“You can’t travel faster than the speed of light. Period. You can’t even get close. The energy requirements are too huge. And the mass associated would create an increasingly powerful gravitational field that would be inescapable,” Thomas was worked up now. He was the grounded one in the small group. “It would create a singularity.”

Image Credit: Heinrich Jacob

“Not in this dimension, sure, but sub-dimensionally, there’s a possibility,” Charlie replied, right on cue.

“Oh, yes, if we could slice up the universe like a pizza and swallow up a New York style wedge, we could close distances in a fraction of the time. Or maybe a Leprechaun will let us borrow his rainbow and we can slide on over to Alpha Centauri. That’s just dumb,” Thomas sneered.

“It’s not dumb, it’s just thinking outside our four-dimensional box. If information is at all physical, and ideas are composed of information and our ideas don’t behave the laws of the universe, then they don’t exist. At least not in the ways that we think they do. Our brains are just calculators of probability that see the world in the most probable way. Yet we can experience improbability by virtue of imagination or dreams. And if we can experience it, than it is so. Therefore, if we can imagine faster than light travel, then we’ve accomplished it,” Charlie said with glowing obstinacy.

“Sure, you can fly from time to time in your dreams, but you never, ever travel close to the speed of light. It simply can’t happen. Even if all the other crap you spouted were true –which it is not –you still can’t travel the speed of light,” Thomas was sincere now and not really heated like before.

“What do you think, Mike?” Charlie asked.

“I’ve always thought that the speed of light was God’s special speed. I think light is his thinking speed. If we ever get close to traveling that fast, it would mean we are close to all-powerful. Certainly He wrote the rule so that He would never be usurped. So it’s impossible,” Mike declared.

Charlie nodded his assent. He may or may not have agreed as he liked to think that anything was possible, but he appreciated the silly metaphorical answers Mike always gave. Thomas likewise remained in quiet contemplation and nodded his approval. Thomas believed in no God and didn’t always appreciate Mike’s sarcasm, but Thomas was more interested in the correct answer than the semantics of the argument. In this case, the message was the same: the speed of light was fixed and alone. It could not be broken.

When Mike got home, he couldn’t stop thinking about their discussion. He still deliberated on all of the possible ways in which something could travel faster than light. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Mike had thought about it all through dinner. He took out the garbage, finished the laundry and flipped the channels on the TV. None of it he really noticed. It was just like his drive home. He was so lost in thought that he was not exactly sure how he managed to land in his driveway. All this transpired without him being aware of the passage of time.

Then it hit him. He had experienced time dilation, or something resembling it.

Of course, he thought. By concentrating awareness on just a single thing, the thought on the subject speeds up. Time is quicker when fixated.

Time flies when you’re having fun, he realized.

Mike was sure that’s how Newton was able to slave away for days on end. His focus was so exacting that he didn’t perceive time in the same way that those on the outside had. Newton was able to concentrate in the same way people are able to sleep. Eight hours in the night passes in an instant.

Unless you’re dreaming, he considered.

In that case, you become aware of not a single thing, but multiple things at a time. A broader awareness of information slows the outside world down. That is, the more you anticipate, the more you think, the more information that is gathered, the slower things seem to go.

“Holy crap,” Mike said aloud.

It all made perfect sense to him. He suddenly remembered when he was younger he was in the top floor of a burning house. Fear gripped him hard. He felt his pulse race and his breathing quickened and deepened. His eyes grew wide and his ears grew sharp. As soon as he saw the flames and smoke burst, he leaped high from a seated position and raced like a flash out of the room. Every movement was smooth, in slow-motion. Nothing went unnoticed to him as he hurried down the hallway. He leaped over the staircase, flew really, and slowly and softly landed on the floor. Mike had turned around and back and noticed every little thing there was to see and hear and smell. He was out of the door before the super-heated air could mix with the oxygen downstairs and inflame the rest of the home.

Mike remembered how slow everything had felt. It felt just like a dream to him. And like a dream, it felt like an eternity. However, as short as a dream truly is, he was out of the house in seconds. It was the athletic equivalent to the “zone.”

Mike shuddered from the eeriness of the truth. He tried hard to rationalize the falsity of the idea, but he couldn’t. All of the examples that came to mind only affirmed his previous notion. Objective time, he concluded, was directly proportional to the speed of thought. The quicker the thought, the quicker the time moved. The slower the thought, the more slowly the time was spent.

Information was really the key factor here. More information weighed the thought down, slowed it down to affect how one perceives the outside world. Less information allowed thought to travel faster, or caused thought to travel faster, rather.

