Crossings through Space and Time

Jon Roland

July 21, 2018


At 74 I am nearing the end of an interesting life, most of which today exists only as memories. Are they memories of events, or only of dreams? Am I dreaming as I write these words, or are you dreaming as you read them? How does anyone distinguish between events and dreams? We can create records, and remember having created them, but those memories may themselves be only dreams. So with these words I memorialize some of my memories, in the hope that someone will find them interesting. That is all anyone can do.


I have waited a few years to commit these memories to a book to see if the memories would fade, as memories of dreams usually do. They have not faded, but remain as lucid as memories of events of yesterday, or more so. That is reassurance that the memories are of actual experiences, and therefore worthy of omitting to print.




Message from My Mother

Jon Roland

First reported August 12, 2001


During the course of cleaning out some family belongings in storage in what had been my Uncle Julian’s house in Seguin, Texas, I discovered a baby book containing notes made about me during my infancy. It contained a message to me from my mother, Miladie Kubala, that confirmed one she delivered to me in person, in 1960 when I was sixteen.


We were in her bedroom. I was reading the Sunday paper, while she lay in bed looking at me in a strange way. Finally, I noticed her gaze, and seemed to sense she had something she wanted to say, so I gave her my attention and waited. She said that she needed to tell me the rest of the story about how I came to be born.


I had known previously that when she became pregnant with me, she had been diagnosed with a terminal heart condition, that her physicians had advised her not to have me, because it would kill her sooner, that she decided to have me anyway, and that her heart condition went away. She had always said she had turned to Christian Science, consulted a practitioner of that religion, and attributed the healing to her faith.


I also knew that her hair was white after that. She dyed her hair a reddish brown, and sometimes I would help her apply the dye to the roots where she couldn’t see. It did not come in just a light grey, or even as white as hair bleached with peroxide. It was an intense, glowing white, like the angel hair used for decorating Christmas trees. I once remarked how beautiful it was, and asked her why she didn’t just leave it undyed, but she answered that it drew too much attention if she did that.


She said that the night after her doctor told her she would die if she tried to have me, an angel came to her in a dream and said, “You will have a son, and he will be a power for good.”. When she woke up, her hair was white.


I asked her whether she meant it began to come in white, but she said no, it was all white.


I asked, “All the way out to the tips?” “Yes,” she said.


Now my mother was a reliable person. She wasn’t prone to delusions, and she wouldn’t make up something like that. A vision during sleep could be dismissed as a dream, and she called it a dream, but when it coincided with the overnight healing of a terminal heart condition, and her hair turning an unnatural white, and coming in that way ever since, it had to be taken seriously.


I thought about the implications of what she had said, then and often since. I am not, and was not then, a believer in the doctrines of any religious sect, but I was open to the possibility of a higher power, perhaps what some would call “angels” or “aliens”, that might guide our destinies, if not according to the agenda of some ultimate Creator, then at least for the purposes of a more advanced civilization.


I asked my mother if the “angel” said anything else, but she said no.


I asked myself then, and often since, “Okay, if I’m supposed to be a ‘power for good’, just what am I supposed to do?” But I put myself in the position of someone who might support such a mission and asked myself if I would tell the person what he was supposed to do. Clearly, if it was the only way I could get him to do it, then I would have to tell him, but if I had the power to write the script for all the parts of a cosmic play, then telling him could be detrimental, or at least it would detract from the dramatic tension of the play. Letting him work it out for himself would be more interesting.


I was beginning to think that when Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” he might have been speaking more truth than poetry. In later life I would have further occasion to think that.


But if it didn’t make sense to provide specific guidance, then why intervene to the extent of delivering a message to my mother in a dream, healing her so she could give birth, then turning her hair white so she would take the message seriously and tell me about it some day? Evidently I needed enough awareness to ask questions, without being given definite answers.


If I had a special mission, however, I reasoned that I would be equipped with what I would need to perform it, and not with anything that might distract me from it, so I might get some guidance by examining my abilities and limitations, my tendencies and aversions.


I examined my gifts: intelligence, a love of learning, and a very strong protective instinct, but one that tended to focus less on the short-term or immediate, or on particular individuals, than on the long-term course of human events. It did not seem to be my destiny to lead an ordinary life, with family and career, or seeking to acquire great wealth or high position.


When I was young I thought I would become a scientist, contributing new discoveries, but that course was cut off by events that took me along a different path. Specifically the Draft Board drawing my number and giving me the choice to join or be drafted. I chose to join the Air Force, as an officer.


As my life has unfolded, it has become clear that every event that seemed like a reversal or a mistake was not. Everything has actually turned out for the best. Some adversities were learning experiences. Others were steering me away from paths it seems I wasn’t supposed to take. The ways everything has fit together are amazing. A better play could hardly have been written, and the final act has yet to be played.


I have had a few dreams or visions of my own. For most of my life, until May, 1999, I would have strange lucid dreams that put me in challenging situations that seemed contrived to be training scenarios. The locations would often be other worlds, and I would not always be human in form. In most of them, I would be waging a nearly hopeless struggle against evil that required me to find clever solutions that did not depend on sheer strength or intelligence or abundant resources. Somehow I almost always managed to come through.


