The Loop

Had a dream last night about something that has careened around my unconscious since childhood. I call it 'the loop'. Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land, describes an alien race that sees humans as long caterpillars; they see time in longer durations than the simple snapshots we perceive. A human being, from birth to death, with all the human's movements in space-time is seen simultaneously and appears strung out like a long worm. Nietzsche believed that consciousness, or awareness, travels down this line and, at death, starts back at the beginning, like on a DVD. Nothing changes, it is merely replayed in our experience. Read Only, after the first recording. Awareness looping forever down the same track.

My loop dream is something like this. It tells me I wouldn't know if I had re-entered my life at an earlier, or a later time, and am playing a segment over and over. Each time going back to the situation I was in before as if it were now. The dream alludes to the possibility that if I even switched to another's life, and found myself in their time-line, with their memories and sense of self, I would play out experience without knowing any difference. With no experience of discontinuity.

Maybe the reason we don't remember any existence prior or beyond this one, is that we are retrieval mechanisms, a needle of a phonograph placed in a track to retrieve the experiences of a specific life-line. In which case, this thought may be a virus, something from the underground, that could derail the function that we are consigned too. Perhaps dreams hold the key to a life with purpose of our own.