My Sister’s Smile from Infinity Miles

Dreams, dimensions, and delusions

My sister Sarah stands in my front yard in a long white sundress. It’s a hot summer day. She’s holding a smiling infant in her arms, her son. His wispy brown hair blows back from his forehead with the breeze that also flutters the hem of my sister’s dress. She’s looking into her baby’s eyes, and he’s smiling up at her, blinking to keep his eyes from drying out, entranced by his mother’s gaze. I can see both of their profiles.

Then Sarah turns to look at me. Her smile is natural, light, unmistakable. She has a way of pursing her lips together slightly, almost as if holding in her smile for a microsecond before it spreads wide and turns up at the corners. Her boy follows his mother’s gaze and turns to look at me as well. His little face erupts with joy as he sees me. He recognizes me, his jaw drops as he emits a happy giggle. My sister lifts her chin slightly as she tilts her head to the side, calling me over.

Then, I’m awake. I think. Lying in the dark.

My husband, Don, is snoring. His breath catches on an inhalation, he goes silent. Everything is silent. The usual white noise from the air conditioner, the humidifier, the fan, they’re all missing. I wonder if I’m still asleep. Don makes a snorting noise as he resumes his breathing. I reach out to check if he’s real. He is. I’m pretty sure. His skin is warm to the touch, I can feel his ribcage expanding and contracting, but it doesn’t seem right. This isn’t the reality I was just living.

I lie there, eyes closed, trying to return to that scene. It’s summer, it’s been hot. That checks. But the sunlight she stood in cast no shadows, only illumination. The breeze that animated the skirt of her dress, that played in her baby’s hair, it swayed no branches, did not caress my skin. I’m confused why it missed me. I look down at my arm to check for signs of sensation. I see no arm. I am not there.

I lie there. The darkness feels tangible, unfamiliar. There’s no muted starlit glow coming through the window. I wonder if the darkness is wrong, if it’s supposed to be light outside. If this is the dream.

I lie there, inspecting my memory, replaying the interaction with Sarah in my mind. She and her baby seemed suspended in time, absorbed in a moment of love. I felt like a clandestine observer, as if viewing them through a crystal ball from a million miles away, wishing I could be there with them, not just watching from afar. It was at that very instant that Sarah looked over her right shoulder, directly at me, as if my desire had called her attention. Only, as our eyes locked it was clear that she’d known I’d been there the whole time. That I was there with them. That she wanted me there. That she was smiling at me.

I close my eyes again, hoping to go back. I want to see my sister, my nephew. But, nothing. Not sleep. Not peace. Not certainty.

She was just here. Or I was there. And now she’s gone.

It was too real to be a dream. And this is too confusing to be reality.

I lie there next to Don. I think it was a dream. I think. But I’m not sure of anything.

Have you ever had one of those dreams that feels so real that you’re utterly confused when you wake up? That, however illogical, seamlessly integrated with your current reality in a way that seemed to challenge the very fabric of your understanding and existence? That wakes you up, but leaves you wondering if you’re awake at all, grasping for clarity as you weigh your dreamed experience against known facts from your life?

Fact 1: My sister, Sarah, died by suicide 7 years ago.

Implication: As I wake up from my dream, my mind has been wiped clean of information from this dimension. I can’t understand why it’s dark and why she’s not here because I don’t remember that it’s the middle of the night and I’m in bed and I’m supposed to be sleeping. I don’t remember that Sarah never had a child. And I don’t remember that she’s dead. I can’t derive meaning because I can’t reconcile facts.

Fact 2:¹ As discussed in an article by British Astrophysicist and popular science writer, John Gribbin, American Physicist Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Theory proposes that whenever a quantum event has more than one potential outcome, the universe splits to realize them all simultaneously.²

Implication: All this quantum universe branching means that in some simultaneous version(s) of reality, my sister didn’t kill herself. Indeed, there are (potentially) infinite simultaneous versions of her and my existence and our non-existence. And yours.

