that I'm transcribing for you in the following pages. Meanwhile, you'll probably be wondering what could possibly happen next. Be patient. There's a whole lot of freaky weird stuff I'll be publishing soon.
 
      But beware, my friend. I fear that once you start reading, you'll soon begin dreaming of stuff that could haunt you, too, some day. Just like all the cold sweat dreams of nightmares that still haunt me each day. As well as those of the countless strangers who continue to live my life and look exactly like me. And, no, I didn't make any of that stuff up. Seriously. Like, for real. 

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"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
Albert Einstein, Theoretical Physicist (1879-1955)