From my dream came the understanding I needed to enable me to push some struggles aside.

I’d conceived that only Now is real. There is no other time. You can ‘travel’ to another time but it’s Now, then. When you ‘travel’ like this – I’m uncomfortable saying ‘travel’ because that implies a physical movement, but I use it here for convenience while working out what term best suits – you’re shifting awareness of Now, not ‘traveling’ anywhere.

Semantics? Perhaps to some, but with important consequences. There’s only true awareness of Now, with an understood and accepted version of past events. These are what was passed on as history. Whether they’re true is another matter.

The future is a concept of what will probably happen, given the various arrows of time engaged. Some of those arrows are more strongly attached and fixed. Still, the future isn’t not necessarily what will be experienced. Except, we do not know; our expectations shifted without our awareness so the future that we experience is naturally what was expected. This is partially a biological and neurological survival mechanism.

To help me cope with the story telling, I conceived of a pack of cards to describe the scenes of ‘Now’ that emerge from Chi-particle looping and entanglements. Cards of ‘Now’ are being shuffled and dealt; these are then experienced. Fine, that was working out well. But I kept trying to adhere to a logical and chronological story-telling process. Yet the cards didn’t support that. I was struggling to reconcile the two aspects. They seemed diametrically opposed. Through my dream, I discovered that I’d carried my card analogy too far.

I’d thought of the looping Chi-particles and the resulting Nows as a deck of cards. They were shuffled and dealt. I saw this as players being around a poker table. Each card was dealt sequentially, around the table. That’s how the story would be told.

That was so flawed. The cards of Now being dealt do not have this order, consistency, predictability or tidiness. Instead of people sitting around being dealt hands of poker, one is being dealt poker, another is receiving a gin rummy hand, a third is playing hearts, a fourth is dealing solitaire, and so on. Each is both player and dealer. In the next hand, the person playing poker is now playing spades, and so on, but they’re struggling with that shift. Some vividly know they were playing poker and expected to continue playing poker. They don’t understand why they’re now playing solitaire.

That is a large part of how the entanglements emerge. We have beliefs of who we are, what happened, and what will happen next. The entanglements skewer every aspect. This creates a complex matrix of possibilities and story arcs. It’s difficult keeping them straight and then telling them in such a way, without elaborate explanation to the reader, so the reader grasps what is happening while the characters can’t grasp fully grasp it — although emerging grasps of what’s happening are part of the story.

Okay, time to write like crazy, at least one more time.