When Reality Glitches

I had a dream where I was different people, different versions of myself, replaying the same scenes but also totally different ones, all at once. If you’ve seen Everything Everywhere All at Once, you’ll know the kind of chaos I mean. It was that confusing, that dystopian. I woke up trying to hold onto the details, but the harder I tried the more they slipped away. Weeks later I still can’t tell you exactly what happened, but I can still feel it in my body.

The dream made me realise something. There are experiences we’re not built to explain, but we’re somehow wired to live them. Quantum ideas, paradoxes, juxtapositions. Physics explains them, but it rarely touches on how they feel. Every now and then we get a glimpse. Some people maybe live closer to that strangeness than the rest of us.

What I saw in that dream reminded me of how obsessed our brains are with survival. They’re built to protect us. I’ve written about this before, but it runs so deep that we forget there are other ways of living. Your boss gives you a strange look and instantly you miss the shimmer of a bird that almost looks pixelated, or a flower so unreal you’d think someone Photoshopped it into the street. You don’t notice, because your brain is already screaming, Danger! Why did your boss look at you like that? Then you do down the rabbit hole, inventing explanations, chasing threats that don’t even exist. And even though you know it’s not real, maybe she just had indigestion, your brain turns into a paranoid MI6 agent, desperate to decode the message and save your job.

The Collapse of the System

The hard hits, the breakups, the griefs, the moments that feel like death itself is staring you down, are collapses. They’re a kind of near-death experience. Not of the body, but of the life you thought you had. And a collapse changes everything.

In a breakup your reality dissolves. Your past, present and future. All of it collapses. In that collapse, you catch glimpses of other timelines, quantum spaces, like life suddenly glitching, as if you’d stepped into a broken video game. It’s terrifying, but it’s also a space where you get to choose. Who you are in the middle of it. Who you become when you crawl out the other side. That collapse is painful, but it holds the chance to transform.

I wrote about this in my book, but now I understand it differently. When I went through a sudden breakup, I had a taste of nirvana. Not because it was pleasant, but because in the shock, the whole system crumbled. The past I thought I knew, the promises, the I love you’s, the I’ll never give up on us, shattered. Overnight, the story I’d been living was gone. In the present, my relationship was gone. My future plans dissolved. In that collapse, I wasn’t just grieving a person, I was grieving entire timelines.