Imagination and the Multiverse

We know that the capacity for human imagination is limitless. It is one of the few things that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. It is such an amazing ability to be able to surpass your perception of the current reality and look through time, to see the past, or to dream the future. We can see things that do not yet exist, or that cannot exist.

We all have this talent, this capability of imagination. Some people use it more frequently, some people focus their inner sights only on certain things. But it is usually employed to fathom the unfathomable, to see that which does not exist in one's perception of the here and now.


There are many different versions of the multiverse theory. I don't know whether it's a higher dimensional plane, or a bunch of parallel timelines, or something which might not hold based on quantum physics or mathematics. But I do believe that the multiverse exists, and this is how I think it works.

Every choice we make in our life splits time into multiple possible futures. From the large, conscious, life-changing choices like who you choose to fall in love with; or the small, arbitrary, subconscious decisions like which foot you step on first when you leave your house. The choice you ultimately make shunts you to the reality you currently exist in; but the other one could have easily existed as well, couldn't it? And I believe that it does, in some form of parallel universe.

(There are some who would argue that I have not gone deep enough, that even the random location of each electron and the vibration of each subatomic particle in each point of time and space would vary across infinite permutations, creating a "plane" or "volume" of existences. To which I say, true, but these are choices which we have little to no control of, and the chances that they will affect us are infinitesimally small.)

So, assuming the existence of parallel universes, here's my theory: our imagination lets us "see" the events in these parallel universes. It it not a mental process in which we "create" images and ideas from nothing; it is a "sense" and a means of perceiving the events which don't exist in our here and now. We look through the windows of our imagination into another world.

That's a vaguely heartening thought, isn't it? That somewhere in this crazy, mixed up multiverse of ours, there are worlds where magic is a real and everyday society hidden from plain sight by illusions and memory charms. Worlds where giant sentient androids disguise themselves as common vehicles and wage a secret war for our planet. Worlds in which cities are mobile, leaving large tank tracks in their wake; where genetically-modified beasts roam the landscape and turned the tide of a world war; where death is merely a second chance at love and life; where the greatest of kings is a tsundere and her knights are all girls.

It is also, perhaps, a very sobering thought. That the extents of human creativity and the marvels of human invention that we know of today are nothing more than copies of another world who has already made them; replicated in ours by a man who peeped across realities and copied their ideas.That we are not the gods we think we are, the creators and sculptors and engineers of divine inspiration or inexplicable intuition, but pale imitators of other worlds.

But that is not to say we should stop dreaming, for it is the best thing we have right now.

I see,
The Edna Man