A loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a YouTube link with the message, "Okay, so what do you make of this?"
It turned out to be a video from a channel called The Mysteria Archive titled, "The Reality Glitch: People Are Waking Up in the Wrong Timeline." In it, we hear about folks who had the sudden sense -- often just after waking -- that everything was subtly changed. Nothing quite looks or feels right. Sometimes it's just an intangible feeling; other times minor details, like the color of a piece of furniture, the title of a book on the shelf, the brand of coffee you'd purchased, are different from what you remember.
In some cases, though, it's not minor. In a story that got enough traction that (according to the video) it ended up in Newsweek in July of 2023, a woman decided to return after many years to take a look at her childhood home in northern New Jersey. When she arrived -- although she recognized the street and the rest of the neighborhood -- the house at the address was completely different from the home she'd grown up in. Neighbors insisted the house had been there for years, and that there'd never been the two-story colonial-style home there that she remembered; additionally, none of them knew of a family with her last name that had ever lived in the neighborhood. Shaken, she returned home, and after some online research confirmed that the unfamiliar house now standing at her childhood address had been there for decades.
In another strange account, this one that ended up in Medium, an Australian woman named Elsie Harven was detoured by construction on her way to work in Sydney, and passed an office building with a sign saying "Bellridge Solutions." She distinctly recalled having worked there as an intern when she was in college -- but when she checked her résumé later, she could find no mention of it. Friends who knew her at the time had no memory of her having worked there, either. Understandably freaked out, she decided to return to the building the following week to see if they had record of her -- only to find that the sign saying "Bellridge Solutions" was gone, and the building she'd seen was now completely empty.
Very weird. Kind of a more personalized version of the Mandela Effect, is how I think of it.
So the narrator then goes into the possibility of it being a side-slip into another timeline -- the old "rip in the spacetime continuum" thing that was the genesis of at least two dozen plot twists in Star Trek alone. He does admit that human memory is remarkably plastic, but seems convinced that this isn't enough to explain all the hundreds of such accounts there are out there. The most likely explanation, he says, is that there was a glitch in the Matrix -- the software running the simulation we're all in has developed minor inconsistencies that every once in a while become apparent to someone.
I have to admit that I've had similar experiences myself. Nothing so dramatic as finding a different house at my childhood address or having an entire office building more or less erased, of course. More like feeling things are surreal, like what I'm looking at "isn't quite right." Not better or worse; just different, as if someone had subtly altered everything while I wasn't looking. I tried to capture the feeling of this experience in my novel The Accidental Magician:
After hanging up, Carla sat looking out of the sliding glass door into her sheltered back yard, the shadows lengthening as twilight approached. It all looked so normal.So I won't deny the sensation is disorienting and unpleasant. But what, exactly, is going on here?
But things felt off. It was like those drawings she’d seen in kids’ magazines growing up, the ones labeled, Find twelve things wrong with this picture! On a glance, everything is as it should be—a brother and a sister in a traditional-looking kitchen, a mom bringing them plates with sandwiches. But then you looked closer, and the numbers on the clock dial are backwards, the mom is wearing swim fins, the milk-filled glasses on the table are upside down, the cat sitting in the corner is reading a book.
Even as a child, Carla felt a vague sense of unease about those, although they were only drawings. The problem was that the people in them always seemed completely unaware of the fact that the world around them had gone mad. Or maybe—they knew. They knew, and wanted it that way. The mom wore a reassuring smile, as if to say, No, dear, of course this is normal! Don’t you know that? Everything’s fine. Just eat your sandwich and stop worrying.
I suppose it's unsurprising that I'm inclined to discount the "slipped into a different timeline" response. This refers, of course, to the famous "Many-Worlds Interpretation" of quantum physics, which attempts to explain the baffling "collapse of the wave function" phenomenon -- the fact that a particle is in a superposition of probabilities until it's observed -- by positing that every possible outcome for the collapse happens, only in different timelines. The thing is, though, those timelines afterward become completely isolated from one another; Geordi LaForge notwithstanding, it doesn't appear to be possible to jump into a different timeline (more's the pity for most of us here in the United States, who seem to have had our wave function collapsed into the stupidest, cruelest, and greediest timeline imaginable).
The other explanation he offers is the computer simulation one, and to me that's at least marginally more plausible. Some of these occurrences do have the feel of an elaborate computer game glitching. But "it feels similar" is light years away from any kind of rigorous scientific explanation.
The most parsimonious explanation is that it's a brain phenomenon. Most of us remember the past poorly and incompletely, while simultaneously believing that our memories are one hundred percent reliable (and therefore, that anyone who remembers differently is just plain wrong). I have to admit that remembering your childhood address -- and the rest of the neighborhood -- and having a different house show up there is a pretty major glitch, but it seems like there should be some way to cross-check more deeply than the woman in New Jersey did. Surely she had to have some record of her address, photographs of her home, school records, something.
Isn't it easier to believe she'd done something like transposed two digits in the address than the entirety of reality being a glitchy computer simulation?
Now, mind you, this isn't a rigorous proof either. I'm not saying the simulation explanation is impossible, just that the evidence we have doesn't get anywhere near the standard required by science. At the moment, it's a weird, surreal phenomenon that happens to people sometimes, and that's kind of where we have to leave it.
On the other hand, if we are in a computer simulation, can we have something positive come out of it? No Agent Smith or evil tracking devices being inserted into Keanu Reeves's navel, nothing like that. But a targeted lightning strike on a golf course near Mar-a-Lago?
I'd happily reconsider my stance.
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