There are versions of my sister as a trophy wife, an astronaut, an artist, an actress, an archaeologist, a nobel laureate, and the happy, smiling, sunlit mother I saw in my dream. Plus innumerable and un-namable others. That also means there are versions of her living homeless, in an abusive relationship, as a drug-addict, or dead even sooner than in the reality I’ve (supposedly) experienced.

That also means there are infinite other versions in which she was never even born, and therefore also never died. Not by her own hand or by any other means.

And infinite others in which she was born and I wasn’t. It feels like it ought to not matter if she lives or dies in those, but it still does to the projected never-born me that this me can only imagine.

Fact 3: According to the Many Worlds Theory, every time the universe branches apart, the newly divided worlds (and the people in them) cannot share information or interact with each other, effectively forming a type of “parallel” universe(s).³

Implication: If the Many Worlds Theory is true (which apparently poses a rather fascinating conundrum because the very nature of these parallel splits makes it impossible for us to observe, prove, disprove, etc.), then the only reality that matters is the one we find ourselves in.

So, a dream is just a dream. And this time, a nice dream, a welcome change from the horror shows that sometimes dapple my nights. But it’s nothing more than my subconscious run amok in the wee hours.

It may be comforting to entertain the idea that some other version of my sister—who, to be clear, would not be my exact same sister—is living a version of her life in beautifully sharp contrast to the tumult and violent end of my sister in this reality. But it doesn’t materially change anything in the scope of what I can process, access, or experience in this world. Alas, The Many Worlds Theory reduces to a brain teaser. Fun enough to mull over: my satisfied sister in her sundress with her brown-haired baby boy. Quite mundane, actually, though deeply coveted. But, even if real, wholly inaccessible. So, ultimately irrelevant.

Fact 4: Gribbin’s piece also discusses the argument of British Physicist, David Deutsch, that a quantum super computer could potentially remember the fuzzy moment between universe splits that would qualify as being in both (or more) parallel universes at the same time, which implies the potential for split worlds to indeed be intertwined.

Implication: If this is theoretically possible for a quantum computer, maybe that means it’s also possible for us, albeit in our (yet unrealized in any reliable and explainable way) human version of such interference. Just because we haven’t figured out how something works yet doesn’t mean it’s impossible. So, I’m going out on a limb here. For shits and gigs. For consolation. For why not?

Maybe I did see my sister (or a version of her) in my “dream.” Maybe it wasn’t a dream at all, but an unlikely inter-universe accident in which we really did see each other for that moment. Good enough for me. Love it.

Maybe in her world, they’re a bit ahead of us in parallel universe straddling and can occasionally choose to intermingle with ours on purpose. Maybe my sister chose to come say hi, in her way, in the only way available to her, and I was just receptive enough or desperate enough or asleep enough for it to work. Even better.

Maybe we met up in a whole other parallel universe where people from different universes can rendez-vous. I held my nephew while my sister and I had a nice long talk and shared a delicious piece of cake and jokes and laughter and love and subtly pursed-lipped smiles and the warmth of some strange foreign sun. And the tradeoff for such visits is that you don’t get to remember, at least not all of it. I’d be cool with that too.

I don’t mind if it’s from an unexplainable blip in the universe or my wild imagination trying to help me compensate. I’m glad I got to see my sister. To see her alive, holding her child. And though it requires consciously ignoring the myriad other possible negative outcomes, if there’s a version of her that’s okay, I will cling to that.

I like dwelling on that moment, that image, that version of her there, smiling in the sun.

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Thank you, Chris, for the thoughtful feedback!

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1. It feels a bit wrong to declare a theory as “fact” but I’m just saying it’s a fact that there is a theory and I’m just exploring an idea here, so… let’s go with it

2. “The Many Worlds Theory, Explained” article by John Gribbin, PhD

3. This is also discussed in Gribbin’s article, but this video (among many others) also helped me try to wrap my mind around these concepts: “Why Parallel Universes are Probably Real”