Time Machines and Distortions of Reality

So I had another odd dream last night. For that matter, I think I had several seperate odd dreams, but on waking I only remembered the one. It's weird: after staying awake (without caffeine) almost 24 hours to fix my sleep schedule, you'd think I could get a good night's sleep. But I woke up several times during the night to find my sheets kicked around and not entirely covering me, and my mom reports hearing me bumping around, which I don't recall doing. Factor in the content of this dream (and the ones I don't remember), and I don't think my brain got much rest at all.

So to start off, I was going back in time with some adult woman. This very well could have come from the end of a different dream, or is the middle one longer more convoluted dream, but I don't remember well why we were going back in time. Nor do I remember what we did there (then?). Perhaps she was some sort of history-fixer, and I an apprentice. Anyway. The destination was sometime before civilization, the job was over quickly, and we were on our way back to the present. Here's where things start to get fishy.

We get back to the present, and the door to the time machine opens. Instantly everything is wrong. My mind feels like it shatters into a million pieces. I black out, but not before noticing that the woman who was there is suddenly a different woman. When I wake up, I'm being called by a name that isn't mine. I recognize some faces, but they have the wrong names. Some people are more familiar and some are less. As is common in dreams, people I know were here and there, and somehow even in the broken reality groups of friends stayed together, with only slight variations. I spent a day in utter confusion as I tried to figure out what was wrong with me, or the world -- but my best idea was that my changes to the past had modified the future, but left me as I was.

It gets worse. The next day I woke again to a new reality, different from the last. This process repeats itself indefinately. I busy these days in different realities trying to find someone familiar enough to who I remember for me to truly communicate with, but to little avail. The people I meet have different memories of me than I have of them, including what my name is. Some days people aren't even speaking English, or any language that I recognize. Some days there is nobody and nothing. Not even I am there. Yet, I have a perception, lacking senses, lying in a barren landscape.

Eventually, on a day where people are speaking English, I find myself talking to a scientist who studies the effects of time machines and time travel. He tells me my experience is unrelated to time travel, that it can't be. He procedes to explain the theoretical effects of making changes to the past: When the door to a time machine opens, the time traveler is exposed to reality, which has altered in infinately many different ways. All of the alterations of reality exist, and are entirely seperate from the others. The phenominon is similar to what some term "multiple universes". The essence of the time traveler, or his perception, splits and fills each of his new infinitely many selves. Each of these selves has a history, and memories entirely seperate from time travel, though some may be time travelers themselves. They do not remember anything of the original time traveler's history -- some 'excuse' is in their mind for why they were in the time machine that day. "Unless," he says, "you had some sort of psycic bond... a root in your past world and life..." He droned off, then went to a blackboard and proceded to fill it with math (which was pure jiberish). "Do you have an identical twin, perhaps?" And he retracts his previous statements, allowing that if one had a constant influx of psycic signal, however slight, it could remind the time traveler's perception of it's history. To forget the past, then, the forgetting would have to happen faster than the reminding. Now, if just one new perception remembered the past, it could be awkward. The time traveler would remember the wrong past, know the wrong things, and possibly speak the wrong language. But if all of the new perceptions were identical to the original, and a person's perception is his sense of self, then it would seem like one 'person' living the lives of infinately many. One person in infinately many bodies. He couldn't conceive of how a mind could manage so much sensory input -- until I came along. I was proof of the possibity, and it could be done by those lives taking turns, one day each.

So how was the problem to be solved? "Kill all your other selves, and the one remaining will live a normal life, though in a world where you have no memories." The consequences of that seem frightening, but he and his team developed the instrumentation that would somehow attatch to me and destroy the other copies of myself in other realities. (Looking back on it, this must have all been acomplished in one day, or I'd be gone.) I was strapped in. I heard: "You idiot! You'll destroy him entirely!" and I woke up.