You're driving. It's a beautiful and clear day. There's a relatively sharp corner coming up ahead. You notice a car driving toward you in their own lane. You're both going a safe speed and taking the corner safely, like normal. You imagine a head-on collision: What would that look like? What would happen if you died? The car passes just like they always do, and everything is fine like it always is. What if you drove too fast and rolled the car on that corner? What if this other car didn't wait for you to pass before turning left? What if you blew through that red light or stop sign? What if the transport truck in front of you on the highway blew a tire, lost control, and killed you in the process?
Have you ever had thoughts like this? I do. All the time. Especially if it's pouring rain, incredibly foggy, blizzard-ing, or if the road is icy. Have you ever noticed a massive shift in your life after an event that almost but didn't happen? Can't relate, but I do have deja-vu's alllllllll the time. (I feel like I should also point out I'm not suicidal nor do I have some weird obsession with death, this concept as a whole just fascinates me.)
We all (probably) know about the Mandela Effect (I took a quiz and my results were 50/50, meaning I haven't really been Mandela Effected too much), and this isn't really what I'm talking about. I don't actually know the term for what I mean (Quantum Immortality?), and it seems like not many people I know do either.
This article tells the story of a man who was out driving when out of nowhere was about to be hit head-on by another vehicle, and without any time to react he braced for impact. He opened his eyes after a couple seconds of silence, and the other vehicle was long behind him as if it never happened. There was no squealing, swerving, crashing, pain... it just didn't happen. He wrote it off because there was no explanation. He returned to work and everybody was suddenly hostile, but they used to all get along. He ended up quitting his job eventually because his boss and him never got along anymore, and his boss insisted some events that had happened pre-almost-accident had not actually happened. His boss also became a drunk within weeks of this "non-incident".
This is how this story ties into my little imagined what-if stories when I'm driving -- What if he died in the head-on collision and that altered his life (Mandela Effects, hello) in the universe he "woke up" in where the accident never happened? I also had to read that a couple times, sorry. He no longer exists in the previous 'timeline' of his life, but it doesn't affect him now. (Timeline? Realm? Universe? Dimension? Sub-time?). I think for the most part, you don't know how or when you're going to die. It's typically a random thing unless you're already really sick in some way. People die in their sleep... they don't know they're not going to wake up the next morning. In that reality, anyway. They die in this universe but in another one they wake up like any other day and might feel off, but they go on living their life. Consciousness doesn't know death, because consciousness isn't physical but our bodies are.
I don't know how true this is (I guess there's no way we can know?) but it makes sense to me. The Mandela Effect has been around for a while, first under the term 'False Memory', being researched by good ol' Sigmund Freud. But the 'Mandela Effect' term I think was coined in 2010 by Fiona Broome who thought Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, when in reality he died in 2013 after being president of South Africa from 1994-1999. The quantum immortality theory actually belongs to Hugh Everett, an American physicist who introduced the Many Worlds Interpretation theory (MWI), who died in 1982 in his 50's from a heart attack.
This entire concept is still really new to me, so I'm going to keep looking into it until I feel satisfied by what I know... but like... that could be never: How does this tie in with the idea of souls? The afterlife? Past lives? Reincarnation? Are people that don't know any Mandela Effects new souls, and therefore have not been in multiple parallel universes? Those who've seen the afterlife in near-death experiences (HELLO, MEDIUMS?), are they in their last lifetime physically AND consciously? I'm writing this at 5:45am at work... I'm here until 1pm. It's too early for my brain to hurt like this 😂
I could go on for forever... so if anyone finds anything that's interesting or will spark another internal spiral within me, PLEASE let me know! DM me or something. I live for this shit and find it incredibly fascinating. #WeLoveLearning ... Anyway, food for thought (you'll never starve at this point tbh).
xx,
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