The other night there I had a strange dream. I was trying to diagnose what was wrong with a patient but his symptoms kept changing. They didn’t change one by one, but in whole sets. It was like he was flipping from one disease to another over a matter of minutes, making it impossible to pin down what was actually wrong with him. I was thinking (in my dream) that I’ve often seen rapidly changing and vague collections of symptoms but this was different. Then I realised there was something additionally strange about this man. At one moment he seemed to be distant, aloof, faraway, as if not in this world at all, then the next he would be fully present, talking and answering questions. It was as if in addition to his rapidly changing sets of symptoms there was a flipping in and out of the world. At that point in my dream I heard a voice inside my head (you know the way we do sometimes in dreams – a clear voice but without an obvious source, a voice from within your own head but somehow everywhere around you at the same time). The voice said “He’s got dimensional slippage”. Pardon? “He’s got dimensional slippage. I think this may be the first recorded case” Well, then that other thing happened that only seems to happen in dreams – I knew exactly what the voice was talking about (suddenly I had knowledge I hadn’t had before). I knew in that instant that the problem this man had was that versions of himself from parallel universes were seeping into each other; that “normally” parallel universes are inaccessible from within each other and not only did this man have something wrong which had undermined those normal boundaries of existence but that his very illness was a proof of the existence of a multidimensional multiverse. (Bear with me here. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, believe me, they were unfamiliar to me too – well, not totally of course, but at that moment I couldn’t have explained to you, had you asked me, what it meant to have more than 4 dimensions in the universe, what a parallel universe actually was, or what the term “multiverse” really meant!). That’s the point where I woke up. Now, normally I probably dream every night but only have that knowledge of dreaming that we often wake with, a knowledge that is totally absent of detail. But every now and again I have a vivid dream, and every now and again (much less often) that dream comes with a feeling of significance. I wake thinking “that was an important dream”. But, of course, I’ve no idea why! That’s the feeling that dream gave me. I feel it was important but I didn’t understand it and I don’t know why it’s important.
So, what did I do?
Well, I started to try and find out what more than 4 dimensions would look like, because I really wasn’t sure I’d grasped that idea very well at all. And I did a bit of reading to see if I could understand the concept of multiple parallel universes – “multiverses”.
First I found this short video –
then, this fascinating interview with Lisa Randall –
So now it became clear to me that when mathematicians and physicists talk about dimensions, they are referring to dimensions in space. And as Lisa Randall points out, there’s really no way for us to picture more than the three dimensions of space (up/down, right/left and back/forward) along with the fourth dimension of time.
But somewhere in my musings about the dream I got to thinking “what is a dimension anyway?” Isn’t a dimension something we represent with an axis on a chart? Every axis represents a spectrum, doesn’t it? Thinking that way, consciousness is a kind of dimension. Every day we move up and down the axis of consciousness from sound asleep to awake and aware. When I thought of my dream patient becoming more or less present, I thought of a dimension of presence. People are like that, aren’t they? They move back and forward between being fully present and having drifted off, as if to some other planet. What if each of us moves back and forth along an axis of presence? And what if, just like visible light is only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the visible body is only a small part of the axis of presence? Then maybe we fade away, as old people often seem to, and, maybe ghosts (if they exist!) are people beyond the visible part of the presence spectrum? Hmm….
There are many dimensions we can imagine this way. I know, of course, this is not what physicists mean by dimensions, but if co-ordinates along a number of axes situate an object or a person, then maybe imagining where we are beyond the spatial and temporal dimensions, gives a different way of considering our lives here and now.
I thought of the dimensions of consciousness, of presence, of emotions like happiness/sadness, and of a 3 dimensional group (like space is 3D) of body/mind/spirit.
Which dimensions would you consider important in your life, and where are you along each of them now?
Maybe my dream was just a way of getting me to think about the multiple aspects of a human life, and to consider that we are all in a constant state of flux and change, moving back and forth, up and down and along multiple axes or dimensions. And maybe the diagnosis I was looking for wasn’t “dimensional slippage” but the dis-integration of the whole self. After all, that’s probably the closest I get to understanding what illness actually is…..a dis-integration of the whole self.
Heroes Not Zombies 