I have also repeatedly been able to understand how some technology works without having had the background of training that would seem to be required. I don’t have it until I need it, but when I do I seem to somehow remember how it works, as though I had learned about it previously in a museum of ancient technology, perhaps in a dream or vision or previous life.


There also seems to be a connection to the martial arts. As a youth I was not a brilliant athlete, but when I took up the unarmed martial arts, as one assistant instructor put it, “You show him something once and he does it!” I seem to remember how to do things I’ve never been shown, as though I had done them expertly in a previous life, and on occasion I have been able to do some things so well it is a bit scary.


The connection extends to firearms. On the target range my scores are okay but not great. But on several occasions I have exhibited accurate “instinct” shooting that is amazing, firing without aiming, hitting moving targets that I couldn’t even see. I seem to have extraordinary abilities when I need them. But it makes me wonder what destiny may require me to have such abilities as these.


I have also gotten what I can only describe as “warnings” just before the onset of some danger to my life. Some might call them “precognitive” experiences, but they are too selective to be the exercise of some kind of sensing ability. I can be driving along and I seem to get a thought, like a whisper in my ear, to slow down, because someone is about to run a red light, and I do slow down, and someone runs a red light right into what my path would have been. Unfortunately, the warnings are not always effective. I got a warning about running into a deer on a motorcycle in 1988 and it happened anyway. Fortunately, all I suffered was a green stick fracture of my right collar bone, and I was able to drive the bike home.


The most interesting visions, however, were a series in April, 1982, of recovering from future heart surgery in a hospital in May, 1999, and one I had during heart surgery in the early hours of May 1, 1999. But for now, it seems that since that day, I have had no more dreams that seem to be training exercises. Just ordinary ones.


My mother became ill and went into the hospital in June, 1976. After that, she couldn’t continue to dye her hair. I didn’t notice it until I looked at her the morning after she had died, but her hair was then all gray, and had apparently been coming in gray since June. The pure white hair had abandoned her in her final days.


I read her message to me in the baby book:


You are such a sweet baby, darling, with your little sly grin and your teasing. I want you to grow up to be a happy man and a power for good.


I am happy, mother. I choose to be, because I have learned that happiness is a choice, and that it is foolish to choose to be unhappy, although it may be difficult if one is suffering from illness. As for being a power for good, it seems that if my vision during my heart operation is more than just a dream, then my job in this world and life remains to be completed. It may not be understood or appreciated by others, but I feel I am protecting and promoting something good, something important. In the end, a life is no more than what it represents in the annals of eternity, but perhaps in eternity shall our lives be appreciated and judged.


Unfortunately, that baby book has been lost, and these words now exist only in these pages.




Vision of a future

First reported August 12, 2001


It was April, 1982 I was dividing my time between my old office at 1015 Navarro, San Antonio, Texas, in a building I had sold to my law firm, Martin & Drought, but was still managing for them, and the new location of my computer store, MicroMart, at 12150 Valliant. A couple of months previously I had hired Samia Buchanan, who was working there, emerging as the office manager.


While I was sitting at my desk at the Valliant location, I suddenly found myself in another place and time, consulting a physician, being told I had a terminal heart condition, and being given some brochures on an artificial heart which was being recommended. It was the latest model, and much more advanced than the ones undergoing clinical trials today. When I came back to my office, I thought I had had an unusually lucid dream, lasting a few hours. But there was no missing time. I had not slumped over the way I would be if I had been asleep.


A few days passed, then once again, while I was sitting in my office on Navarro, I found myself somewhere else. This time I was in a hospital ward recovering from heart surgery. I shared the room with a roommate. There was a whiteboard on the wall facing us, about 5 feet up, and toward the right side of the room. On the board was written the current date, May 3, 1999, the names of the patients, one of which was mine, the first name of the nurse assigned to each patient that day, and some diagnostic information on each patient. I had stitches down the cut in the middle of my chest, and down the cuts on the inside of my right leg where the saphenous vein had been harvested for the surgery. I was wearing an elastic sock on my right foot to hold down the swelling that resulted from the missing vein, but it was making a line around my ankle at the top of the sock. I spent about ten hours there, then suddenly found myself back in my office, with no time having passed there.


Each day thereafter, for about ten days, I would be sitting at my desk, either in my Navarro office or Valliant office, and find myself in that recovery ward, one day later, as shown by the date on the whiteboard on the wall, and would stay there for most of a waking day, which increased to about 16 hours. Again, there was no loss of time in 1982, and I was never slumped over as though I had been asleep.


I realized at the time that this was no ordinary dream. I have had lucid dreams, but never quite that lucid. There was too much detail about things I could have no knowledge about. Medical equipment and procedures. The feeling of the click in my mending sternum where the two halves did not quite settle into place, and how it hurt when I coughed or sneezed. The demands from the nurses that I blow into a plastic spirometer and make the indicator rise to a certain level. The way the physical therapist would have me walk in the hallway and climb a few stairs, and how I was ready to do more than he expected, and how he was amazed at how rapidly I was recovering.


I took notes of these visions, but those notes have disappeared.


