Einstein Demonstrates Probability Bundles

 

A passage opens, like a long cylinder lined with silver and bronze-colored rods, angling up into the sky. As I speed up through it - shooting up effortlessly - I become aware that I am about to encounter someone who can instruct me on the workings of time and the content of the future. I come out high above the ground and look up at a huge revolving structure, something like a Ferris wheel on its side. At the end of each spoke is a different object, or rather bundle of objects. As the wheel revolves, I notice that the spokes go up and down at all angles, making the general shape of a sphere.

At the hub of the wheel is Einstein. He appears with his wild fluffy hair, in rumpled clothes, as he has appeared in other dreams. From the center, he works an engine that enables him to toss down bundles from the ends of the spokes. As one spoke dips, another rises, producing a seesaw effect. As the bundles fall to earth, Einstein instructs me that this is how the unfolding of events in time actually takes place: not in the serial fashion that is a concession to the limited human mind, but in the releasing of probability bundles, packages of time + energy whose contents will be unfolded over a certain period. The unfolding of events will be influenced by the dropping of subsequent probability bundles.

I woke from this dream excited, with an aha sense of illumination. While Jung said that synchronicity (a word he coined) is "an acausal connecting principle", when it happens we often feel that causation is at work on a level that escapes explanation in terms of the push-pull laws of consensual reality. Einstein's demonstration provides a model of how this may work, raising our imagination to a higher dimension of the multiverse.

I think of Einstein at the wheel of that crazy machine in a dream I recorded twenty years ago whenever I notice a riff of coincidence. When things keep popping up that you know are connected, though there is no causation involved on the physical plane, couldn’t this be the effect of the firing of one of those probability bundles, flung from another world into this one, to burst across our space and time like multidimensional piñatas? The world "quantum" means "bundle" or "packet", so this image may be a clue to how quantum effects are manifested on a human scale.

What I like best about the dream image is that the machine that fires the probability bundles closely resembles something you might find in an amusement park, evoking a game greater than the ones we spend most of our lives playing. Heraclitus said that life in time is governed by a child king at play  moving pieces in a game on another level of reality. Maybe the pieces in play are probability bundles.

Illustrations by Robert Moss: original drawing at top; with AI assistance at bottom