Here’s a weird experience I had some years back. I wonder if others would have had a different train of thought.
Our Allen Center lab is on the third floor, and right across the hallway from it is a conference room where we often have meetings. One day, we were having a meeting. It was a long one, several hours, and very intense, with a few folks from outside our group. I had been more tired than usual going in anyway, and pretty drained by the end. I was gathering my laptop and papers and was the last one out of the door. Everyone had gone by the time I got up and went out of the room.
I did what I always do after those meetings, which is walk across the hall and swipe my ID card to get into the lab, all on autopilot, while still thinking of the problems we had been discussing. Or, rather, that’s what I tried to do. What I realized, to my complete befuddlement is that there was no swipe reader. In fact, there was no door at all. Where the entrance to my lab used to be, was a totally blank wall. No Allen Center sign, no door, nothing – just smooth white wall. I stood there, running my hands up and down the wall, to make sure. I paced back and forth a bit, hoping the perspective change would un-glitch the universe – nope, no dice.
I better explain right now that this was not actually a paranormal situation (nor was I on any kind of exogenous psychedelic). What happened was that, counter to the hundreds of times we’ve done it in the past, we had had this meeting on the 2nd floor instead. Right before it started, someone had grabbed me and led me down to the 2nd floor conference room while talking about something intriguing, and I managed to forget all about this slight but crucial change of venue. The problem is that the 2nd floor is just like the third, in almost all ways: same layout, same furniture, same conference room, same whiteboards on the same walls. The only difference is – where my lab is located, the 2nd floor had shell space which was walled off at the time.
The whole episode lasted probably about 20-30 seconds total, but it was long enough that I had a long train of thought, which I carefully dissected later (after my cortisol had stabilized) because I thought it was interesting. It went something like this. First, wtf is going on – where’s the lab? Then: ok there’s no lab, that much is clear, let’s move on from that basis. Now, I’ve read enough science fiction about people ending up in some parallel timeline that this wasn’t “impossible”, in the largest sense of impossible, but it certainly had implications. If there was no lab here, a) is it somewhere else, or b) was there really never any Levin lab at all?! If (a), how do I find it?! I supposed I could call the university main number and pretend to be an outsider needing directions to the Levin lab. Finding it, even elsewhere, ought to at least close the gap a little.
But what if it’s worse than that – if option (b) is the situation, then where do I go next – what do I actually do here, if there’s no lab? A quick glance at my Macbook laptop, and the obvious realization that this building is only a few years old, dispelled my first guess that I’m still an undergrad at Tufts and the last 30+ years have been a dream. No, definitely it’s not still 1990. But if it was, I think I’d have adjusted pretty quickly. It was weird, but not to the point that I was going to freak out and grab anyone by the lapels while babbling incoherently, and end up arrested. I’m pretty sure I’d make a few careful probes into what the current deal was and then just get on with the climb (perhaps wondering if any of the 30 years’ worth of information from my career “dream”, which I could remember vividly, would actually be useful this time around and perhaps save me some headaches and dead ends).
But that train of thought reminded me of how tenuous the grip on a specific life story really is; I really was pretty prepared to find out that it had all been a dream. Actually, a few times a month, it hits me anyway – I step back, mentally, and just pause in complete wonder at my incredible good fortune. It’s easy for me to re-capture the feeling of being a fairly young kid, finding out for the first time what a scientist is supposed to do, and wondering – is it possible, that someday, I could actually do this? The improbable, wild, whole truth of it – the fact that there is a lab here, full of amazing people doing awesome things to answer questions that keep me up at night, doesn’t seem very real to me at all, much of the time.
So the whole life story was pretty plastic. But oddly, what wasn’t plastic, is the realization that I’m almost certainly late for something. That part must be so deeply carved into my brain by now that no amount of reality bending was able to touch it, and standing around not doing anything useful felt wrong. I still had this nagging anxiety that whatever the situation, I had better resolve it right quick and get to where-ever I was actually supposed to be. What to do?! And that’s when I found out who my Keeper of the Ground Truth is, at least in this engineering building: my good friend and long-time collaborator David Kaplan, who often visits me in this building. Because, that was my next thought: I’ll go see David and ask him what he thought of the world and my place in it. It never occurred to me for a minute that he may say “Who the devil are you?”. My mind had assumed, apparently, that whatever happened to me couldn’t have possibly affected our knowledge of each other. And that’s what broke the case wide open: as soon as I made a plan to go find him, I thought of the stairs and corridor I would have to take, and that’s when time started moving again, the representational geometry of my surroundings kicked in, and I realized DUH – I was on the 2nd floor…
That whole episode lasted no more than half a minute, but it felt like much longer. Going back over my thoughts later, it was interesting to see how such a weird scenario would play out and the thoughts that flowed during it. What would your thoughts be, in my place? Do you know?
“Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” — Lao Tzu
Images by GPT-4.
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