I worried I was on a fool’s errand. The theories of lucid dreaming ran counter to my experience. So did much else of my experience. Conventional science had no explanation for being able to experience other people’s dreams or sensations. Even the occult couldn’t explain it. There was no way around it: This was going to require me to develop original theories, ones which only I could test, unless I found another dreamwalker, and they might be difficult for anyone else to accept. In all likelihood it would be my life’s work and even then I might not understand it. But I did find some areas to explore.

When I got far enough into physics I learned of one other theory that had any potential application, quantum theory. It is hard to get one’s head around quantum theory, and there are still lots of unanswered questions in this field. But among the key concepts is one that objective reality doesn’t actually work the way we think it does. Our reality emerges as the large-scale result of the interaction of massive numbers of tiny particles that behave according to different laws. These laws state that the properties and behavior of these particles are probabilistic, and rather than having fixed values, they can have a distribution of values with some probabilities. Even calling them particles isn’t quite right, because part of the theory is that particles and waves are the same thing, a thing which can behave like a particle in some circumstances and a wave otherwise.

The wave-particle duality is probably the oldest part of this theory, and it became recognized due to the double-slit experiment. To run this experiment, you need to have a particle emitter which emits particles with a consistent energy level. Early versions of the experiment called it an electron gun because sources which emitted electrons were most easily available. And you need to have a screen made of some material that the particles will not pass through, with two slits in the screen. Finally, you need to have a second screen which might be a photographic film, something that will show the locations where the particles impact it.

Each particle impacts the screen at a discrete location, as you would expect. The weird bit is the overall distribution of these locations. If they behaved like particles, you’d expect to see the impacts clustered at two locations behind the slits, but instead, you get a wave-like interference pattern, with alternating intervals of greater and lesser frequency of impact. You sometimes see this sort of pattern when light interacts with certain objects, like soap films. In this case, the pattern is similar to what you would get if two waves were being emitted from the slits.

But variations in the experiment show that it’s stranger than that. This interference happens even if the particles are emitted so infrequently that only one particle is in the air between the emitter and the film at one time. Therefore, each particle behaves like a wave, parts of it pass through both slits, and these parts interfere with each other, until the particle impacts the film, in a location whose probability varies according to this interference pattern.

And if you install detectors which can tell when a particle passes through each slit, then each particle passes through only one slit, and you get the expected pattern with just two clusters of impacts behind the slits. Observing the particle, seeing which slit it went through, forces it to go through only one slit and not interfere with itself the way it does when it is not observed!

Another bit of this is quantum entanglement. Two particles can become entangled, so that the properties of each particle are not known but some relationship between the values of the particles’ properties is known. Each is restricted to certain states in ways dependent on the state of the other particle. This entanglement persists, even when the particles move away from one another. When one particle’s property is measured, the other particle is instantaneously forced into a state consistent with the other particle. This happens faster than the speed of light, and has been verified by letting entangled particles get sufficiently far apart, then measuring both particles simultaneously, finding them always consistent when the measurements are later compared. Albert Einstein himself initially rejected this idea when it emerged from his work, saying such “spooky action at a distance” was impossible, but later accepted it was a real part of nature at the quantum level.

This quantum behavior persists even for masses composed of multiple particles, whole atoms, molecules, and small masses of molecules condensed together, but the probabilities of each individual particle in each mass combine, strengthening the most likely results and weakening the less likely ones. By the time you get up to grains large enough to see, each object has single values for each property with so small a likelihood of any other value that it’s not likely to be observed for any object ever over the entire history of the universe. And for everyday items of reasonable size, forget it! In other words, I can’t simply phase myself through small holes in the wall as a mass of waves because the probability of it working is too low, beyond low, so low that you could never write out all the zeroes before the first nonzero digit in your lifetime. And even if I did, it would be even more unlikely that I would reassemble myself on the other side.

But another of these quantum experiments was one called Schrodinger’s Box, or Schrodinger’s Cat. This was proposed as a thought experiment, not one that was meant to be carried out in real life; he wasn't into killing animals. The idea is that you have an opaque, soundproof box which you seal up. Inside the box is a sample of radioactive material, a detector like a Geiger counter to detect the emission of a particle associated with the radioactive decay, a vial of poison gas which a device connected to the detector will break open when it detects the particle, and a cat which is initially alive. The particle is in a quantum state of having decayed and having not decayed until the result of the experiment is observed. So the cat is in a quantum state of both dead and alive until the box is opened again and it is observed whether the cat is dead or alive. This observation forces the radioactive material to correspondingly have decayed or not decayed.

