I wouldn’t say that this was a nightmare, though it was brimming with dark implications. I’ve a long-standing theory that our dreams are us remote viewing firsthand perspectives to moments in the lives of ourselves from parallel realities, irresponsibly carjacking their experiences and thus destabilizing their worlds, and the more different the dream from our waking life the further that reality from our point of reference.
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We arrive on the remote island, eager to help continue the research of its founders from decades past.
The only persons allowed are researchers, with modest facilities scattered about its acreage of dense though scenic wilderness, everyone’s task entailing they maintain certain paths, specific schedules. Our team is small but friendly, and much of our professional work by this point had involved study of the many strange phenomena of this island, albeit from afar. So there is elation at finally arriving, being accepted into the lone field we felt we might contribute. But the first night there is a theorized incursion, so that we must vacate elsewhere. Many of the island’s phenomena amount to such incursions, where matters such as power outages are the least of troubles to stem of it. Yet there is an infectious excitement in the air all the same, as we note many of the support staff and fellow researchers serving their own times there referencing what’s to come emotionally on the same level as though they were children talking about some upcoming street parade or fireworks exhibition. Except that there are always grave dangers with the incursion events and manifestations, the founders quite adamant in their years of discovery that straying from routines to sneak a peak firsthand comes with dire ramifications. Alongside their inventory of the island’s strangeness, was the fact proven that mankind is simply not meant to observe all things, for observing some thing or other changes its nature, as marked by the undefinable reality of quantum entanglement, as impactful as how a neglected child gets born again once noticed or an ego awarded attentions is inflated beyond its self-sustaining place. So, we opt to explore the far northern side of the island, out of harm’s good fortune, for initial sight-seeing of the area where the founders first came to the setting, and where they performed much of their own research and development and strange experimentation, laying the very groundwork which drew us all to our trades, to each other, and to this mysterious land lost between sea and sky.
Only, upon making our way to the north shores we realize that we ourselves had traveled through an incursion, appearing some 50 years into the island’s past. And that in actuality it had been we ourselves to discover the island, we ourselves who observed and experienced and catalogued its phenomena. In the long years trapped in those decades ago, we will eventually learn that time travel is not an instantaneous event. The island, and likely the rest of the world at large, possesses fixed points outside of time and space, and outside our scope of perception, for these fixed points randomly lapse into one another like some ethereal Mobius bottle, wormholes running in reverse or turned inside out. We learn to imagine this island as a hallway with doors at either end, entering one doorway leads you to exit in the opposing room rather than the intended one. Experiments will show us that we cannot see where we are going, only where we have been, so that what we experience as the passing of time is a reflection of the event itself, a mirror image rippling in the waves of a creek with other business about itself altogether. We learn that ghosts are travelers themselves, and whether going forward or backwards what is encountered are persons in transit. And this island is so full of ghosts there’s hardly room for anyone to stay. As time is experienced directly by the observer it seems to fly along swiftly enough, too swiftly at times, but from differing perspectives time can be prolonged dramatically, or omitted entirely, the long ago season eternal or the lifetime gone too soon. A third party observer of time travel cannot witness the full occurrence unless traveling themselves, so that what is experienced by the observer is on par with a single beat of a strobe light’s pulsation, and not the full processes of conveyance.
All our days and nights, every life on Earth cannot help but to witness all we encounter traveling through time, just not at the same directions, or in the same speeds. Perceiving someone vacating the time-stream, whether slipping out or slipping back in, proves the raveling and unraveling of our sensory perception, of what binds the known universe. It’s not the matter of the unobserved tree making no sound as it falls, but the matter of its dance along the way and of its narration along the way. If the gods are verbs then so too are quantum mechanics, the expression by phenomenon that words and actions are wholly inseparable. And by dissection or by division, piercing through their unity causes the electromagnetic spectrum to wave forth and back, observers of the perverse majesty drop dead, or they go mad. Trees will dance as they fall.
Eventually, through severe experimentation we believe we are able to return ourselves to our proper place in the time-stream, and never again the many other places which we should have never observed, where every incursion proves a doorway left open to observation, manifestations not revealing the proverbial man behind the curtain but the lifeblood of gods spilling forth from the cracked Mobius bottle. We know to arrive at a safe vantage, opting for the other side of the island where we first physically arrived with our ideals, remembering it to be vacated for an incursion of the continuum later that night. Which proved to be my team, returning for the final time of their chronological lives, but many, many streams from the last. Through their work they knew that physical matter cannot occupy the same space as physical matter, as much of physics take great issue with such attempts, and they dare not reappear halfway inside of whichever unfortunate soul already occupying that space. They had by then learned the hard way the danger of specifically encountering oneself in time, how all of the wacky science fiction stories aside it results in both parties being made undone, like they never existed.
There were events long prior to our discovering the island some 50 years ago which we were responsible for manifesting, and there are to be events long after the return tonight which we were responsible for manifesting, but indeed it is from their return tonight my friends will live out the rest of their natural lives, because from their vantage all things past are future and all things future are past, every future the slow disappearance of memories we dwell in, and every history the building of foundation to assure that end. There would be many more occasions where they would meet again, but in the here and now I only exist anymore briefly, in this virtual account of a dream soon forgotten, made undone by incursions through static points beyond time and space cracked open by my efforts to stare into the abyss, like a fetus kicking furiously from inside the womb.