In the dream fitting room, clues to parallel lives

It's happened again. There I was last night, strolling down Jermyn Street in London in a very smart double-breasted gray suit. I haven't worn clothes like these in decades. I haven't put on a tie since my daughter's wedding years ago, and my idea of dress-up is chinos with black sneakers. Yet in the dream, I am my present age, leading the life I might have lived if I had never moved to upstate New York, never started dreaming in the Mohawk language, never become a dream teacher - and remained a bestselling novelist.
    The other Robert's life ain't shabby. He has grown as a writer, specializing in literate spy novels set in the darkest years of the mid-20th century, somewhat akin to Alan Furst. He is a time traveler with a special agenda, using active imagination, along with good research, to enter the lives of people in the era of Hitler and Stalin.
    I have no wish to swap lives with him, but I'm glad to see he is thriving in his own way. If ever I feel a twinge of regret for a path not taken, I can console myself with the knowledge that in another reality the path was taken. 
    I've long been fascinated by dream experiences of parallel lives. These can take many forms. We find ourselves in the situation of a person living in a different time. We seem to be enjoying - or not enjoying - a continuous life in another reality. We slip into the perspective and apparently the bodies of other people (including even members of other species) who may be living in our present world, but are not ourselves.

    The parallel life experiences that intrigue me most are those in which we seem to find ourselves traveling - in an alternate reality - along paths we abandoned in this lifetime, because of choices we made. Contemporary science speculates about the existence of (possibly infinite) parallel universes. In our dreams, we have the ability to gain experiential knowledge of this fascinating field.

    In dreams like the one of the fancy suit, I quite frequently find myself living in a city or a country where I used to live, doing the things I might well be doing had I stayed in a former line of work and a certain life situation. In these dreams, I am my current age, but my life has followed a different track from the one I have taken in my waking reality. There is a "just-so" feeling about these dreams. I return from them thinking, "Well, that's how things might be if I had made a different choice." Sometimes I'm quite relieved that I made the choices I did; sometimes I feel a little tristesse for something or someone left on the "ghost trail" I've seen in my dream ; but most often my feelings are entirely non-judgmental.

    This theme is nicely explored in a novel titled The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver. Through alternating chapters, we follow alternate event tracks in the life of the heroine, depending on whether she did or did not kiss a man other than her partner on the night of his birthday. That night, her world split. We follow her double life, through those alternating chapters, and the dual narrative is beautifully wrought. At the end of the twin tellings, it's hard to make a value judgment between the alternate life paths. You can't really say that one is better or worse than the other; they are simply different.

    Through a chance encounter that was the product of a missed airline connection, I once met a woman who told me she was living a double life of this kind every night (or every day, depending on your perspective). Every night, she went home to her husband at their comfortable house on an island off the North Carolina coast. They might go to their favorite restaurant, or to the mall or the country club. In the morning, they went off on their separate ways to work. The shocker was this. The man she went to every night in her dreams was a different husband, in a different house in a different island. "Whenever I close my eyes," as she told it, "I'm in a different world. It's the same as this world, but everything is different."
     Under the Many Worlds hypothesis now widely entertained by physicists, it's possible that every choice we make results in the creation of two or more new universes.

     In Parallel Universes theoretical physicist Michio Kaku suggests that another universe may be floating just a millimeter away on a "brane" (membrane) parallel to our own. He explains that we can't see inside it because it exists in hyperspace, beyond the four dimensions of our everyday reality. But in fact, we can and do go there - in dreaming and in the imagination.

    Synchronistic encounters and moments of déjà vu can help to awaken us to the reality of parallel worlds, as explained in my book Sidewalk Oracles. Imaginative fiction helps open our minds to what is possible. In Borges' 1941 novella "The Garden of Forking Paths" a sinologist discovers a manuscript by a Chinese writer where the same tale is recounted in several ways, often contradictory. Time is conceived here as a "garden of forking paths", where things happen in parallel in infinitely branching ways. Borges conveys how all possible outcomes of a given event may take place simultaneously, each one opening a new array of possibilities.

    It's fascinating to speculate on what may happen if parallel selves, and their parallel worlds, bump up against each other. Could we combine the gifts of different life experiences, or would we compete with each other? One approach to this theme is a creaky old Roger Moore movie titled "The Man Who Haunted Himself", hilarious to watch now because of its silly, jingly circa-1970 musical score. An arrogant, power-mad, womanizing s.o.b. finds enlightenment, and becomes softer and kinder to the point where his family, his office and his girlfriend can't figure him out. When his other self - the s.o.b. in the Savile Row pinstripes - turns up, everyone accepts him as the true Roger Moore character, and Mr. Softer and Kinder is shut out of his home and his office.

    Leading-edge physicists recently renamed the Many Worlds hypothesis. They now talk of Many Interactive Worlds, exerting mutual influence that usually escapes human perception. As I walk the streets that parallel Robert is walking, is it possible that our lives begin to converge? Is he dreaming more? Am I more drawn to the period and the themes that fascinate him, and to his genre?

    I take a sideways look at that smartly dressed fellow in London, through the window my dream opened. He's decided to buy a new dress shirt, and is stepping into Turnbull & Asser, no less, with this intention. Price tags are immaterial to him. I'll leave him to it, as I pack old jeans and polo shirts for my trip today, to places in Europe he also visits, on his own track. However, I pop Night Soldiers, a  beautifully written spy novel by Alan Furst, set in eastern Europe in 1934, into my carry-on bag.

