Fair warning. There are spoilers, and there are lots of them. Also, depending on how much you understand (and accept), time travel, this theory will TOTALLY MESS WITH YOUR MIND. It has completely thrown the HelloGiggles office into a frenzy, and we’ve been debating this for an hour already, and will continue to for the rest of the day. You have been warned.

Let’s go ahead and cut right to the chase: Bran is back, and he is sorta traveling through time. He’s met up with the Three-Eyed Raven, who is going to teach him all sorts of cool stuff, and also taken him into ~visions~ of past events. In last week’s episode, “Oathbreaker,” we saw Bran travel back to the Tower of Joy, and we got SO CLOSE to seeing what’s happening inside (whispers: the birth of Jon Snow).

The biggest moment actually happens when Bran calls out to his father, a young Ned Stark, and it appears as if NED HEARS HIM. This is big. This suggests that Bran can actually communicate within these visions, and possibly, just maybe, influence/change events.

Image zoom HBO/Buzzfeed

Okay [deep breath], so now what happens if the Three-Eyed Raven is actually Bran FROM THE FUTURE, who’s trying to guide our young Bran now into influencing/changing events in the current timeline?

Redditor Obliviosso has posted a lengthy, and also pretty convincing, theory that breaks down this idea. The gist of it is this: Bran’s ~whispers~ are the reason the Mad King goes Mad, and “the Three-Eyed Raven is in fact an older version of Bran who just used his time travel abilities to try and fix the mistakes HE made in causing the Mad King from going Mad.”

Make sense? Okay, there’s more. Because with this theory, Bran is also considered to be immortal, and destined (maybe cursed) to relive the history and events in Westeros again and again. The Bran Stark we know and love is actually Bran the Builder, aka the FIRST Stark and the guy who built Winterfell AND the Wall, and time traveling Bran “decides to help them. He twangs around guiding Westreos into a peaceful civilization…he does this for a millennia, then witnesses his own birth.”

It’s then that Bran, “remembers the past/[future] and knows what he must do now. Once he witnesses himself being born, he decides to reach out via dreams to his younger self get to him to come to the cave…We always hear people warning Bran to not stay too long in the past, or it will consume you. What if it did consume him and the THREE EYED RAVEN is old Bran stuck in the past because he stayed ‘in it’ too long?”

The Three-Eyed Raven is simply trying to fix everything, and TIME TRAVEL. What’s really messing with our brain is how this time travel works, because can Bran actually go back and change the past? What happens when he goes back to the future? How many time-traveling Brans are actually out there, trying to see to it that Westeros lives in peace?

AND, is there any possibility that Future Bran could have Preset Bran travel back to that moment Jaime Lannister pushed him out the window, and have Baby Bran actually die, here by stopping many of the events that sets Game of Thrones into motion?

Image zoom HBO

Or is that not how this ~time travel~ is going to work for Bran? We still really don’t know what he can and can’t do in the visions, let alone if he can actually influence past events (think, Marty McFly).