During one of the days, I got a second roommate, and the nurse wrote his name on the blackboard, but she misspelled it, and in the vision I knew it was misspelled, and how to spell it correctly. When the nurse came in, I had her correct it. She had spelled it “Thorson”, but I had her correct it to “Toreson”.


On April 30, 1999, I was living in Sacramento, California, had a heart attack, and shortly after midnight, had heart surgery. While I was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, I remembered my visions from 1982, which I had always thought of as a kind of dream, and noted that it was now 1999, when I was in the visions.


The 1982 visions were only of events in the recovery ward, not including discussions of my clinical death, of the events preceding or following the recovery process.


As soon as I woke up, I realized that this was the scene of those visions, 17 years before. This was not just deja vu. I really had been seeing the future, or at least, a similar future. Many if not most of the details were the same as in my vision, but some were different. I was fascinated, and determined to note all the similarities and differences between the two. I came to call the sequence of events in the vision, Timeline X, and those in the realization, Timeline Y.


The following is a partial list of the similarities and differences between the two timelines:



The crucial test came when my second roommate was brought in, and the nurse spelled his name “Thorson” on the whiteboard. I knew from my vision of Timeline X that I had known how to spell it correctly, and had the nurse correct it the next time she came in. I debated with myself and decided I should defy my destiny and force myself not to have her correct it, and thereby deviate from the vision. Else I would fulfill it and have her correct it. Did I have Free Will? Then the nurse came in, and I had her correct it, and I couldn’t tell whether my decision had changed or not. So much for “free will”.


One of the things I found remarkable was that when the characters and events were the same, they were exactly the same. Same words, inflections, movements, everything. But when they were different, they were completely different, although not in a way that seemed to require the things that were the same to change.







Crossings

First reported August 12. 2001


These experiences were not part of the 1982 vision of “timeline X”.


The ward nurse leaned over me and said, seeming to want to avoid being overheard by other staffers, “You died!”


It was May 2, 2001, the second day of recovery from open heart surgery. I had five by-passes, an artificial mitral valve, and a defibrillator-pacemaker had been installed. When I woke up I got the feeling that there was something unusual going on. A certain amount of concern for a surgery patient was to be expected, but there seemed to be special concern about my mental condition and even surprise that I was so alert and acute.


My primary physician, Dr. Philip Bach, confirmed that something was unusual about my case when I visited him for a checkup about a week after getting out of the hospital, where they had kept me for two weeks. He asked me, on his own initiative, whether I had “seen the light”. Then I told him about what I had experienced. He seemed interested, but in a way that suggested he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.


The evening of April 30, 1999, was like any other. The time was about 7:30 PM. I was having supper at an oriental fast food restaurant near my apartment in Sacramento, on Howe Avenue. Suddenly I had a strange feeling in my chest. I felt my pulse, and recognized the rapid flutter of tachycardia. I had read about using a simulated bowel movement in such situations, which I later learned was called the Valsalva technique, to temporarily restore the normal heartbeat, so I did that. Then I walked to the counter and asked for a carryout, explaining to the attendant that I was having a heart attack and needed to leave. I put the rest of my supper in the carryout and drove back to my apartment.


When I got there, I considered what I should do. I felt I could probably drive myself to the hospital, but suspected I might not make it, and I recalled the last few times I had sought treatment at a hospital emergency room and was kept waiting for several hours. I decided the best course was to make a dramatic entrance, so I called 911.


While I was waiting for the ambulance, I took an aspirin tablet, and found my last will and put it on top of my papers on my desk in case I didn’t make it. The ambulance arrived, the paramedics did their usual fine job, and a few minutes later they delivered me to Sutter Memorial Hospital, which was not the hospital to which I would have driven myself.


It took a while to round up the physicians. More episodes of tachycardia occurred, and I would use the bowel pressure method to restore a normal heartbeat. The medics also said that a cough might work, but I didn’t use that method. The testing continued for a few hours. At one point they did an angioscopy on the arteries leading to my heart, and I had a good view of the angioscope as the probe was put down each artery with a small hair-like extension that would curl back when an obstruction was encountered. At first the physician talked about putting in some stents to open the arteries, but after a while he concluded that nothing less than a multiple by-pass would do, so I signed the forms, and the surgical team was assembled and introduced themselves to me. Then I was carted into the operating room, and anesthesia made me unconscious.


None of what follows was part of my 1982 vision. It was all new in 1999.


I next became aware of somewhat unusual music. I first thought the operation was still going on, that I was emerging from anesthesia, and the physicians were operating to music. I couldn’t see anything, and there were no sounds other than the music, which had a strange beat and a complex tonality that suggested a fusion between classical, rock and jazz, but perhaps fifty or a hundred years beyond where it is today. Nothing like what I had ever heard before. Not hummable, but I would recognize it if I ever heard it again. I would later ask all the physicians on the surgical team about that music, saying I would like to get a copy, but all of them denied playing any music.


I also became aware of multiple beings hovering over or around me, conversing among themselves. But they weren’t sounding words. The only sound was the music. None of the usual operating room sounds. They seemed to be exchanging thoughts that I was picking up on, but it was difficult because they were so fast, like a voice recording played at a multiple of normal speed. I mainly picked up on attitudes and a few key concepts. They seemed professional and focused, but there was a note of a wise-ass attitude that intruded. I could distinguish about five or six individuals. I seemed to pick up on the concept of bundled or braided timelines, and I got the thought that the focus of their attention was not me so much as the timeline or timelines I represented, and that they were conducting some kind of timeline repair. But I can’t be sure of that.