The point of Schrodinger’s Box is to ask the question: Could you break through the probability barrier by forcing a macroscopic object’s particles to align in the same quantum state? Nobody’s ever really succeeded, but they also haven’t ruled out the possibility that there might be a way to align all of an object’s quantum states in a way that you can teleport the object through a solid wall.

How this applied to me was that it was possible that something I was doing worked because of quantum effects, that I could somehow entangle my particles with those of someone somewhere else, even in another universe, and even align the quantum states of the particles in an object to teleport it across worlds along with my consciousness.

Other universes were also possible. The Big Bang Theory says that the universe expanded from a singularity 13 billion years in which the entire universe’s mass was condensed into a single point. But expanded into what? And where did the singularity come from? This is another area science cannot yet explain. There are several different ideas which remain merely conjectures, with no clear idea how to test any of them. These real-life conjectures include many ideas popular in science fiction, which drew its ideas by speculating about the ideas proposed as a part of real science.

In some of these ideas, our universe is but one of multiple universes within some larger space, which may have existed for unfathomable additional time before our universe. One view of free will is that the universe also expands in dimensions we cannot see as a result of decisions people make, each decision branching off a new universe which is immediately and permanently isolated from the universe in which that decision was not made or was made differently. But in such a multiverse, who’s to say that particles from our universe can’t remain entangled with ones from another universe? If this is true, and I’m somehow quantum entangled with everything, it might explain why I can access these alternate Earths as easily as my own.

All of these subjects gave me more than enough ideas to contemplate over my summers, weekends, overnights, and whenever.

---

I didn’t let all that completely control my life. I finally figured out my dating problem! It wasn’t that I wanted to be a guy, it was just that I liked girls. It doesn’t matter whether I’m myself or a guy. Once I figured out I could be a real-world lesbian, it wasn’t much trouble finding a date, though it was tough choosing!

During my senior year I decided to try to look among my pool of dating candidates for one who was also a dreamwalk candidate, based on her not having counterparts of herself or close family members on the other Earths. This meant looking for each of these people as a target for dreamwalking in that system in my head. And there was just one, Jenna, a sophomore. Conveniently that meant we’d graduate together, and by my 5th year we were dating regularly and I started spilling secrets to her that only a couple dozen other people on Earth knew. She didn’t think it was too weird, though early attempts to test her potential abilities didn’t go anywhere.

Jenna also admitted she was “a little bi.” So we agreed that if she wanted to date a guy now and then, it was OK, and I might do some virtual dating as a guy. She ended up only dating guys twice the rest of the time we were in college.

I finished my multiple degrees according to my planned schedule, and opted out of continuing into a doctorate to study the brain further, deciding from what I had learned that it wasn’t likely to help. I married Jenna, and was happy to move wherever she needed for her own career since I could set up my studies in any big city. Her self-sufficient income meant more of the funding Hiroshi’s inheritance had provided could be committed to scientific study of dreamwalking.

I had certain advantages over the other scientists who had to speculate about so many things. I knew for a fact that parallel universes existed, in such a way that contact between them, whether by particles entangled before they split or in some other way, was possible. I knew that the power of our collective minds had made other universes exist, somehow, in some sort of likewise reachable space. I knew that somehow, in some way likely related to entanglement, I was connected to essentially everyone on Earth, as well as those in the other universes. I knew that it was possible, at least for some people, to close off those connections so that other people could not use them.

I ran a lot of different experiments, and when it fit the experiment and she had time, Jenna was a sport and let me use her as a test subject. One of the first things, naturally, was that she played through beginner training in World of Dreams, but she was unable to do any of the exercises from her real body. We made no progress until an experiment I ran one night after we’d been out of college for a bit over two years.

The purpose of the experiment was supposed to be seeing whether I was more resistant to being awoken out of a dreamwalk while receiving sexual pleasure. The way I was doing it was taking over Jenna’s body, masturbating as best I could with her body, and at the same time pleasuring my own body. All the while, both bodies’ brainwaves were being recorded on an electroencephalogram, or EEG. In the midst of all this, my own body’s dreamwalk detection went off and that woke me up and pulled me out of the dreamwalk.

“Whoa! Someone dreamwalked!” I exclaimed.

Jenna, now back in control of her own body, raised one hand. “It was me, I think. Just for a moment I felt like I was in your body, looking back at myself..”

“Do you remember how you did it?”

Jenna didn’t. But I assembled the recorded video of our bodies synced up with the EEGs, and paused them at a certain point.

“Right here, Jenna, there’s a spike in your brain activity right before it all happened. What were you thinking right at this moment?”

“You brought my body to an orgasm, and I was thinking really intensely of you.”

“But do you remember what you did in response? Do you think you could do it again? And how could you do that at all through my shield?”

