Picture yourself from afar, a distant person surfing the internet. Then zoom out, seeing yourself as a small dot on the face of a big dot orbiting a bright star. Zoom out more, remembering yourself as you were – focus on seeing yourself from even further, so the star becomes distant and the galaxy soon becomes a dot. Further still, while the local super-cluster of galaxies shrinks, becoming a point of light, with you at the centre of it, slumped, reading, scratching your nose. Even further now, the structure of super-galactic filaments resolves and then recedes into the distance, a vast network of tendrils, pure energy, interfering with itself as the waves of potentiality fold and break on the shores of infinity.

You’re still zooming along, further away from home and things are very strange at this scale. Yet you know, deep down, that this almost unimaginable vastness is infinitesimally small compared to the the potential of infinity. As you are whooshing along with this really starting to sink in, you notice a familiar pattern in the whorls of condensed energy around you and you turn to see what you are heading towards – it looks like the place you have just left, so you zoom in. In, past the scintillating webs of galactic hyper-structure, closer to the wispy node that so resembles your own. Further in towards this twin of our milky way, our sister star and a pale blue dot that has your doppelganger at the centre of it, scratching their nose! And you’re here.

But, what, how? Yet.. wait. Something’s different. Your cup is on the other side of the keyboard. Why did you move it there? You’re distracted by this for a moment and then you realise: this is not you. You left yourself behind and have continued in a straight line for all this way. You have come far enough so that the complex variations in the structure of matter have started to repeat. You have flown out beyond the edge of your pattern and into the next, there was no transition, no boundary, just distance. Great, great, distance.

You decide to continue on, to find the next one, faster now as awe propels you – flashing forward to the next adjacent pattern to see the subtle difference in its expression. Some are so similar you can’t spot any change, some are inspiring, some are scary, while some are uncannily eerie and confusing, making you wonder if this could have been you with different luck or taking different choices.

You leap from one to the next, flash, flash, flash, seeing endless duplication, but consistent variation along a line that extends all the way back to your starting point. Home. So far away now, or so it seems. You wonder if you can ever find your way back. You almost feel like you never left. And then you realise that all of this, vast, glorious complexity has emerged from boundless potential, dividing itself infinitely with each sub-division further dividing and folding, like a new life emerging from a single cell.

This gives you an idea. You know that everything is relative, even space and time are just vectors in relationships between infinity and itself – the distances you covered are actually all within the same point and these alternate lives, the same, the different, the good the bad, they actually overlap. They are all your life, your reality, shifted by a single factor that of itself does not exist. You never left your room. Part of you made the journey, but it was the one part that is not constrained by the relationships and structure you just traversed.

You begin to see that there are an infinite number of versions of you living lives that you are exploring with your imagination. You are invited to the party, just pick a direction and keep going.