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During the fall of 2018, I experienced something strange. I lay in bed, wide awake, unable to sleep due to a trapped nerve in my shoulder. At precisely five in the morning, I heard phantom footsteps on the stairs the same eerie sounds that many of my visitors had often reported. Once the event passed, I remained alert, my mind alive with thought.

It was one of those peculiar moments when my thoughts seemed to drift not under my conscious control, but guided by another force. It felt like a blend of daydreaming’s lightness and the intensity of receiving an explanation from my subconscious, my higher self, or perhaps something beyond me.

I’m not one for "airy-fairy" ideas; I’m practical and approach most things with logic. Yet, I cannot deny that, at times, my consciousness seems to tap into something beyond the usual a higher level of awareness. Words form, not just in my mind but also as audible sounds I can hear, as if the information is being communicated both internally and externally.

What I saw or thought, I’m still undecided was vivid and unsettling. It played out in my mind yet felt tangible, as though I both thought it and heard it, resonating within my ears.

For years, I had assumed the footsteps were residual an echo from the past, replaying like a recording. It made sense. But in this moment of heightened awareness, I was told otherwise. It wasn’t residual; it was dimensional layers not stacked like an onion but existing side by side, parallel and intertwined.

Human beings, I realized, live within these dimensions as real, breathing entities. Time flows simultaneously through multiple dimensions, and occasionally, those dimensions overlap. When this happens, a ripple effect occurs one dimension intrudes upon the next, spilling over like falling dominos. This phenomenon, I understood, could happen in either direction, affecting what we perceive as the past or future.

Reflecting on the footsteps from the previous night, I couldn’t help but wonder: were they echoes from a time before I was born? Could it have been Herbert, one of the spirits in my house, alive and going about his daily life perhaps rising early for work, investigating a noise, or nursing his ill wife? Were these sounds manifestations from an overlapping dimension, bleeding into my timeline?

The idea reminded me of an old vinyl record. A scratch on the surface causes the needle to jump, disrupting the music and replaying a fragment of it again and again. Could my presence, as I got out of bed to investigate, have caused a similar disturbance? Did I appear as a ghost to someone in another timeline the next "layer" of the onion? Did I frighten someone in the past or future, or was I merely hearing myself moving through the house in another dimension?

This raised even deeper questions. Do we exist across all time simultaneously, never truly dying? Are my loved ones, who have passed in this timeline, still alive and thriving in earlier or future dimensions? And if these timelines occasionally overlap, is that what gives rise to sightings of ghosts and apparitions? Could it be that what we call ghosts are not spirits of the dead but living beings from adjacent dimensions, glimpsed briefly through these overlaps?

Perhaps, in this way, time travel exists not in the conventional sense, but as fleeting interactions between people from overlapping timelines. For just a moment, those in the past, present, and future might encounter one another, mistaking these encounters as supernatural phenomena.

My thoughts spiraled around this notion, gaining clarity one moment and slipping away the next. The only conclusion I could reach was that dimensions or layers of time exist side by side. Occasionally, they collapse into one another, creating these anomalies. Yet, the universe seems to have an intrinsic mechanism to correct such disruptions, reestablishing order and restoring everything to its rightful place.

Layer upon layer, eternal and cyclical. Life, death, and rebirth, looping endlessly across dimensions. It’s a profound concept, one that feels both immense and elusive.

Even now, my mind wrestles with these ideas, dissecting them bit by bit. I sense there’s far more to uncover, and I know this is a subject that will occupy my thoughts for some time to come.

Irene Allen Block