Since Mike was already contemplating thought, he considered his findings in terms of intelligence. He decided that those traditionally considered “smart” were usually described as, quick, informed, and contemplative. He understood shortly after, that they must actually think more slowly, paradoxically enough. Of course, this is the personal experience of slow. Objectively, very small amounts of time would have passed. Outside observers would consider that the findings of a “smart” person had come rather fast.

Mike shook his head and soon realized he had lost himself in thought again. He immediately measured his lost time. When he peered at the large clock on the wall he was surprised to find that hardly any time had passed at all.

I suppose that makes sense, he thought. Yet this line of thinking was still counter-intuitive to him. He had to remind himself over and over again that the faster you move thought, the faster objective time passes. The slower thought moves, or the more information considered, he decided, the slower objective time passes.

So, if I can focus on a single thought hard enough, maybe I can move it at a velocity approaching light? He wondered. But how would I accomplish this? Maybe sleep is the natural terminal velocity of thought, so to speak? Dreaming slows down the process below the normal conscious experience, however. It’s worse than being awake. And lucid dreaming is the worst of all. What does this mean?

I have to be asleep, yet awake. I must be conscious, but not lucid, he predicted. This is going to take some practice.

Mike took to it immediately. He sat in lotus position on the floor in the middle of the living room. It took him a long time to adjust just right so that he was actually comfortable. At first, he was too excited about the idea to clear his mind. Once he was able to do so, he began noticing all of the noises in the surrounding apartments. As soon as he was able to tune them out, he was uncomfortable in his position.

Time and time again he shifted, went from lying down to sitting, to even standing at one point. Several hours passed and the experience was excruciating. Mike was determined, though. He pledged not to quit until he was able to have a genuine experience of time dilation.

While lying down once, due to his extreme mental fatigue, he fell asleep. When he awoke, he realized he had only slept a few minutes but it had seemed so much longer because of his dreams. Mike was disappointed because although he had experienced the phenomenon he intended to, it had the opposite effect.

Mike sat in lotus again and concentrated on his breathing. He tried to control only his breath and let go of everything else. His eyes were lazy. They were not completely closed, but they were hardly open. He imagined himself running back and forth on a basketball court. He really tried hard to get the exactness of the experience down. He imagined the breeze on his face, the patter of his shoes on the wood floor, his hair bouncing up and down. He imagined himself going faster and faster until he was certain he couldn’t actually go that fast, and then he pushed faster.

Eventually, he concentrated harder and harder at the passing lines under foot. He imagined how the lines blurred beneath him then appeared to meld together. As he ran faster and faster, he was unable to distinguish the color separation of the lines from the floor itself.

Eventually, the surrounding environment appeared to stand still. However, the features of the background were nothing but a blend of color suspended in the space around him.

His eyes shot open and it took him a little while to adjust to the light. It felt like he had just woken up. Mike immediately looked at the clock and realized that only a few minutes had passed. Dejected he got up and stretched mightily.

Over the next several days and weeks, Mike followed this routine and spent an increasing amount of time perfecting it. In each session he was able to experience more and more “lost” time. Yet he was still dissatisfied with the lack of substantial results.

In the early morning hours, Mike prepared his cushion on the floor. He had noticed early in his attempts to propel thought that if his limbs were not in just the right position, they would either ache or fall asleep altogether. Also, his posture was important as sitting in the same position for hours on end pained his back. After several sessions, he was able to perfect the practice to the point that he could endure more than three hours in the same posture without moving.

Mike dug in for a long session. He went through the same running routine. However, it had evolved from the basketball court to a circular track to an open, rolling field, which was his meditative preference. He rather enjoyed the undulation from running over the valleys and peaks of the hills. Like waves on an emerald ocean, he bobbed up and down in what seemed a nearly circular motion.

Again, some time passed and his eyes inadvertently darted opened. His eyes were much more blurry than usual and his whole body was stiff and cramped. His head pounded and he nearly felt sick to his stomach.

I must be severely dehydrated, he decided.

He eased his legs straight and he laid his back and head down on the carpet. Mike’s mouth felt dry and his eyes still stung. It took several minutes before he was able to focus on anything. Minute after minute he glanced at the clock in attempt to accurately gauge the objective time. Finally, he was able to read it and was immediately disappointed in the results. A great sigh bellowed from his soul. Only several minutes had passed.

I’m through with this, he declared.

