I've been letting my mind wander as I go on walks, for example, today, I was imagining a world with magic and multiple dimensions of time.
Thinking after the fact that some of this might have been better explained if I had waited until I were well enough rested to form better sentences. Also, if I had some visual aids.
and I'm trying to think of an imaginative scenario that helps explain how this sort of thing might work—i.e. feeling oneself to be simultaneously occupying different times, while moving around on basically the same physical course in life.
tell me what you think of this idea, Ellen—this thought experiment.
think of the world the way it is now, and then imagine an alternative in which one crucial event, something that shaped all subsequent history, happened at a different time. I'll be macabre (I've got "Seventh Seal" on my mind still) so I'll pick the Black Death as that crucial event. it was like an evolutionary bottleneck for Western civilization, but it might easily have happened at some other time than when it did. so let's say that the Black Death happened 250 years ahead of schedule, according to our notions of "the world the way it is now".
now it's possible that if the Black Death had happened 250 years earlier, then a host of later developments in Western society would also have happened about 250 years earlier—i.e. the earlier occurrence of the Black Death might have given Western society a powerful kick, prompting social and technological developments much earlier than what happened in our consensus timeline. now extend that alternate timeline forward to 2023, to our present day: wouldn't things be much different? further "advanced", maybe, by some measure of advancement. the timing of the Black Death would determine the pace of subsequent development.
hence you, at any given moment of the current form of the present, might be thought of as having a counterpart in a timeline where the Black Death happened 250 years "early" (relative to our timeline) and therefore your life in that timeline would probably be quite a bit different, and yet also very similar in a lot of ways because, in this thought experiment, only the timing of the Black Death has changed and nothing else so presumably society would still develop along much the same lines. conversely, there's some version of yourself from about 250 years ago in that alternate timeline—i.e. a version of yourself that's about 670 years onward from the time of the Black Death (for in our consensus timeline, we're about 670 years down the road from when the Black Death occurred in consensus history.) that past version of yourself in the alternate timeline might be eerily similar to the present version of yourself in the current timeline, because you're both about the same distance in time from when the Black Death changed all society.
or is that all just too confusing?
~Chara of Pnictogen
I think I understand. You're saying that the time a version of myself might live in a particular timeline would depend on when historical events take place?