The Midnight Library and the Café Jet-Lag

 

"Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you."

It's a great moment in Matt Haig's great novel The Midnight Library, when Nora, who is sliding between parallel lives, discovers there are others like her. This is what Hugo, the first to reveal himself, tells her.

"We are sliders. We have a root life in which we lying somewhere, unconscious, suspended between life and death, and then we arrive in a place...A library, a video store, an art gallery, a casino, a restaurant..."

And this place becomes the portal to a parallel world where you find yourself in the body and situation of your parallel self as they are in this same moment. You'll be challenged to catch up with their divergent biography, with a lover you never knew, a job you never had, songs you never learned, muscles you didn't know you had.

The many worlds interpretation of reality, as it has evolved, makes sliding acceptable to theoretical physics. The architecture for transit - the library, the video store - is easier for human minds than theorems about quantum waves.

You don't need to be half-dead to explore this field for yourself, though we all exist somewhere between life and death. I use a very special library, and a cosmic video store, and an art gallery or museum often as portals for lucid dream adventures in parallel worlds and others and play guide for groups that want first-hand experience of these things..

Matt Haig's slider remind me that perhaps I haven't made sufficient use of restaurants, though I often dine well in my dreams and return with the taste in my mouth. I think I will see whether the Café Jet-Lag in Paris, where I would often stop for coffee or vin rouge after overnight flights, is a friendly transit lounge for interdimensional travel. The name matches my condition when I return from world-jumping.