I did have the impression, however, that they were not aware that I was aware of them and their conversation. I decided it was best I not let them know, and tried to just listen and learn what I could.


After a while I got tired of trying to pick up on what they were thinking, and wondered if I could observe anything beyond my original position. No sooner had I thought that than I found myself facing some beautiful backdrops. I won’t call them landscapes, although they resembled landscapes, because they seemed too colorful and somewhat contrived, like scenes from a science fiction movie of an alien planet.


The first scene looked like water-sculpted stone, reminiscent of the Painted Desert in Arizona, but with more saturated colors than a natural scene would have, or like a scene photographed with Kodachrome film. I seemed to be about 30 feet off the ground, but without a body, and my vision had an infinite depth of field. The scene was uniformly illuminated, but without a sun or clouds. The sky was a deep azure blue, like the sky at about 30,000 feet. There was no wind or other sounds. No birds or other animals. No grass. No signs of intelligent life, or angels, aliens, or any thing else. Nothing to have a conversation with. No white light.


When I caught a glimpse of it, the horizon seemed closer than on Earth, as though I was on a smaller planet.









This is not exactly what the first scene looked like, but it is similar. In my experience, there were no clouds, and the sky was a deep azure clue. This is a long shot across a valley. Imagine just the rocks on the right side of the photo, from about 200 feet away.





Normally, by training and instinct, in a strange situation I would take notes, even without anything to write on. But I was unable to feel any emotion or initiative. Only curiosity. Yet I found that by being curious about something off to one side, my view would turn in that direction. By being curious about something in the distance, I would glide in that direction, maintaining about the same height above the ground. By controlling my curiosity and gaze, I found I could traverse a wide territory. Over the next subjective five hours I seemed to be able to examine a territory about 5 by ten miles, over a variety of different terrains that blended into one another.


In this way, I could view first one backdrop, then another. They were beautiful, like huge paintings, most were in the mid-distance, and I caught only a few glimpses of a horizon. There was no sign of any other beings, living, angelic, or whatever. I Seemed to have the place to myself.


In one scene I did see something that appeared artificial. On the top of a rolling green hill, perhaps a mile away, I saw what at first looked like an ancient Greek temple. However, it did not have pillars. It looked like four vertical slabs of while marble arranged in a rectangle, without a roof, but with gaps between them that one might walk through to enter. Despite being curious about it, however, I was not able to approach it for a closer look.











This looks like the hill I saw, except it lacks the stone structure on top, and the sky was a deep azure blue.


I remember wondering whether this was what some people who had near-death experiences had reported back as being “heaven” or “limbo”. I could see how someone whose experience and imagination was more limited than mine might report it that way. My impression was that I was wandering through a different reality, and that the world and life I had known was the illusion.


After wandering around for what seemed like a subjective time of about five or six hours, I got the feeling that I should return to my entry point, and no sooner did I think that than I lost all consciousness again, until I woke up in the recovery ward about mid-afternoon of May 1.


I would later ask questions about the operation of the surgical staff, but they gave surprisingly evasive answers, and not just about the music. I got the distinct impression there had been something highly unusual about my operation.


Through further conversations and questioning, I have come to the tentative conclusion that I had become clinically dead during the operation, and that I was probably “called’ as dead, so that when I “came back” it was a surprise to the operating room staff. It is not unusual for a patient to be “lost” for a few minutes during major surgery like that, and revived. Word about that doesn’t make it to the ward staff or become a topic of conversation among them, or induce any of them to break the code of silence and tell the patient about it. I would like to see my medical records, but they won’t give them to me, so I will have to get a cooperating physician to receive the records for me.


My friend Samia later reported that she had flown in and been shown my body on life support on May 1. She was asked if she could consent to have me taken off life support, but she said she did not have that authority, and flew back before I revived.


If this was an anesthetic dream, then it is difficult to explain the music, which was not familiar. I have had other dreams where I heard music, but the music was always something I had heard before somewhere. I can have fairly creative dreams, but I am not musically trained and my creativity doesn’t run to composing entirely new music for my somnolent entertainment.


On the other hand, I did not view anything in the “real” world that I could later view to confirm that I had been experiencing external phenomena and not noumena. Some persons who have had “near-death” experiences in which they floated above the operating table and could look down at documents lying on the tops of file cabinets, then later gone back and found those documents, where they could only have been seen from a viewpoint near the ceiling, have confirmation that theirs was an experience of externals. My glimpses of what appeared to be Earth scenes were too brief and I can’t relate them to any locations I could visit to verify them.


There have been a few other unusual things associated with this experience. The first was having a series of visions, in April, 1982, of recovering from heart surgery in May, 1999. The second is that I have some memories of things that apparently did not happen in the timeline in which I am writing this.


