Multiplication of beings

When my kids were little and required a watchful eye, I would sometimes have dreams that duplicates of them would appear. So for instance, I'd dream I'd just helped the ninja girl into the car, but here is another ninja girl. It was bewildering. It wasn't a case of one being a fraud, or of my somehow overlooking that they were twins; it was just pure duplication. It was like when you add a stitch accidentally in knitting. There was just one of her, but now there are two of her. Occasionally I'd have dreams with further multiplication. It seemed wrong, but there was nothing to be done about it. Certainly I couldn't just ignore or neglect the duplicates--it wasn't their fault there was this hiccup in reality.

Not the ninja girl. Source


You know how, in film, a series of still shots are run in succession, and so you see motion? If a person is walking across the street, each still shows them a little further along--but it's the same person, just one person, and when we watch the film, that's what we see: one person walking across the street.

If I were to imagine an explanation for my dream experience, it would be that versions of the ninja girl from very near, but distinct, points in time somehow got detached from their place in time, as if a person in a film still could climb off the film and wander into another still, somehow while the film is running (and then from then on I guess the film compensates by having the duplicate in all the subsequent stills? I'm getting tangled up in an analogy that's imperfect.)

In the dreams, the extras usually disappeared eventually, which was a relief. I don't know how to work that into the film analogy--it's more like double vision that clears if you blink hard.

I thought of it just now because I was snuggling with our cat, and I thought I heard him calling from outside the door. I'm always alert for when reality might start to behave like a dream.

ETA: Maybe I'll write a story with this in it....