Aaron M. Fortkamp

I would really like to believe that all things could be proven scientifically. I mean, I think there is a scientific explanation for everything, just that there are some things we will never be able to prove.

Like, I would love it if one day we can prove using quantum theory or something that there are an infinite number of parallel dimensions, and that the reason we need to sleep is because this is how we experience them, connect with them, touch them and draw inspiration from them, that when I dream I am my age but my friends are all high school age and we’re chasing tornadoes across Kansas in a glass-topped minivan, that in another dimension this is the reality, and this is why we are the most advanced species, not because we stand on two legs and use weapons but because the inspiration for these things is drawn from our advanced ability to commune with other possible realities. Other species dream too, to be sure, my dog might sometimes visit other existences in which he is allowed to chase the squirrel, but we have a higher capacity for retention and inspiration from these connections, and what’s more we’ve evolved so that this advanced sort of astral projection is common to even those without the capacity for recognizing it for what it is, not just an out-of-body experience but an experience out of time, out of our time, out of our universe and space and time, an amazing organ, the human brain, you ask me what is consciousness, what is identity, I tell you it’s the quantum presence of our waking selves, and when we sleep the brain unlocks the quantum portal and this as-yet unmeasurable entity transports across dimensional boundaries and space and time and experiences all manner of horror and rapture and passion, all of it real, just not here, just not now. And we too can be receptacles of cross-dimensional travel, in our best moments, in our worst, inspiring the nightmares of another earth in the upside-down.

And everyone knows we can do this but we have not outlined the mechanisms of consciousness as of yet, much less quantum travel, so the meantime explanation of it is dreams, we dream, we create nightly unguided scrapbooks of past experiences filed away in our brains’ nether regions, it’s psychology, is the best we can describe it now, psychology so unrespected and unexplored that our best guides are sold in the checkout lanes of grocery stores. Generally they are thought to be meaningless, and maybe they are, but even if they are, wouldn’t it change things if these random quantum leaps were proven to be so, if two people dreaming about the same place and time actually did jump into the same place and time, if you murdered someone in a dream, if you cheated on a spouse, if you won a race in the Olympics, if dreaming about something happening meant that something had to be possible somewhere.

I would like to be able to channel these quantum dreams, too. Like yes okay I would like to have the ability to access the universe wherein I won the lottery and take those numbers back to this one and do the same, sure, but mainly, though, mainly I want to use it in writing, because writing is just carefully worded dreams, and following that logic than somewhere across the spectrums of infinity there is a real place with every story happening inside it that’s ever been written, in some existence there is Hamlet prince of Denmark saying the exact words that Shakespeare wrote for him, slings and arrows, he’s saying that and what if Shakespeare simply figured out a way to tap into that dimension, to listen to it, let it feed him and transcribed and rewrote and revisited the scene and scratched out and this time transcribed correctly, over and over until the draft was finished because he was out of time and flash forward 400 years and every fourteen-year-old kid in this dimension has to read it. 

Somewhere there is a dimension with a writer making up my character, visiting me in their dreams, watching and listening and writing down as best they can the story of Aaron and Gretchen and the never-ending kittens and the struggles and triumphs and the blackouts and promises and every mundane or exciting thing. Maybe I need them. Maybe if they aren’t getting enough sleep lately, then I can’t be motivated to act.

Maybe the most motivated of us here on this plane of existence are being guided by the coma patients in others.

But writers, doing it right, don’t have to sleep to go there.

That being said, I am tired now, and I haven’t written enough of other people’s stories yet today, so. Off I go.