One such thing is a black backpack, made by Western Pack. When I returned to my apartment after I got out of the hospital, I noticed it missing. I asked my friend Samia, who had visited me there when I got out, whether she had seen it or taken it, but she hadn’t. It was the second largest model the company made, which I had purchased at a gun show in Sacramento, after becoming dissatisfied with the first such backpack from the same manufacturer I had purchased some months before, a green one, their largest model, which had a defective wheel assembly. I had been using this second backpack to carry my notebook computer and scanner to the library to scan books to put on my web site. When I had last used it, I had left a number of items in it from my last trip to the library, including a printout of a 17th century pamphlet that the library had in microform. I did find the printout and other contents, but in a different bag, another one that was defective, but which I might have used if I hadn’t had the missing bag.


Then I went through my checkbooks for the time period I bought the missing bag. No check for it. In this timeline, I never bought it.

Another such experience came years years later when I tried to get a copy of my mother’s death certificate. I went to the location I remember going to before, and the building was not there. Then I found the correct building and ordered the death certificate. While I was there I asked about the location I tried first, and one of the clerks said she thought there had been plans to build a new building at that location, but the county decided to acquire their location instead.


My memories are often of another timeline, almost identical to this one, but differing in a few details. From all this I conjecture that the job of my telepathic surgeons was to transfer my soul with all of its memories from a body destined to die to one that might last a tad longer, long enough to accomplish some mission. In which case I am a “walk-in” to this body. One might think they could have chosen a healthier vessel, or just repair the original.


Fortunately, so far all my passwords and lock combinations still work.


Cosmological Implications

First reported August 12, 2001


With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had saved detailed notes of my vision in April, 1982, of recovering from heart surgery in May, 1999. I recall I did make a few notes of the first, but I don’t know where I might find them today. At the time I thought it was just an unusually lucid daydream. I hadn’t had any other visions like it, before or since, or had them confirmed by events as visions of the future, or at least of a future.


If this was a valid experience, then it has implications for the physics of space-time. Even while I was experiencing the realization of my vision, with its similarities and differences from the vision, I thought about what constraints on physical theory might be indicated.


The standard view of time is a single sequence of events, stretching into the past and future, which we traverse at a constant pace from past to future, aware only of the present, with perhaps some memory or records of the past, but with none of the future.


The established principles of physics do not explain this “arrow of time”. They are symmetric with respect to time, except for the breaking of charge-parity-time (CPT) symmetry for some weak particle interactions. We have nothing left to explain the perceptual asymmetry of time except the structure of space-time in an expanding Universe, which is larger in the futureward direction, but how that structure might affect how an observer perceives events is unclear.


One of the perennial theories of physics to explain how some events seem to be arbitrarily chosen to occur, when several alternatives are possible, is the “many-worlds” or “multiverse” conjecture, which proposes that all the alternatives do in fact occur, but each yields its own branching timeline, which is not observable from other timelines. This theory would have each moment in time be a branching point for a nearly infinite number of alternative timelines, each branching further, and all diverging from one another, without reconnecting or converging. The future one experiences is chaotic, with small events, like a butterfly flapping its wings, having large effects, such as storms, that change everything.


Physicists tend to take for granted that information flows in only one direction, from past to future, even though their equations don’t rule out pastward flows of information. So why do we not have memories of the future as we can have of the past?


The answer from some, of course, is that we can. There are persistent reports of individuals, who have sometimes gained the reputation as seers or prophets, having visions of the future that turned out to occur much as they foresaw them. There are also reports of visions that resembled the realized future in most details, but not in all, holding out the hope that an undesirable future, if it could be foreseen, might be avoided. Many such prophets, such as Michel de Nostradame (Nostradamus) adopted the practice of couching their predictions in ambiguous language that could not function as clear warnings, but whose meaning became apparent only after the events foretold occurred. Of course, this is explained by skeptics as the trickery of charlatans, and in most cases it may be, but predictions of some like Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce seem remarkable, and events resembling their predictions have convinced some skeptics that there is something to them.


After my own vision, I can sympathize. Life would be simpler if there had either been no vision, or a lot more of them, preferably about nearer-term events that could be verified. But I feel obligated to report on what I experienced, and let people decide for themselves.


The first question that this experience suggests is why only this one vision, of these events, 17 years in the future. It couldn’t serve as a warning, or provide me with any basis for making decisions differently. Clearly it was a turning point in my life, especially if, as I suspect, I was “dead” for a while and somehow mysteriously revived.


The second question is why some things between the two timelines were the same, and some completely different. From conventional physics, one would expect a single future, and if by some means one could have information about it, what one would see is exactly what would occur, with no differences. If infinitely many timelines diverged from every moment in time, as in the “many-worlds” conjecture, then one would expect that if one got information about a future timeline that differed in any details from the one he would eventually take, it would differ in almost all of them, except for things like astronomical and geological events that are largely unaffected by changes in human affairs. But to get information about a timeline that is identical in many details and different in others is more difficult to explain.


There is also a problem about how one might get information from the future, or any future, at all, if the asymmetry of space along the time axis is the source of the arrow of time. The answer to that is easier. If timelines are information channels, then one might expect the channel capacity or noise level to be greater in one direction than in the opposite direction, like a telephone connection that is clear in one direction and weak or noisy in the other. This line of thought indicates that an observer is only possible in an expanding universe, and that if expansion ever stopped, the future would be indistinguishable from the past, and observers on the other side of an expanding universe, which we would think of as converging, would perceive themselves traversing in what for us would be the opposite direction, but which would be from their past to their future.