At first, Jenna couldn’t reproduce it on her own, but eventually we were able to reproduce the entire experiment, with everything again falling apart the moment it happened. I confirmed that my connection to Jenna was creating a hole through my shield that she could come back into me through, an important thing dreamwalkers should be aware of that does not seem to be in use within World of Dreams, probably because Hiroshi never had the opportunity to model it.

But that approach didn’t get us further in helping Jenna. To try something different, I dreamwalked into Jenna, and I was able to use her abilities from her body: shielding, dreamwalk detection, and even actual dreamwalking into other people, which had never worked for me when I dreamwalked into World of Dreams characters. That didn’t work before that time. Somehow, what we’d done had “woken up” Jenna’s real-life dreamwalk abilities. Between learning from what I did in her body and reviewing the earlier lessons from World of Dreams, Jenna learned to repeat them all from her real body. She even learned to dreamwalk into her game character the way I did.

So how many other people out there had latent dreamwalk abilities that needed a kind of awakening as I had done with Jenna? If they were going to need that level of awakening, they might never get it!

---

It took Jenna about 6 months of practice doing things in World of Dreams and doing the same things in real life to get to a point where she felt fully confident in her abilities. During this time I pondered several ideas for identifying more potential dreamwalk candidates. Most of these were based on identifying people who didn’t exist in any other worlds, since so far all of the people I had known that to be true about had been capable of dreamwalking, or were closely related to a dreamwalker.

There was the technique I had used to find Jenna, just looking through the directory in my mind of all the people of all the universes. This only worked for one person at a time, but I just had to mentally query for all the worlds that person existed in. I felt that this technique was fairly solid. I likely wouldn’t be able to detect the person if they were already shielding themselves, but this probably meant I wouldn’t find them at all, and then I’d know to contact that person another way. But I couldn’t do bulk detections this way. I could run “sets” of people, which basically amounted to procuring some list of people, taking the list into World of Dreams, studying the details I had about a person, disconnecting from my character there and looking for that person as a dreamwalk target across all the worlds, and then going back to World of Dreams to write down the results. I had managed to run about 3000 people this way, including our neighbors, Jenna’s co-workers, high-level players in World of Dreams, and other candidates I selected in other ways, and not one of them existed on fewer than 6 worlds, and only a handful existed on fewer than 10. It made me feel that finding Jenna among only a dozen or so candidates had been extremely lucky.

I had some other ideas for doing more bulk detections, but they all basically amounted to acquiring databases of all the people on all the worlds and trying to compare them. And the list of problems with this idea seemed endless. First was the problem that there were a lot of worlds. I went back to the people from my directory runs who were on the fewest worlds, and there wasn’t a lot of overlap. I probably needed to gather data from hundreds of worlds to avoid having a lot of false positives because I just didn’t have the data from the right worlds to match certain people.

Second was the problem of obtaining the data. Did Earth just leave its directory of all the people in the world sitting around where anybody could get hold of it? No! It didn’t even have one such directory. At a minimum I needed to go visit all the countries of the world, and even then it wasn’t typically possible to just download a database of identities. That data was kept secret in various ways.

Third was the problem of getting all the data together. Even assuming I could just get all the data onto a USB stick and bring it home with me, were all these worlds going to have compatible USB sticks? No, of course not. My best hope there was finding some fictional world where I could gather computers from all the worlds and find a way to get them to talk to one another.

Fourth was the problem of actually comparing the data. When I looked up a person, that person didn’t always have the same name on all the other worlds. Or the same address or other data. My mind figured it out, but just looking at a bunch of computer data, which might be in different formats from not only different worlds but different countries within each world, how was I supposed to match up the identities?

There were so many obstacles that a technological solution seemed impossible. So I also tried to consider magical solutions. But it was just as bad. The magical people I could dreamwalk into didn’t themselves have access to the worlds I wanted to check. Could I first check for dreamwalkers in those worlds, and then figure out how to combine the ability with magic? Maybe if I could first find a world where I could use magic to detect dreamwalkers on that world. That would already be a huge advance.

But while simple magic wasn’t too difficult to do in those worlds, this was far from simple magic. I probably needed the equivalent of another college education to learn enough magic to do something like that. For the longshot chance of maybe being able to detect other dreamwalkers in my world that way, it wasn’t worth it.

Since I was unable to figure any of this out, I still had only the one-by-one checking. And before long, Jenna was through with her training and confident in her ability to dreamwalk anywhere I could direct her. So we started dreamwalking together.

Pretty soon, these turned into dates, 7 nights a week, spread across dozens of different fictional worlds, as different characters every time. I still used my days to work on my theories, and an occasional night when Jenna and I would sit in our World of Dreams dorm and I would bounce ideas off of her.