Time is Relative

When I was little I got sick; really sick.  I went into a coma and I was given 6 hours to live.  A wonderful doctor was flown in from a research hospital who saved my life and here I am today.  I left the experienced changed.

 A seed of doubt was planted in my tiny mind.  It has grown over the years into a tree with many branches.  I started noticing clocks and the ticking sound they made.  It made me wonder if I was really out of a coma at all.  Was the clock mocking me?  Was I ticking down to the hour I would wake up and everything I know would be gone or changed?  Was my life from a lie?

I asked the fundamental question.  Can people in a coma dream?  Now I know you have to reach a state of REM and they must dream sometimes because if you don’t you will die.

As I grew the idea got more complex.  Could your mind create people with independent personalities and backgrounds?  Could you create a world in your mind?  I can’t be the only person who’s ever wondered if I am really a bit actor in someone else’s dream.   When they wake up will I cease to exist or do our thoughts have the power to bring these dreams into creation?  If that is the case there are a lot of worlds out there where I can fly and others where zombies chase me or houses consume me.   

There is one thing Inception shared with this concept.  In dreams time is relative.  You feel you’ve lived years and it’s only been minutes.  It could also feel like moments and you’ve been out for 8 hours. 

After seeing that movie I watched one of the many science fiction films where astronauts’ are put into suspended animation and shot into space.  That opened a whole new branch of thought for me. 

We are so close to figuring out how to freeze a person and bring them back.  Call me optimistic but I can see that happening in this youngest generations’ lifetime.  I don’t see people discovering a way to travel faster than light soon.  I think “warp speed” is firmly in fiction.    But if we know it’s possible to freeze someone and send them back to life a light year is no obstacle.  By the time you make any significant discoveries and return home no one will remember you left and people will have evolved significantly.    But with endless funding and interest this could be possible.

If you are in stasis for thousands of years traveling trillions of miles away would you dream?  If you could I imagine your mind would starve for interaction.  If it’s possible to create a whole world where life exists at such a relative pace you could watch a world come into creation, flourish, interact with generations of lives and manipulate it like a god.  It wouldn’t take long for you to forget you aren’t really a part of that world.  What would you think as you lived on while whole civilizations rise and crumble around you?  Would you assume you are god? 

   

You wouldn’t know how fragile your whole foundation is.  You would live never knowing that you would wake up and it would all be gone. 

When you do wake up what kind of effect would that have on your mind?  Suddenly, you have a group of astronauts’ coming back to consciousness after thousands and perhaps millions or even billions of years in dream time.  Even if they do remember a life before they have to live knowing that everyone they ever cared about or talked to is dead aside from the few they are traveling with.  They are utterly alone where they used to be gods of their own universe. 

My husband told me I was fucked up.  He said if I ever wrote that into a novel everyone would hate me.  The main characters would all die lonely in the depths of space and even if they did make it home it would be to a foreign world that doesn’t know them.  I think it’s a cool idea even if it is depressing.