Dreams flow in the subjective domain like parallel layers of thought. We personally experience dreams as a natural aspect of the human mental 'operating system,' just beyond the reach of objective reality. We reach out to touch them, but they disappear in the mist under the light of lucid consciousness.

From information theory, we know that they must have an ontological reality. All information, dreams included, must have physical representation. Dreams therefore exist in some very real sense, apart from the measure taken by our mental apparatus. Dreams are the simulations of other worlds, often with very different rules of behavior from our waking reality.

In recent years it has become popular for physicists to dream up the idea of other parallel universes, called brane-worlds, floating near each other in a higher dimensional bulk space. In this theory there is an extremely weak coupling of the brane-worlds coming from the exchange of gravitons -- quantum particles of the gravitational force -- which are heavily diluted by the higher dimensional space that they escape into. Physicists like this idea because it helps to solve several long-standing problems in physics, not the least of which is why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces of nature.

Gravitons are the quantum manifestation of gravity, which is the classical curvature of spacetime. Brane worlds are thought to be spatially flat and in parallel with each other, but all of the other forces of ordinary matter are confined to each brane world, and do not interact across the bulk higher dimensional space. We are stuck like flies on fly paper by the very forces that allow for our existence. Only gravity is allowed to pass between the worlds.

About ten years ago, Sir Roger Penrose invoked gravity as the determining player in consciousness, by allowing different spacetime curvatures to introduce a non-computable selection process into fundamental reality. At the classical level the brain cell microtubules discussed by his associate, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, operate like multi-celled binary information processors, based upon the conformation (shape) of their proteins. The shape of each individual tiny protein structure is determined by an individual quanta of charge (the location of an electron) which in turn is affected by the selection of its path due to the shape of spacetime. One shape could be represented by a one, the other by a zero. Thus in the Penrose-Hameroff theory, the output of a quantum mind appears as a classical computer. Prior to the classical selection of a thought (represented by the configuration of ones and zeros) the quantum mind is in a superposition of different outcomes, or a thought may be found in more than one place at the same time.

All of this is conjecture, but real, material brane worlds might be detected by high energy experiments in the next couple of years, when we 'observe' the graviton leaving our brane world and entering the bulk. By the way, each flat brane-world must be less than 1/10 mm from the next. So it would be true to say that the universe next door is right at your fingertips!

Imagine an alien device tunneling via a wormhole into the brane world next door; the brane could serve as a base of operation inaccessible to the human race. Carefully controlled micro-wormholes could then be used to penetrate into the material space of our brane-world, nearly invisible except to the extent that the aliens desire to interact strongly with our material world. In this scenario the aliens are operating from an alien base (based upon the moon, perhaps?) but that base cannot be accessed by human technology, nor observed by ordinary means. If our minds are quantum-gravity related as in Penrose-Hameroff, then perhaps we might 'remote view' these alternative worlds via gravity fields across the bulk hyperspace?

This makes for an interesting speculation, as real-life men-in-black tasked Ingo Swann, the U.S. Government's primary remote viewing psychic-spy trainer, to view alien moon bases in the 1970's. The tale of this incredible adventure is told in our story, "To the Moon and Back, With Love."

Copyright (c) 2006 Gary S. Bekkum. All rights reserved.

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