Multiversal Me

Where lucid dreaming meets the complexities of alternate lives and the challenges of Chase being interrupted multiple times while he's trying to get his writing done.

Yesterday, my knee started hurting and I got pretty anxious about it after work. It’s better now but I’m worried I’ll fuck it up at work or while walking. I really ought to try that again. Um, wait. I really ought to get that fixed I mean. I wrote what I was thinking but not the part that I was frontward thinking? Before I dive down this rabbit hole, I’m going to check out the writing prompt for today.

Five Lives

Recently, I discovered that my dreams are not just lucid, but sometimes can be pathways to other lives I am living. Dreams where it seems so incredibly real and long that I wake up completely out of sorts and doubting that I was dreaming at all. In these dreams, it feels like I am the subconscious mind observing, feeling, and thinking. A visitor to another me’s reality. A lucid dream to me is a playground where I can - sorry, I just got interrupted by my wife who wanted to come give me a kiss after getting up to pee which is a nice loving and thoughtful gesture. Okay, back to the playground - where I can break the rules of “reality” and be Spider-Man.

One of these lives, I remember going camping with friends (not my friends but this other me’s friend) and a long-time girlfriend. I think we had been together for years at this point. I had memories of real time spent together. Nitty gritty life stuff. During the camping trip, she broke up with me and I was devastated. I had become overwhelmed with emotions and fought back tears. One of my friends offered to drive me home because I had ridden up with her. I remember sitting alone on a rocky jetty at a beach. Water flowing in and crashing against it. Processing the loss of this relationship and how different, lonely, and relieved I would become down the road.

Then I woke up.

I was jarred. It took a while for me to regain my senses and my own actual memories. The more time passed, the more difficult it became for me to recall the specifics about this life I had lived. I don’t remember what my occupation was but my dreams have taken into 4 other distinct versions of myself somewhere out in the multiverse.

2. The Theologia

Somewhere in the infinite universe where my dream took me is a life that I am living as a scholarly religious man. Not just a man who read about religion the way I once did and still do, but who, unlike myself, went to a bible college and became a pastor. People were in need of shepherding and I felt called by the Judeo-Christian God to lead (in that universe.) Helping spread the message of growth and forgiveness. I felt the importance of addressing the matters of the heart and spirit and teaching the words of Rabbis and brilliantly humble people from the past. Not the rules that modern Christians focus on or the way they try to step in and create laws to stop groups of human beings from being who they are instead of letting love, forgiveness, and acceptance be their guiding light.

I was concerned with the broader bigger picture. Not the thousands of years old rules established by men in power. I could feel the tug though still. I was participating in something that was oppressing people. That by my mere label as a pastor, was causing people to assume I was against them if they weren’t already a believer in my faith. My family there was supported by donations to our small seedling church and some books I had written. It was just enough to get by. I felt that if I grew any larger, it would stop being what it was and become like all the rest. My wife wanted to be more like a monk. Living in solitude. Devoting my life to writing essays and letters that might influence the way that the world is -

Okay, my writing time is almost up for the day and someone is texting my phone entire paragraphs worth of things to read and I’m annoyed. It’s not even 6 AM. I wake up early for this to be my time. Uninterrupted by the world so that I can write. Why mustn’t the world cooperate? 30 minutes of non-stop writing and I could not fill 3 full pages of this book. I swear there are entirely too many lines on these pages compared to my last notebook. That’s a wrap I guess.