What is more difficult to explain than that is how there could be bursts of clear information from some future periods and not others, and how they could come from timelines other than the one to be actually taken by the receiver.


The situation is like wandering through a multi-stage theater showing variants of the same play on each stage, with identical actors saying identical lines on some stages and with different characters saying different lines on others. But this metaphor should not be taken too far. It suggests a playwright, an audience, and perhaps backstage hands. A natural explanation may be possible, and one that is indicated is a restricted version of the many-worlds conjecture, in which there are not infinitely many timelines diverging from every moment, but a finite number of them, loosely gathered into bundles or braids, whose threads sometimes diverge, and perhaps sometimes come together and reconnect. One can get this by assuming that space-time is quantized, like the electron orbitals in an atom or molecule, where which they can assume only a limited number of discrete energy and spin states. If this conjecture is valid, then certain features of timelines would be inherently more stable, like electron orbitals, and not just astronomical or geological events. Those stable elements would anchor the other variants, limiting their number and divergence, and make it likely that any information an observer might receive from a future timeline would contain those stable elements.


As for why some future episodes might be more clearly received, one can speculate that they might be at or near major reconnection or crossing points of several timelines, which might have the effect of amplifying the signal and enable it to be received over the noise.


This can also help explain the arrow of time. If the Universe is “expanding” along the time axis, then there must be two distance metrics that are changing with respect to one another, the first representing some fundamental small distance unit underlying all physical phenomena, and the other the “size” of the Universe at each point in time. If the first is quantized within the field of the other, then there is an increase in the number, finite but very large, of states as one traverses futureward. In other words, there are more future states than past ones. Many future states can share the same past, making it a stable element in their timelines, but a single past state can have many future states. This explains how an observer can have a memory of the past and not of the future, or at least not of most futures, except perhaps those where timelines converge to a few futures.


One would expect that beginnings and endings of major actors would be stable points in timeline forks. For human individuals, this would be their births and deaths, or at least points where many of the timelines lead to death. One might be more likely, therefore, to have a vision of events leading to death, or perhaps of those which get past a point where most other timelines led to death. If this conjecture is valid, then most of the timelines leading to May 1, 1999, ended in my death, but not all of them. I foresaw one, am living another, and have memories that may differ in some details from a timeline leading to that event, but that may not have gotten past it.


All this conjecture does not, however, completely remove the nagging suspicion that it is all somehow contrived, like the lines in multiple versions of the same play, which has a playwright, an audience, and perhaps stage hands working behind the scenes. But to what purpose? Entertainment? Training of future citizens of some vast supercivilization whose members are truly lords of time and space? If so, can they be bound by their own timelines, or is our apparent reality merely the operation of a vast computer simulation, creating a virtual reality in which we live and play out our parts, like the characters in the movies Tron or The Matrix? Is there a programmer? Is consciousness and free will an illusion?


For what it’s worth, I have these admittedly subjective experiences, and no way to prove there is an objective component to them. I have been pursuing the implications for cosmology, but the mathematical problems are computationally intractable. You need a universe to simulate a universe. I can find no practical use for these experiences, other than to tell my tale and see if anyone else has similar tales to tell. From conversations with operating room personnel, it would seem that they have heard such stories from others, and that physicians are reluctant to acknowledge them, for fear of impairing their professional reputations.


So I go on, asking the questions, not claiming to have the answers, and knowing that if I thought I did, I wouldn’t necessarily want to tell anyone about it. Perhaps in the end that is what it is all about, a voyage of discovery and enlightenment that may have no definite end, but is intensely fascinating.





Terminology


This field seems to have developed a plethora of terms that essentially refer to the same concept. The most common are “alternate universe”, “parallel universe”, “timeline”, and “dimension”. Of these, the worst is “dimension”, which has another meaning in physics and should not be used in this way. In physics it means one of several values needed to specify the position of something in the field of possibilities. For most of us that is three dimensions of space and one of time, commonly referred to as “space-time”.


Of these the time axis deserves special discussion. It emerges from our equations as the imaginary number i = √-1, which, despite what some 17th century mathematicians may have thought, is not “imaginary” at all. Based on its association with time, I prefer to use the term “chron”. It is common to use a single symbol, in what is called covariant form, to refer to all four values, which, when its terms are squared, results in the chron value being negative. From this emerges that physical events move along the chron (time) axis futureward at the speed of light, and that, if the three space dimensions were “created” by the “big bang”, there may still have been a chron axis that preceded it, so that the “big bang” did not “create” time, and something may have preceded the “big bang” in time.


The current favored theory of cosmology, “M theory” (M for Membrane) does not actually require that there be 11 dimensions. The equations just work better if one presumes that number.


Brian Green wrote an elegant book, String Theory, about strings (1-dimensional “branes”. All the math seems very impressive until one realizes he is just stating the obvious using math, which is more elegant with 11 dimensions than with another number, but which does not show one how to confirm the theory experimentally, much less how to build an Alcubierre-Sporing drive that would actually work. Brian also makes frequent television appearances popularizing his work and that of his colleagues. He is a charming, attractive, and well-spoken fellow.


