Several times in my life, I’ve stepped out of a familiar restroom, usually at my place of employment, and experienced a moment of mild surprise and disorientation.  I wasn’t where I expected to be.  The surprise never lasted long.  I soon figured out that I had gone into the restroom on another floor.

The restroom on my floor was being cleaned, or the stalls were full when I needed one, or maybe I’d had a quick task to do on the other floor, and stopped into the restroom on the way back.  The exact cause varied, but I always remembered it shortly after stepping back into the world where the sights varied from one floor to the next.

The absent-mindedness necessary to have that little shock of surprise may not be common in humanity; my presence of mind may be abnormally low.  But I think it could happen to almost anyone if they were tired enough or distracted enough.  I never thought too much about it until I realized that an episode like this is a real-life example of dimensional travel.

A typical men’s restroom may look something like this:

There’s not a lot to look at, really, but it becomes familiar if you use it every day.  There are usually no arrows or axis labels (x, y, or z) along any of the corners, but I wanted a clearly-defined z-axis for the discussion below.  Now, if someone leaves a crumpled-up paper towel on the counter, you don’t think it’s another restroom.  If a crack develops in one tile, or a mirror gets replaced, or the chrome on a faucet gets dulled by harsh cleaners, you still don’t think it’s another restroom.  The familiarity of everything else keeps you grounded in the fact that it’s the same place.

Yet the difference in restrooms from one floor to the next is often no greater than this.  So, if you go to a restroom on a different floor, all you have to do is forget the trivial matter of how you got there, and your mind accepts it as the same familiar restroom you always go to — that is, if you’re as absent-minded as I am.

The figure to the right shows how a dimensional shift, a displacement along the Z-axis, can move you from one restroom to another.  Generally, you make that shift in a very roundabout manner, using stairs or an elevator.

Outside the world of the restroom, the absolute similarity between floors generally stops.  The floors have different purposes, different offices — perhaps even different companies.  The rest of the floor is remade according to the needs of the people who are working there.

But the needs of people going to the restroom don’t vary as much.  So, after the construction company runs the plumbing up the wall, from floor to floor, placing the stalls and urinals and sinks in the same place out of mere convenience, and buying the same fixtures at bulk rates, the tenants of the building tend not to bother changing these utilitarian rooms too much.

So we have a logical narrative to explain away our dimensional dilemma.  But sometimes I wonder what would happen if I walked into my familiar restroom, on my floor, and miraculously walked out of the restroom on another floor.  The shock would initially be greater than normal.  But then, I’m pretty sure I would convince myself that I had walked into the same restroom I’d walked out of.  Nothing else would make sense.  My mind would create the story, and it would become a memory.  By ruling the present, I would rule the past.

So, maybe this type of thing happens all the time.  How would we ever know?  A spontaneous shift up or down the virtical dimension might be expected, so I heard somewhere, every googolplex years or so.  That’s about 10⁹⁰ orders of magnitude greater than the most commonly accepted age of the universe — or, in more simple terms, a ridiculously long period of time.

But, of course, that’s counting on quantum jumps to transfer all of a person’s atoms, in exactly the same orientation, through close to three meters of vertical space.  If there’s another way for it to happen, I don’t know it.  And that’s why I’d convince myself I’d made the dimensional shift to a parallel restroom by conventional means, and then simply forgotten about it; and science tells me I’d very probably be right.

When people talk of parallel universes, whether in scientific speculation or in fiction, they’re generally talking about just such a dimensional shift — except they’ll pick a different axis, maybe a w-axis, to shift along.  This is much more difficult to put into a picture, and I won’t bother here.  Usually, parts of these parallel universes are very similar to ours (like the restroom), and parts are very different (like the rest of the floor).

Some would say that my example doesn’t quite qualify, since I used one of the restroom’s actual dimensions (represented by the z-axis) to shift along.  But, if you limit your universe to the thickness of one floor of a building, you end up with a universe that functions a lot like a two-dimensional universe, and I think you can still use that third dimension to shift along.

Besides, I never said that I had a real-life example of parallel universes.  I said it was a real-life example of dimensional travel.  That’s undeniable, I think.

Plus, with all the explanation I’ve done, I still have no proof that I’ve never been spontaneously shifted from one restroom to another — or even into a parallel universe.  Perhaps there are ways for that to happen that are more probable than random quantum shifts.

But, as I said before, I can never prove it either way.  And, in truth, I know I’m generally going to accept the simplest explanation, as occam’s razor dictates — So why even think about this?  Because life is more interesting for me if I do than if I don’t.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 7:14 AM and is filed under Steve Thinks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.