A Parallel Universe

Like a time-lapse film of an uncoiling fern, a second universe, natural yet strangely foreign, has unfolded around me. It now lies like a silver film over the worlds I have become accustomed to, revealing unexpected details–peculiar patterns, unusual congruencies and emotional energies–that have roughly taken my attention until I could do nothing but walk and stare, stare and walk, moving from world to world in a bizarre trek of rediscovery.

I imagine it must be analogous to the fact that flowers sport radically different details when viewed in ultraviolet light. I can now imagine what that first scientist must have felt like after such a disclosure: examining slowly at first, then frantically, racing from bloom to bloom, amazed at the changes, yes, the new patterns, certainly, but even more affecting would have been the profound apprehension that birds and insects live in an almost literal parallel universe, a reality, just as meaningful and rich, yet utterly independent of human perception. What a mindblower that must have been, yes? Imagine–coming to understand that there might be MORE such “realities” just a perception’s twitch away, exactly as real as what we used to think of as “all there ever was.” — M.A. Fink, The Found Diary of Avery Alexander Myer.