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A Dream Concerning Time Travel and Alternate Realities

Vaporo

Inkling
Since my latest writing project is largely about prophesies and foreseeing the future, I've been thinking a lot about time travel lately. The trend I've noticed in time travel fiction is that when someone goes to the past, their "original" reality simply ceases to exist as far as the narrative is concerned. Even if they travel backwards after millions of failures, the only reality that matters is the one where they succeed. In Groundhog Day, does the timeline continue for an alternate version of Bill Murray at the end of each day, or is his progress truly erased? So, when my characters look into the future, do all the alternate futures they see actually exist? Are they actually creating billions or trillions of futures in which they fail and/or commit horrific atrocities just to have one in which they succeed? So far my answer has been "no, they're just visions," but it seems my brain meant to challenge me on that point.

At the beginning of this dream, I built a time machine and sent it into the past (no idea how), presumably with a note telling me how to correct some minor mistake or another that I was about to make. However, I was left behind. The time machine had simply created an alternate reality in which I did not make that mistake, leaving this reality intact. So, I shrugged and went about my day. I went to class (Although I actually graduated a few months ago. Possibly more time travel shenanigans.) and somehow I wound up telling another guy named Carl about my experiment.

Now, Carl is a real person and a fellow engineering graduate. He wasn't a bad student, but he's a joker and was frequently late to class. Don't take this dream as any sort of reflection of the real Carl. When he heard my story, he got an odd look about him. He clearly understood the implications. We were now in an alternate reality. The "actual" reality was the one created when the time machine went to the past. Therefore, the one we're in now doesn't actually matter.

Carl convinced most of the other Aerospace Engineering students in my graduating class that he had something to show us. He led us up the stairwell in a tall building (The building in the dream was called "The Etten," by the way, named after a mission in Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, which I've been playing recently). Thankfully, I get suspicious since I'm genre-savvy enough to know that whatever prank he's about to pull isn't going to end well.

We get up to about the twentieth floor and tells the rest of the students out into a hallway, but he remains in the stairwell. I hang back as well and grab hold of one of a fire-alarms-in-a-cage that's attached to the well, since I suspect what's about to happen. Indeed, Carl does something to the building that makes the floor and every floor beneath to spontaneously collapse, sending the rest of my graduating class to their deaths.

At this point, I'm just annoyed with Carl. I'm still following his logic, that this is just an alternate reality and nothing that happens here actually matters, so to me this is just an obnoxious prank. However, as I climb to safety I gradually feel a sense of mounting horror as I realize what Carl had just done. Sure, this was an alternate reality, but we had to live in it. For us, this world was still completely real. And he'd just killed about twenty people.

We go to our next class (which is now virtually empty) as I grapple with what just happened. Carl is oblivious. He figures that he just pulled a harmless prank. Eventually, an FBI agent shows up at the door of the classroom and asks to speak with Carl. A minute later, she comes back and also asks to speak with me and one other guy that I don't know.

The dream ends with her leading us down the hallway and me realizing that I'd accidentally grabbed the wrong jacket, so I hang it on a hook in the hallway hoping that its owner will eventually find it.

...Anyways, I think that the dream could be an interesting premise for a story. Somebody realizes that they're in an "alternate" reality of some sort, such as one of the time loops in Groundhog Day, and that nothing that they do there matters, only to find that the reality the presumed to be irrelevant actually continues after they commit some horrific act.
 
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S J Lee

Inkling
certainly a premise worth doing...

I often wondered if Bill Murray's character should have psychological damage from remembering all those traumatic deaths

OR if he had raped McDowell's character instead of trying valiantly to charm her....it would have been ugly, but it would have "made a certain sense" since "none of it mattered"... eg, he had started to steal money....

Glad they didn't go there

You get the same vibe in VR sci-fi..

Arnie in Total Recall... 1.00 to 2.00
 
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