But these are not the “dimensions” that UFO investigators mean when they report that UFOs appear to have come from another “dimension”. That would be something more like an alternate universe. Some might like the term paraverse, but such a thing is not really parallel. I prefer the term “diaverse”, from the Greek, diakládosis (διακλάδωσης) in which the prefix diaklád- emphasizes its branching structure. “Verse” comes the Latin “universum”, which is mixing linguistic roots. Could have used “acro” (Latin, sharp or top end) to be consistent.


So how many diaverses might split off from one parent diaverse. Time and the splitting events appears to be quantized, so the number would seem to be at most countably infinite, or אo, but it is possible that the larger superverse might put further constraints on the number, perhaps requiring that diaverses be organized into bundles or skeins. It could be a (large) finite number.


Fiction provides many examples of travel to other diaverses. The TV series Sliders is an example. In that series the protagonists had the problem of not being able to get nack to their “home” diaverse. UFOs and aliens seem to have solved that navigation problem. Obviously they would not want to use inter-diaverse travel if they couldn’t find their way back. That suggests an “address” for diaverses, and a dimension for those addresses. The address would not need to be diaverse-wide. Within each bundle might do. There would also need to be some kind of time-like dimension, which could be time itself, so that a traveler could locate itself within the diaverse. For that it would need to have reference points so that a traveler could locate itself on the timelike stream. In this diaverse time doesn’t have absolute reference points for time. It is all relative to a standard clock. We use neutron stars with a near-constant spin frequency that slowly spin down at a constant rate. Those also provide location markers that we could use to navigate the galaxy for centuries.


It is nowhere mentioned, but in the Star Trek series it is undoubtedly those neutron stars that allow starships to navigate through the galaxy and through time. It is now thought that the Milky Way galaxy is a barred spiral, with the sun, Sol, between two of the spiral arms, about 2/3 of the way out from the black hole in the center. Contrary to what was once thought, the stars in the galaxy do not wind up in a Keplerian manner, the outer stars revolving more slowly, but spins together as a coherent disk, the result of dark matter holding them in approximate stable position. Thus while navigational neutron stars might drift some, the drift would not be as great with the influence of dark matter.


But we could expect different diaverses, especially those in a bundle, to have the same navigational neutron stars that we do in ours, which could assist in navigation within them. They would not provide an “address dimension”, but could assist in other kinds of navigation.


Several alien contactees report receiving warnings of severe “earth changes”. One reports being shown a scene of a planet being consumed by fire and being told that was the future of Earth. That sounds like something more severe than the term “earth changes” would suggest. More like an extinction or near-extinction event. One might expect it to be common to all the diaverses in a bundle. It would not likely be caused by the sun. Stars of spectral type G are too stable. It suggests either an impact with an interstellar planemo, or a nearby hypernova or a gamma-ray burster. The only known candidate for the first is the star Betelgeuse, about 642.5 light-years away. If the travel of aliens is superluminal, then they would know about such events before they destroy nearby planets, perhaps including some of their own. This suggests we had better develop superluminal stardrives of our own, or hitch rides on theirs, so we can discover such catastrophes in time to evacuate Earth.


If both we and nearby aliens are threatened by cosmic calamities, that could explain apparent increased alien activity near Earth. It does not explain abductees, hybridization, cattle mutilations, or other reported phenomena.


Galactic calamities are a serious threat to the development of advanced civilizations. I have mentioned hypernovas (the nearest likely one being Betelgeuse) and gamma-ray bursters, which seem likely to occur anywhere without much warning. There are others, that could clear out large regions of the galaxy of life. We are lucky that none have hit us yet. They don’t happen very often, but when they do they could set life back to one-celled organisms from which it would have to evolve all other again. They occur often enough to explain why there are not more advanced civilizations in the galaxy. It is likely that any advanced spacefarers we meet are refugees from several such events, and some may have gathered in our neighborhood as a region that has remained relatively safe for a long time.


Whenever you hear about aliens “from” nearby star clusters or bright stars like Arcturus, don’t believe it. Bright stars are almost never safe for earth-like planets, and a star cluster like the Pleides consists of young stars, only a few hundred million years old, too young to have planets on which life could have evolved, most likely protoplanets in their heavy bombardment eras. There might be alien colonies there. All aliens need are planets with hot cores that could support geothermal energy extraction. They don’t even need to be close to stars. They could be unbound planemos, wandering in the space between stars. There are likely to be more of those than planets around stars. Aliens are most likely to reside on planemos, and be refugees from life-clearing galactic calamities. Those calamities will not always render the planet uninhabitable. Gamma-ray bursters are likely to leave microbial life on planets suitable for colonization. Hypernovas are more likely to leave dead rocks, some without atmospheres. Of course, alien colonists won’t need atmospheres.


So Mars is likely to be a good place for alien colonists, including us, to take up residence, in underground cities. It still has a core not hot enough to generate a strong magnetic field, but hot enough for geothermal power. It would be likely to endure all but a very close hypernova, and to endure a gamma-ray burster. It is likely that many planemos resemble it.


