Dreaming the Many Worlds

Physics tells us that it is probable that all of us are living, in this moment, in one of a possibly infinite number of parallel universes, that every move we make (or fail to make) causes our world to split, though we rarely, if ever, notice.

    As a brilliant Princeton postgrad student, Hugh Everett dreamed up the Many Worlds hypothesis. He aspired to reconcile quantum mechanics and classical physics. The basic question he posed was: If an atom can be two places at once, why can’t we? In the quantum field, it seems that a particle can be any number of places at the same time – until the act of observation fixes one quantum event out of a multitude of probable events.
    But our normal experience of physical reality, on the human or macro scale, is quite different. Hugh Everett’s bold proposition was that quantum effects are at work in every part of the universe, on every scale, all the time. We don’t notice this because our universe is constantly splitting. Any move we make, and breathe we take, generates a new universe. In the moment we observe such things – in the quantum field or in a city street – we generate a parallel universe in which a parallel observer is either not looking or looking in a different way. “We live in an infinite number of continually interacting universes,” Everett proposed. “All possible futures really happen.”

     While Everett’s hypothesis was largely ignored in his own time, the Many Worlds theory is approaching a consensus view among many leading-edge physicists today. We find confirmation for it in dreaming., when we wake up to the possibility that dreams in which seem to be leading continuous lives in a different reality may indeed be glimpse of parallel lives we are living in parallel worlds. I help people to explore this consciously. We can sometimes move beyond regret over the past – over people we lost, things we did not do – as we awaken to the possibility that we may be walking all of our possible life roads, right now.
    We can learn to do more. We can learn to reach to our parallel selves and bring gifts and lessons from their lives into our present one. We discover that we can open doors between worlds without need of a subtle knife. This is central to my current work in teaching people to explore multidimensional reality through the techniques of Active Dreaming.
    In a recent workshop, I helped a group to open a portal through which we could journey, with the help of shamanic drumming and focused intention, to explore the situation of parallel selves who made different life choices. I was able to observe parallel Roberts on five distinct event tracks. I returned from my journey feeling profoundly grateful that the choices I made have kept me off three of those roads in my present life.
    Two of the other parallel lives are exciting and rewarding. In one of them, I am a popular author of superior historical spy novels, traveling all over the world in the course of my research and readings, writing better and better. In another life, I am a babalawo of Ifa, a high divination priest of the Yoruba tradition, living in the northeast of Brazil.
    I recognize that I slip in and out of these lives, and many more, in dreams. Our dreams are sometimes memories of continuous lives lived in parallel realities.
    When we shared travel reports in that workshop, we found that nearly everyone had brought back important gifts. One of them was often a sense of closure, through the understanding that making a different life choice would not have resulted in a happier or more desirable outcome. Another gift was the understanding that we can reach to our parallel selves and borrow their knowledge and their skill sets. Then there was the vivid awareness that we don't need to let ourselves be consumed by regrets over lives we might have lived when our parallel selves are leading all of those lives, right now, on the countless roads of the multiverse.

photos (c) Robert Moss