Are mirrors gateways to other universes? The debate has raged throughout the ages and continues today with arguments about photons, energy vortices, and quantum entanglement. Do our conscious minds anchor us to this reality? Can that anchor slip? Can mirrors create a rift between worlds permitting eerie glimpses into parallel realities? Are there universes so different from our own that the merest hint of their existence is enough to drive you mad? Some researchers say the answer to all those questions is yes.
Virtual reality or dimensional split?
What is reality? Is it the perception of length and breadth, and height? Is it the ability to process a kaleidoscope of light waves and chaotic patterns into a tapestry of logical order?
Reality, in its most basic form, is always perceived as a construct. What we see is always in the past. The mind operates in the eternal now, but the universe around us is always in the rear view mirror and receding. Only the imagination can anticipate the future.
What we perceive as reality is only the tip of the iceberg
When you look at the stars, you see the past and some stars you see may not even exist anymore. The same holds true of what you hear, smell, touch, and even taste. Everything you sense is delayed while the mind operates at near light speed.
You can only see lightwaves the body are designed to see. You cannot see radio waves, or the ultraviolet that honeybees dance to in the meadows, or into other dimensions. You simply don’t have the senses to see many things that exist, so only see part of reality.
The world you see is upside-down and righted by your brain. Everything is seen in two-dimensions which is converted to a 3D illusion through the parallax of two separated organs called eyes.
According to theorists like Dr. Michio Kaku, you are interacting with parallel universes right now. On the Earth next door, just outside of your perception, an SUV might barrel through the space you’re sitting in, but its quantum strings vibrate at a slightly different rate so you are oblivious to its passage.
You don’t have the senses to perceive any of this.
Rifts can open. Things can fall through into our reality or fall from here to there, wherever there might be. People can fall through too.
Dimensional doorways may be a brief, turbulent vortex, or a more stable gateway that uses the properties of physical objects to bridge the gap between the vibrating strings of the quanta.
Physical objects like mirrors?
Mirrors and the occult
The occult’s fascination with mirrors goes back many centuries. Mirrors were used by soothsayers and the high priestesses of oracles as far back as the ancient days of Sumeria.
The Dream of the Red Chamber, an ancient Chinese novel, tells the story of a Taoist monk with magical abilities that creates a double-sided mirror that reflects the truth on one side and lies on the other.
The eerie sensation many feel when looking at their reflected image in a mirror, unblinkingly staring into their own eyes, no doubt helped fuel the fire of mystic powers attached to mirrors deemed to be magical.
Mirrors are claimed to reveal visions of the future, hell, demons, ghosts, and a veritable potpourri of paranormal powers. Mirrors have been used to cast spells, murder, surrepticiously spy upon rivals, and even travel through time. The practice of using a mirror as a paranormal tool is called scrying.
A famous work of fiction, Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, uses a mirror as a portal to another world where the intrepid heroine, Alice, becomes entwined in a new adventure after her first travel through the rabbit hole.
Seers, sorcerers, witches and warlocks all believe mirrors have special powers embedded within them that can be accessed with the right words or rituals.
Although their beliefs can certainly fire the imagination, and anecdotal incidents supporting the beliefs abound, sadly there’s no real evidence that proves any of it true.
Yet it’s true that myths and legends often have a core of truth within them, like a little nugget of glistening gold locked within a featureless rock.
Could there be a truth deep within the mystic belief that the very nature of a mirror, its unique physical construction, might lend itself to opening some gateway or portal to the multiverse?
Perhaps.
The room with a view
Famous American writer of dark and eerie tales, Edgar Allan Poe, abhorred mirrors. He found them to be unsettling and slightly evil.
In his story, The Philosophy of Furniture, he wrote: “Regarded apart from its reflection, the mirror presents a continuous, flat, colorless, unrelieved surface, a thing always and obviously unpleasant. Considered as a reflector, it is potent in producing a monstrous and odious uniformity: and the evil is here aggravated, not in merely direct proportion with the augmentation of its sources, but in a ratio constantly increasing. In fact, a room with four or five mirrors arranged at random, is, for all purposes of artistic show, a room of no shape at all. If we add to this evil, the attendant glitter upon glitter, we have a perfect farrago of discordant and displeasing effects.”
The ‘Hiding Mirror’
Things are said to hide inside mirrors. Images of past events may be contained in infinitely trapped light waves. Mirrors are also considered by some to be linked to the spirit world.
Haunted American Tours has compiled a list of things never to do with a mirror. Here’s some of their cautionary suggestions:
1. Never look into a mirror by candlelight, it may show you a very haunted version of your home.
2. If you stare into a mirror between two tall, white candles you might see the spirit of a loved one who’s passed away. And their soul is stuck in your mirror.
3. Always cover a haunted mirror during a thunderstorm because lightning will release the ghosts.
4. It is considered a bad omen to receive a mirror from a deceased person’s home as a present.
5. If someone sees their reflection in a mirror in a room where someone has recently died, they will die soon.
6. It’s said that if ghost wanders your home during the night a mirror can capture it.
That’s the ghostly side of mirrors. The scientific side may be even more fascinating.
Lawrence Krauss, formerly a Case Western Reserve University professor of physics now with Arizona State University, penned a fascinating book, “Hiding in the Mirror: the Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond.”
Krauss wonders if there’s another world in mirrors and if scientific discoveries over the past several hundred years are leading to the realization that mirrors might be windows to something else.
Still frame from motion picture ‘Into the Mirror 3’
His speculation caused some controversy, but is supported by an in-depth assessment of empircal sciences. AsPhysOrg.com notes, Krauss reviews “empirical science in the last two centuries, beginning with the discovery of the laws of electromagnetism that eventually would lead to larger questions about the link between time and space that Albert Einstein would solve in 1915 with his general relativity theory. The book continues through the remarkable discoveries associated with the nature of the subatomic world, including the discoveries of nearly exotic particles such as positrons, muons, neutrinos, and quarks that have led mankind to a new understanding of the four forces in nature, and to a clear appreciation that somehow gravity is fundamentally different than the other forces in a way that is still not understood.
“It is the attempt to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics that led scientists in the 1980s to explore string theory, with its possibility of extra dimensions.”
New discoveries tend to support many unknown worlds. And as Krauss said in an internal article about his book published by Case Western Reserve University, “Science does not operate in a vacuum. These ideas about extra dimension keep cropping up century after century, and it might be telling us something—if not about the natural world, then at least about the human mind.”
Mirrors in the madhouse
Related to the alleged phenomenae associated with mirrors are physical portals that stand alone. These are energy areas free of containment that exist in various places of the world. Called a spatial vortex or time vortex, believers of this phenomena claim that those within the field of the vortex can phase shift.
Examples of phase-shiftin (that’s also been associated with mirrors) is presented here by Burlington News. The photos are examples of people phase shifting.
Creator of the quantum computer and strong advocate of the multiverse theory, David Deutsch, employed a series of experiments with photons to prove that when passing through multiple slits, photons (even one photon) is blocked by a phase shift that cannot happen unless it is running head on into another dimension or reality.
Quantum mirrors may permit travel to other worlds
Proponents of multiverse mirrors use the photon argument to advance their contention that mirrors, at least some, could be gateways to other worlds.
Whether mirrors truly can whisk one away to another psychological, even physical reality, is debatable.
Until it’s resolved, however, I’m considering turning every one of my mirrors toward the wall.
Do mirrors contain other dimensions, infinite realities?