If alien civilizations must often evacuate regions of the galaxy, it would seem they would need to develop the technology of mind recording and transfer, so that they could preserve the essence of themselves, for later placement in suitable hosts, or “vessels”, that would remain “them” for most purposes. If my mind was transferred into a different vessel in a different diaverse, that raises the question of what was transferred, as well as how it was done. If what was transferred was what theologians call the “soul”, then we may gain some clues about what a “soul” is. I will venture here onto controversial ground when I posit that the soul is not something supernatural or sacred, but an artifact of a very advanced civilization, that captures the essence of personalities and memories in a kind of hologram, without the details of synaptic structure and function, which will vary from one vessel to another, the way an audio recording captures the music without the details of the operation of musical instruments. Intelligence might reside mostly in the “neural net”. I posit that advanced civilizations are everywhere in the multiverse, and that each may have its own method of soul capture and transfer.


If this conjecture is valid, then “souls” could be the exchange media of the multiverse, not minerals or energy. Advanced aliens don’t need such things, which are everywhere abundant, but desire bundles of information that capture the essence of living beings. They might be planted in vessels, or just “read” for entertainment.


A clue is provided by the “past lives” revealed by regression hypnosis. Many people seem to have them, often many such “lives”. Some going back hundreds of years, some only to someone in the same family who “died” just before a later life, or the present life, was born. They seem to be recordings of the personality and events of that life, often in great detail. It seems to be possible to pick up at some point in the past life and play it forward for some period of time. Most have memories of their deaths in a past life. Some men have memories of being women, and the reverse. But the memories are usually of being human. There are a few of being animals or plants. None of being aliens or “hybrids”. Since there have been aliens around for a long time, that suggests a compatibility problem, as though the brains have to be compatible for the mind captures to work. If aliens can capture or transfer the souls of humans, it would seem they could do the same with their own, and that some alien souls should be showing up in the mix. Unless aliens are immortal, or don’t have souls as such. Are the attempts at hybridization attempts to come up with vessels that can host alien souls?


What about cattle mutilations? The parts taken are not genetic, but mostly parts that come into contact with what the animals eat. What use is there in that?


We see extractions of human DNA and eggs in human abductions, and reports of hybrids, but is that possible across species from different planets, unless there are common ancestors? The only aliens that seem sufficiently humanlike are the “Nordics”. What is going on there? Were the young female members of the Vril Society hybrids with the Nordics, whom they resembled? What did Vril leader Maria Gorsic mean when, just before they all disappeared, she wrote “We will not return to this place.” Did she mean Earth?


There have been at least two unequivocal messages to national leaders: when UFOs disabled the launch controls of American missiles, and another set put Russian missiles on launch status. No word on what was done with the Chinese, or with bombers and nuclear missile submarines. Of course those messages seemed to ignore the MAD deterrence doctrine, which can’t just be turned off unilaterally. If they really don’t want us to launch they need to convene a peace conference, and agree to help enforce it. UFO actions are almost useless except as a signal. Any intervention needs to be more emphatic.


There seem to be more than 20 alien civilizations or exotribes (not necessarily species) operating in Earth space. We need to disclose them and the apparent agendas and strengths of each. Are they morally equivalent? Are some locally much stronger than others? What does each bring to the table?


Now anyone who wrote a book called The Art of the Deal should be able to testify that it is infernally difficult to make a deal among just two parties, much less 20. I don’t have the full picture, just glimpses. But if one group wants us to denuclearize (even if they realize we can’t do that unilaterally, and another doesn’t. That is the basis for making some moral distinctions. Now I agree we should not favor the Nordics because they look like us, on the other hand the Ebens (Greys) don’t seem to care about our nukes, and are offering us, in return for letting them abduct us and breed hybrids, some technology. What kind of technology? FTL travel? That would make a huge difference. Are we so determined to have our own “Space Force” that moral distinctions are irrelevant? Who can we defeat?


Which group disabled our missile systems? That makes a great difference. We should know at least that much. It makes them negotiators at the peace conference. Are the Nordics still helping Nazis? That also makes a difference.


It is way past time for full disclosure of the aliens, what each group wants, and what each group has. We are not going to be able to make sound decisions unless this happens. Everyone needs to join in the discussion.


One problem with FTL travel is that each space traverse is also a traverse into the past. If we are being visited by other civilizations that use FTL, then they, just by being here, are also changing their own times in at least adjacent diaverses, which, unless diaverses reconverge, may be somewhat chaotic. Therefore they, or some of them, may very well be our descendents, with a special interest in what we do in our own time.


The government pretends to tell the truth, and we pretend to believe them.

But nobody’s pretending anymore.


Does anyone believe the government lies on this subject? Have they ever? Swamp gas? Really? It’s become an insult. The government has made itself a laughingstock. People are not going to panic. That is ancient history. We’ve become used to aliens around.


Notes:


  1. Many-worlds conjectures.

  1. Remembering other lives. If real it changes everything.

  1. UFOs, aliens. If real it changes everything.

  1. Invasive species.

  1. Earth changes? Be specific. This can be events that threaten a few hundred to billions.