The book on time travel with a doll inside

I have two well-read, elegantly dressed male visitors, perhaps from Buenos Aires. Among the books they have with them is a blue-jacketed volume titled H.G.Wells on Time Travel. I realize I have this on my own shelves, though I haven't looked at it in a long time and possibly never read it closely.
     I get down my copy, and find curious things interleaved with the pages. A tiny dress, folded into a neat triangle. The dress is lacy and pretty. Does it belong to a very small girl, or to the doll I also find pressed among the pages? The doll has long curly fair hair and is wearing a different dress. Where did these come from? I set them out on a child-sized writing table.      

Feelings: Curious and excited. Also annoyed that noises from the street ripped me from my dreams before I had completed my adventures.

Reality: I last read Wells' The Time Machine in 2006 or 2007, when researching a chapter about Churchill for my Secret History of Dreaming. Wells wrote other things about time travel, including the early story "The Chronic Argonauts" from which he developed The Time Machine as a serial novel. Despite their political differences, Churchill was a great admirer of Wells and valued the prescience of his science fiction stories, which frequently previewed future events and technologies. He especially liked The Time Machine and told his physician in 1947 (when he was very ill and conscious of his own mortality) that he would take a copy of the novel with him into Purgatory.
     Are the tiny dress and the tiny doll connected with the tiny, elegant but terminally effete Eloi in the future world Wells' Time Traveler visits? Or with a different trans-temporal story, maybe one of my own? Is the doll a part of soul, or a clue to soul identity that will be discovered and reclaimed in a journey across time?.
     The bookish visitors from Buenos Aires make me think of Borges and his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, another great Argentine writer of fantastic tales. Borges' interest in time travel extended to exploring parallel event tracks in parallel universes, as in "The Garden of Forking Paths" and he read and appreciated H.G. Wells; he credited Wells for inspiring his own celebrated short story "The Aleph".
     I am leading an adventurous new workshop titled "Time Travel and Reality Creation" near Seattle next weekend, so my dream is rather timely.

Action: Dreams set us research assignments! Look for a book like the one on my dream, which is an anthology and may contain essays on Wells as well as selections from his own writings. See if I can reenter the dream, identify the little girl whose things are inside the book, and interview the visitors from Buenos Aires.

Feedback: Early feedback on this dream is giving me further interesting leads. A dear friend recalls 1940s-style paper dolls she used to dress and play with as a small girl and how she would use them and their paper clothes as bookmarks. Being a boy, I may not have recognized exactly what I was looking at.
    After mentioning the paper dolls, she dug up some papers I had sent to her while working on The Secret History of Dreaming. These include detailed reports on the importance of dreams in the writings of H.G.Wells, and how he moved beyond the linear technology-based model of The Time Machine to describe in later stories (like "A Dream of Armageddon") how dreaming is the key to time travel and gives half-awakened individuals the ambivalent power to make choices about where in time they will place their focus and their identity. I had quite forgotten that I wrote these papers. I did not draw from them in my Secret History. So, as in my dream, I was guided to something I had in my personal library, something on "H.G.Wells on Time Travel" written by none other than myself. 

The page you'll dare to read to a friend

Under the blue moon, I want to offer a New Year's instigation, especially for those who write or want to write, in any genre, or simply within the covers of a journal. I am borrowing these words from an essay written by Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine poet, essayist and maker of fantasy worlds, as a young man: -

I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page. The page that justifies me, that summarizes my destiny, the one that perhaps only the attending angels will hear when Judgment Day arrives.
--

Hang on - can Borges really be saying that he (and we) must deliver the right page to the angel in order to be saved on the day of Judgment? That may be as hard as the flinty Calvinist belief of some of my father's family that we are damned unless we are born among the elect, and damned even so unless our lives are justified by works. I fled that doctrine very early, though those who have observed me working round the clock complain that it remains a sleeper (or rather, unsleeping) agent in me. I won't dispute that the creative spirit is stirred by a "divine unrest", whatever its source.

--
Can Borges be serious when he says that to produce that one saving page, we may need to write "more than one book"? That's enough to make any aspiring writer break a sweat. -

Mercifully, in the last lines of his essay, young Borges relents. He wants
--

Simply, the page that, at dusk, upon the resolved truth of day's end, at sunset, with its dark and fresh breeze and girls glowing against the street, I would dare to read to a friend.
--

"A page I would dare to read to a friend." Now, that sounds manageable. And think what can be accomplished within a page! Borges' published essays are brilliant miniatures, often only a page in length, as are the stories collected in El Hacedor ("The Maker"). Even his astonishing story "The Aleph", in which his word magic brings a kabbalist legend alive and allows us to see, for a shimmering moment, a sphere the size of a coin that contains universal space - complete with tigers and pistons, tides and armies and a woman in Inverness with her "haughty body" and "violent hair"and the cancer in her breast - fills less than a dozen pages.-

-

A page a day. Here's the seed of a fine intention to let sprout in the New Year. I don't say "resolution"; New Year's resolutions have earned their bad rep. Resolutions may or may never get resolved. Intentions invite tending. So my intention, as we enter 2010, is to write, every day that I can (every day of the year would be grand, but I don't promise that) one page, in any genre, that at day's end, I would dare to read to a friend. How about you?

Happy New Year! May your best dreams come true in 2010!
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The essay quoted is"A Profession of Literary Faith" (1926) translated by Susan Jill Levine, in Eliot Weinberger (ed) Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).