Mike slowly stood and simply stretched his aching muscles. He peered outside and realized that it was a little darker than he expected. He looked at the clock again. He was wrong. In just a moment he understood that it hadn’t been merely a few minutes; it had been 12 full hours later. No wonder he was in pain!

The realization of the event scared him a little. The painful headache did nothing to help either. Yet the idea that he was able to push thought towards light-speed, if only a fraction, excited him. He was stiff and sore but he felt good.

Mike ate heartily as he felt completely drained of energy. His head still ached, and he couldn’t seem to get enough water. Quite frankly, he felt as if he had been wandering in a desert for days.

While he showered he devised a method to catalogue his experiences. Wanting to stay as objective as possible, he considered asking for help from his friends. But he decided against it as he felt a little silly about the whole thing.

The plan he formulated was simple and probably a little unscientific because of the scale of the experiment. It was the best he could come up with, yet if many others followed suit, it could promote some compelling data.

Mike wrote a simple program for his computer that would set an alarm for a random period of time that was no less than 20 minutes in intervals and no longer than 4 hours. That way he has plenty of time to settle into the routine but it would guarantee that he didn’t miss too much time. Then, he would settle into his routine to speed up thought. When the audible alarm indicated and shook him from his trance, he would estimate his personal time, write it down, then measure the objective time.

Mike decided to lie down to complete his meditation as several hours in a seated position was would simply be uncomfortable. As soon as he recorded his hypothesis and his method, he started his experiment.

The random alarm generator worked like a charm. For several days, then weeks, he was compiling his data into a database and quickly saw trends. He dedicated every free second to his work. The downside was that he felt time around him bending in such a way that others accomplished much more work in much smaller intervals of time. At least, time as he experienced it. He felt the world pass him by. But he stopped and realized that he was wrong. It was him who was passing the world by and not the other way around. At this rate, if his body actually accompanied him on his travels, he would remain young while the rest of the world would age.

Months passed and Mike was recording an extraordinary amount of good data. The sacrifice of friends and family was bearing down on him however and he decided that tonight would be his final trip.

He prepared the bed and the alarm for the last go-around. Excitation flowed through his body as he was overjoyed to finally share his findings with Charlie and Thomas. Anxiety also flooded his head as he was afraid he would not be able to calm himself down to complete the session. And there was concern with how his research would be perceived by his friends.

Air moved in and out of his lungs slowly, he turned the light off and opened the blinds to let the light in, then lied down on the mattress. Within seconds, he was running the open fields; bounding up and down through the rolling hills. In his mind, he was no longer a man and his perspective was not third-person. Rather, he was a single point and his perspective was his own.

Like in the basketball court, his speed dictated that everything around him appeared to stand still and blur into a wonderful smear of natural color. Blues covered the top of the canvas and greens covered the bottom. He lingered here for an eternity.

After days of not hearing from their friend, Charlie and Thomas decided to stop by and check on Mike. Mike’s apartment was keyless and both had the code. They used it when no one answered the door. The apartment was empty and dark. The display from the digital box was the only light available for them to see. It continually blinked 12:00. Thomas turned on the lights.

After repeated calls the two searched every room. It wasn’t long before they saw Mike lying on the mattress in the computer room. They tried in vain to awake him. After several aggressive but failed attempts, they called for emergency services.

Mike was taken to a hospital where he continued in his coma with a feeding tube, an I.V., and many monitors. The doctors did not have an explanation for anyone right away. For all practical purposes, Mike was seemingly healthy. Or at least he should have been.

Mike remained in the coma for years and years. There were fewer signs of aging on his skin as he had no contact with the sun. But his graying hair was a dead giveaway. His unique condition brought all of the brightest minds from all over the country to study his case. No one had an explanation.

A lifetime passed and Mike’s body eventually stopped. His matter was moved to a grave in a nearby plot and only a short time later, he was forgotten. But that singular point that was Mike in his travels continued to glide seamlessly over the valleys and hills of that perfect prairie.

Years and years passed and the matter that was once Mike’s body broke down and decomposed. After decades, maybe centuries, that matter began to coalesce again. Atoms at a time, at first, but soon, whole molecules eased their way to the center. Slowly, the molecules pressed more tightly together. Several millennia passed before the density of matter was great enough to overcome its repulsive forces.

Mike continued to enjoy the meadow. It was easier for him now to see the trees and their leaves. Soon, each blade of grass was distinct from others. Once again, his limbs were visible. He no longer had to run. He could enjoy the warm sun and the cool breeze.

All the while, the universe would bend and twist until all the stars and all the forms of the galaxy swirled around where Mike’s body lay.