I’ve been disappointed at the dearth of dreams I’ve been having since I watched “Inception”. There are only two that I remember. The first one was fairly vague. All I remember is trying to hijack a Final Fantasy-style airship. The second one involved me and my ex from high school in an alternate timeline where we never broke up and we were supposed to go to a wedding that I first assumed was in Las Vegas, given all the casinos and hotels, and the fact that it was the middle of the desert. The only thing that was totally off was the fact that this dream city had a port, and I remember thinking in my dream “When did Las Vegas get a port?” The dream involved searching for a particular book in all of this dream city’s bookstores. Yeah, not very exciting.

The last dream was really something that started off as an idea in real life that sort of mutated in my sleep (and which I would turn into a short story if I had the time and the skill to do so—but since I don’t, I’m just going to write an outline of it here so I don’t forget it.)

It involves alternate timelines, unrequited love, and a fantastical intersection between quantum mechanics and oneirology.

Now, I’ve always been interested in alternate timelines, alternate histories, things that can never be. I’m trying to pinpoint exactly when the idea arrested my imagination, but I think it may very well be when I first played the Super NES game Chrono Trigger, which, as the name might suggest, involves time travel.

If you’ve ever watched any time travel science fiction whatsoever, the idea of an alternate timeline is probably very familiar and even mind-numbingly cliché. Now that I really think about, the first time I must have encountered the idea was from the “Back to the Future” movies. The idea is really just an extrapolation of causality. If you change something in the past, you will necessarily change the present and the future. So now you’ve got two timelines—the original pristine timeline, and the altered timeline. Multiply this by the number of choices and degrees of freedom at every single moment in the universe, and you’ve basically created a multiverse, consisting of all the possible alternate timelines dependent on every possible branch point at every moment.

The thing that really blows my mind is that this is actually a totally valid interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Since there are an infinite number of alternate timelines, it basically follows that everything that you can think of that doesn’t violate the laws of physics will happen at least once in at least one alternate timeline. This is where I get disgustingly pathetic. Sometimes, when I’m lying alone in bed feeling sorry for myself, I console myself with the knowledge that on some alternate timeline, there is a version of me that managed to find his soulmate and is currently living happily ever after.

Which leads me to the nucleus of the story that took shape in my mind. I even already have a title for it. “A Never Event” (which is actually medicolegal terminology about something else entirely.)

So some indeterminate time in the future, people regularly manipulate their dreams the way you can manipulate characters in The Sims (yeah, I’ve been playing The Sims 3 way too much lately.) You have no control over what dreams arise or who ends up in your dreams, but you do have some limited ability to suggest that characters in your dreams do certain things.

Where it gets weird is that someone proves that dreams are really manifestations of alternate timelines, and soon an industry develops so that you can attune your dreams to view various alternate timelines that feature yourself.

Which leads to the protagonist searching the multiverse for that exact timeline where he does manage to find his soulmate and live happily ever after.

The thing is, he can never find it. It’s as if it doesn’t exist. That in all the infinite multitudes of alternate timelines, it actually never happens.

It’s sort of a soft science fiction version of Groundhog Day, except the guy never gets the girl.

OK, so it’s a really lame story, but maybe if I knew how to write, I could actually flesh it out into something interesting. Or not.