Time shifts, or space-time shifts, fascinate us because we’ve all had at least a glimpse of this experience. Interludes of walking into and back out of the past, for example. Finding buildings that aren’t there when you go back to find them again. Glimpses of people in old-time clothes doing old-time things on old-time streets that are modern and normal when you look again. Being in one place, then in another, without experiencing time between, with no memory of intervening sights or sounds.
Yes, these are anecdotal, rarely involving physical evidence, although a few claim to, with artifacts displayed to “prove” it. In such cases, it’s more likely a good yarn was woven around the artifact, to imbue it with added interest. More likely is not proof against claims, though. It’s important to keep an open mind and to remain willing to entertain outré claims at face value during analysis.
One classic type of account involves travelers coming upon a diner or hotel, eating there or spending a night, and enjoying it so much that they decide to stop again en route back — and they can’t find it. It’s not there. Yet they ate, yet they spent a night; could they have hallucinated? They seriously doubt it. Had they slept, for instance, in an empt field, they’d have been soaked by dew, cold, bug-bitten, and so on. Had they only pretended to eat, they’d’ve been hungry.
There have been cases of photographs taken at such bed-and-breakfast places are, upon looking, blank. Research might reveal an inn or tavern that stood on the spot, long since demolished. Or it might reveal nothing. Travelers are left baffled, convinced they’ve experienced something eerie.
Seems to me, they have.
There are even reports of visits to the future. People claim to have spent entire days well ahead of now and are often able to tell us what will happen or be true at the future time. Did they physically go there or was it an epiphany? With all the surveillance cameras, we should be capturing people vanishing and appearing, and sure enough, we do.
These incidents are put down as hoaxes and digital video glitches. They are dismissed without much investigation. Trouble is, they’re not of a consistent type, so if it is a flaw in the equipment, it meanders. Not entirely unheard of but these modern day gremlins seem to focus on giving us only one type of evidence, that of people blinking in and out.
There is a story about two professional journalists who witnessed an attack on a harbor, even getting a few photographs. They were not believed and their report was dumped. A few years later, war broke out, and pictures nearly identical to theirs appeared in newspapers showing a harbor attack.
This is, once again, anecdotal. No sign of the images remain, only the story. This is convenient for hoaxers or for those crying hoax, but actually proves nothing either way.
There is the guy in Sweden who claims he was fixing plumbing under his sink when the back panel by the wall opened, revealing what looked like a sunny field beyond. He says he climbed through and was met by an older version of himself, with whom he spent the day. He even took some pictures with his phone, and these survived. In them, sure enough, we see two guys who look very similar, with even the same tattoos and so on. His family says there are no older brothers, uncles, or cousins who might have posed with him.
How do you explain this? The guy accepts it was precisely as he says, and is fine with it, not freaked at all. He doesn’t want interviewed about it further, and he’s never sought notoriety or profit.
Theoretical theory supports the possibility of this happening, even as it warns of the perishingly small chances. Who knows, maybe the guy really did meet his future self and spent a nice day with him. Self.
One woman, Miram, from Chicago, was with her fiancé at a department store. It was crowded and, upon stepping off the elevator, they were separated. She figured he’d find her and took a seat nearby, waiting until the store cleared out and she was asked to leave, as they were closing. She walked outside, intending to go home and wait for him.
The street was not as she recalled, and looked old-timey. Horses, carriages, and people in antique clothes surrounded her. People did not seem to notice her. She walked and grew frightened, then noticed a teenaged boy watching her from a corner. She went to him and confirmed he could see her. He also confirmed he didn’t know what was going on.
He claimed to have been just finishing getting dressed in a locker room after tennis in Lincoln, Nebraska when there was what he thought had been a power outage. Everything when dark. When the lights came back on, he was standing in a train station near the corner where Miriam found him.
They decided to explore together, perhaps finding others in their situation. They walked until the city became fields. Cresting a rise, they saw a river and a sand bar on the other side, where three women waved to them.
The tennis player decided the distance was easily swimmable, so he stripped down and tried. After a long time, he came back to Miriam’s side, exhausted. Miriam collapsed in despair of ever returning to her time and place, only to look up and find the boy, and the three women, gone.
She began crying and darkness fell, and she felt herself falling.
She came to just outside her house, where she found her fiancé waiting. “Where’d you go?” He asked. He was sitting with a neighbor, who claimed she’d seen Miriam walking with two other women and a boy in a crowded street down town. Miriam, baffled, recounted her tale.
All she had to prove it was some stains on her clothes.
That’s a famous account but there are plenty like them. We’re reminded, too, of the cases of people vanishing even in front of witnesses. A farmer crossing an empty field in sight and sound of his family and friends seems to fall. They never find him although, eerily, they hear his voice calling for help now and then. No caves or sinkholes in the area.
That one was written up by Ambrose Bierce, who collected eerie stories in his travels, later to be recounted as real life ghost stories or used as fodder in his fiction. Another involved a farmer whose son came to the barn to say lunch was ready. The farmer told the boy to finish milking the cow and headed toward the house, which was visible. He walked into nothingness and was never seen again. There is a modern one in which a guy, gone missing, leaves tracks in snow that go out onto a frozen lake. The tracks just stop, so they fear he’s fallen through. Makes sense. Trouble is, he’s found, dazed, miles away, no recollection of what happened to him.
All this demonstrates the world may well be stranger than we can imagine. Makes sense, given that our senses filter instead of integrate experience. We know the world only as a projected model in our heads, a construct of imagined responses to stimuli we can’t directly experience. We know, says science, everything is energy and nothing but. We know, too, most things are empty space, no matter how solid they seem to us. If that doesn’t confirm the fact we live in a simulation, what would?
Whether we simulate it, each of us, to the best of our common abilities, or are puppets created and jerked around on someone else’s strings, is an age-old debate. What is now called digital theory, which states the basis for reality is information, not particles, not wave forms, and not energy per se, states that infinite complexity arises from binary combinations. Yes/No, Up/Down/ In/Out, and so on, suffice to allow our reality to exist.
This being the case, can we alter reality? The answer seems to be in the affirmative, with the future able to change the past, and so on. There is, in other words, no reason that the so-called Arrow of Time, (past through present to future), is hard-and-fast true. Time “flows” in all directions at once, because reality is a solid and time itself a subjective illusion.
Uh-oh. Can we come loose in time, outside a Philip K. Dick novel? Loose in space-time, as space and time are one thing. If we can drift, does this explain many of the anomalous experiences people have reported through history?
Next time you trip out to the past, future, or just some place else, keep in mind that, chances are, you’ll snap back into your familiar frame of reference soon enough. Try to remember to bring back objects to prove your experience happened beyond your mind. Be an explorer, not a hapless victim, if space-time slips around you, or if you step into unseen realms.
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