"Everything seems the same, but this isn't my husband": five stories of individuals who found themselves in a parallel universe.
Among a multitude of wild hypotheses, there exists one – in fact, an entire bush of assumptions – that stands out for its sheer madness. This is the concept of the multiverse, or parallel worlds, proposed by the founding father of quantum computing, physicist David Deutsch. And he is not alone: nearly all major physicists of the last century have contributed to the creation of alternative universes.
The theory states that every time you make a decision, even a trivial, everyday one, you enter a parallel world. And there are an infinite number of such worlds. There are some where I am a basketball player, and many where I don't exist at all.
Normally, a person does not feel the transition because adjacent universes are remarkably similar. The differences between them increase over time. For instance, a boy born in the wilderness to a troubled family, destined for a joyless life, starts to apply himself from a young age, demonstrating immense perseverance, and by the time he is 50, he sits in a restaurant of a luxurious hotel reaping the rewards of his efforts. His universe of success is incredibly distant from his universe of failure. He has traversed several decades taking small steps from one universe to another. It's like walking south: each day it gradually gets warmer, life is improving.
However, there are cases when a person enters another universe not gradually, but abruptly. And this new universe is already significantly different from the old one. Is that possible? David Deutsch himself has nothing to say about this. Physicists remain silent. But romantics are convinced it happens!
We have gathered some of the most striking examples of this from the internet and beyond. Perhaps it’s all just chatter and fabrications. Or perhaps not everything is made up. It’s hard or impossible to verify. Let’s just read.
MARRIED TO MY EX
In 2008, someone – a person identifying themselves as a woman named Lerina Gorsina Gordo, 41 years old, from Spain – appeared on social media. Friends, explain what is happening to me, the person exclaimed.
Lerina claimed that one day she woke up at home. Everything was as usual, except the sheets... were different. She didn’t have those. Another oddity was that her car was parked in a different spot than usual. Well, that could happen. However, that was just the beginning.
At the office, two unfamiliar men greeted her, a nameplate with an unknown name hung on her office door, and her new room was in a wing she had never been in before. That evening, it was revealed that she was still married to a man she had divorced some time ago. And her new suitor seemed to have never existed: when she called him, an unrecognizable voice picked up.
Lerina thought: either I am going crazy, or I have been drugged (by whom and for what purpose), but for now, I’ll try to hold it together. During dinner that evening, she asked her sister, “how’s your shoulder?” – “What shoulder?” Oh, never mind. In the morning, off to the doctor. Verdict: the body is clean, there’s no psychosis, and her mind is intact.
That’s the story, and it ends there. In the comments (the post is long gone), she received various responses, from “you’re pulling our leg” to “I’ve had something like that too.” Lerina initially engaged in dialogue but then disappeared.
Internet detectives are still searching for her, but it seems they won’t find her. The internet of the 2000s was an anonymous zone. A black hole, what was there has vanished.
Of course, perhaps someone, inspired by David Deutsch, decided to take his hypothesis to new levels. Or maybe not.
WALKED INTO A ROOM, ENDED UP IN ANOTHER
A long time ago, a magazine called FATE was published, and under another name, it still comes out, featuring seemingly strange but verified stories while also exposing frauds. At one time, it gained notoriety for scathing articles about Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle, claiming it was all nonsense.
The September 1956 issue is prized among collectors, sold online, and fetches a high price. Why this particular issue? Because it contains a story by a certain Miriam Golding, considered to be one of the most classic cases of slipping into another dimension.
According to the story, a woman and her fiancé went to a record store; the guy wandered off somewhere, and Miriam entered an elevator but exited not on another floor of the store but at some train station. A voice from the speaker announced the stations, people were buying tickets and bustling about.
Strangely, it was as if the woman did not exist for those around her. She tried to ask questions, but they didn’t hear her, didn’t look at her; they merely passed through her. In horror, she stepped outside and saw a teenager standing bewildered in the crowd. “Oh, maybe the guy is stuck just like me,” thought Miriam, and indeed, the teenager waved his arms at her.
It turned out he had entered an elevator at a sports club several hundred kilometers away and ended up at the same station. Together they started looking for a way out and found themselves in some park. Suddenly, in the distance, they spotted a group of girls, and Miriam realized: it was her fiancé’s sister with her friends.
They see Miriam and the boy and start waving, but the woman and the teenager cannot take a step closer. An invisible wall, like in a dream.
Then everything darkens, and Miriam finds herself as if in space, in zero gravity, and suddenly she is sitting in the record store, with a magazine open on her lap that she is reading, just a few minutes before closing, and the sellers are already circling around, hinting that it’s time to leave.
Her fiancé greets her at home, asking where she had been, while his sister says, “Yes, we saw you with some guy, but you ran off from us, we were surprised, but oh well, we thought nothing of it.”
The editorial office published this story because – it was a waking dream, of course. Deutsch’s theories did not exist at that time, and in 1956, little was known about singularities, black holes, let alone the multiverse.
And in our day, the story has taken on new colors, wouldn’t you agree?
If, of course, the journalists were not deceived. But the editorial office should have checked the facts. Probably.
DISAPPEARING GIRLS
Strangely often, bizarre stories are linked to the girlfriends of young men. But not the other way around – girls do not tell such things about young men. These are male stories. They are plentiful online, and while anyone can fabricate something there, similar incidents have occurred even among my acquaintances, so it’s worth paying attention.
The stories are twofold.
Either a young man remembers that he once interacted with a certain girl, but no one else recalls it. Or, conversely, everyone asks, “Where’s your girlfriend?” and the man has no idea what they’re talking about. Statistics (though what kind of statistics) suggest that the distribution of situations is roughly equal.
It’s hardly worth detailing specific examples; they are typical. Something like:
- How’s your new girlfriend?
- What girlfriend?
Whether such stories relate to parallel universes, we do not know (and we do not know whether everything described in this article relates to them). It’s tempting to assume that a girlfriend, having flashed by on one twist of space-time, drops out of reality while memories remain. But tempting does not mean truthful.
Why such cases do not happen with women is a big question. Perhaps they do happen, but they don’t talk about it, feeling embarrassed. It’s a disgrace to forget your man. So, they must be promiscuous. Or perhaps some young men view relationships more simply (which we condemn) and genuinely forget who they hung out with for a week or two.
PARANORMAL TOURISM
And this one is not from the internet: this story was told to me by acquaintances; it happened to them personally, and I have no reason not to believe them.
So, it was a weekend, and a husband and wife were rushing to catch a train for a day trip. The train brought them to Tula: the Kremlin, samovars, gingerbread. At the Kremlin, the couple briefly met another married couple, who had also come to admire the ancient city but planned to stay overnight.
The interaction was neither long nor short. They walked through the museum halls together, exchanged ideas on where to grab a bite, and then parted ways.
As the day was drawing to a close, our friends realized it was time to head for the train. They found themselves at the station just as a train from Moscow