Part 1 of my book
“Time, extraordinary and unexplainable. Simple, yet portrayed as complex beyond the thought of humans, or anyone else as a matter of fact. Many have tried but none have come close; that is, after a while they stopped calling them scientists. They became philosophers. I too am a great philosopher, but I also believe in science. Although the two were meant to be separate, they have been edging closer together ever since there became a distinction between philosophers and scientists.
“The ultimate question on every philosopher's mind of course is the question of time. No one has ever questioned its existence or its validity, but its identity has always been questioned. Some want to know what time is, others want to know if time can be changed, while others want to know if time can be used. Many have tried to come up with a view of time that would explain any one of these questions, but I want to present a universal theory, a theory that not only answers these questions but also numerous other ones. Is time truly unbreakable, unbendable, or untouchable? Does time flow like a river or does it stop and rest? Could time be portrayed in any way?
“My theory begins with a hotel, which has an infinite amount of rooms in it. All the rooms look the same: they have transparent walls, transparent ceilings, and transparent floors. Every other room in this hotel can be seen into from any other. None of the rooms is occupied with anything but people. There are no chairs, no sofas, no television sets, nothing. Just the people that are living in these rooms. Everyone chooses whichever room they are most comfortable in and they make this choice subconsciously. But how can these people choose the most comfortable room if all the rooms look the same? Well all the rooms may look the same, but they feel different. Every room is different inside because the time inside each room is different. Most humans choose the same room and they choose it because they feel the most contentment in a room which has 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. In this room, each day is the same as the one before it and the one that will come after it. Every morning after waking up, time is moving at the same rate it was at moving in the evening before going to sleep.
“A more interesting part of the theory is about the time people are asleep. We loose track of time when we are asleep. A typical question after a good nap is, ‘How long was I asleep?’ This is a very interesting phenomenon because while we are sleeping our consciousness is slowly walking away from our 60-second room. Our consciousness is free to roam the hotel until it finds the most inviting room for the mind to rest in. Some people move to rooms where the time passes faster, that way they can stay in that room longer because our 60-second room is slower. They wake up later in the faster room and then when they move back to the slower room they wake up just in time to get to work, since a minute in the slower room can be an hour in the faster one. Others are very eager and want to begin their day early; they move to a slower room, so that their consciousness will sleep less. The most important thing to remember is that we go to sleep in the first place so that our bodies can rest. Because of this our consciousness moves to different rooms in the "time" hotel. If our bodies didn't need sleep, we would just stay in our 60-second room and continue living our happy lives without ever concerning ourselves with time. After all, time is an arbitrary idea.
“Who is it that invented the notion of time anyway? Who was it that made everyone think that time functions in seconds, which turn into minutes, which turn into hours, which turn into days, which turn into weeks, which turn into months, which finally turn into years? Why did people not question that categorization? Do we even need to categorize something that is as simple as time? Children are born with an understanding of time, just like they are born with an understanding of any other dimension. Time was conceived by observing the movements of heavenly bodies, such as the sun. It was observed that every day was 24 hours; a year, 365 days. What about those living on a distant planet. Their "days" are no longer days, their "year" no longer a year. In fact, quantifying our life on Earth is also wrong. It may be the twenty-first century in our room. There is a room in this "time" hotel where time passes faster than in our room; there it could be the thirty-first century. The idea of a quantity of time is as ridiculous as an idea from quantum mechanics, but we accept them both. For us time is not a question, nor an idea. For us time is a reality. But it is only a reality to us because we have never seen the other rooms.
“Imagine what it would be to live in another room of this grand hotel, where our boring, long day turns out to be only a second shorter.(I must stick with our incomprehensive quantification so that the concept will be easier to grasp.) Well, it isn't too difficult to picture. Just imagine waking up a second later than usual, everyday, and then doing the same amount of work that would have been done if that one second was not gone. If we always lived in that room then we would consider it normal, but when we move there from our 60-second room it feels different. Not much different because it is just one second. Everything would be happening faster than it did in our 60-second room because everything must happen there in 86,399 seconds instead of the 86,400 seconds in our usual day. But, here is a devastating fact. Our imagination is very limited and cannot realize many things. We can easily picture a room that is one second shorter, but what if every day was shorter by four hours; every hour shorter by ten minutes, every minute by 10 seconds? Even this picture can be imagine after we think about it for a long time. But, let us not stop there, let us reduce our imaginary day to only one second!
“Now that we have addressed the issue of what other rooms are like, I think that it is important to ponder how these rooms will work. We are comprised of a body and a consciousness, two opposite things. Our consciousness moves around in the hotel and our bodies move around the world. The mind leaves us, the body, in the room that is so familiar to us, but what do other rooms look like? How does the mind get there? Well the mind is like another body, except it lives in imagination. What we see as reality is only imagination for our mind. What we think is imagination, is the reality that the mind lives in. The reason why neither enters the realm of the other is because they cannot see each other. As we do not see the time around us, the consciousness does not see our reality. Also, since the body stay’s in a room that is our reality, the consciousness wants to leave that room. When the reality leaves, it is important to understand what our imagination, or its reality is like. The "time" hotel has rooms built so that each is seen from every other and so are the people living in these rooms. There is only one problem, our mind sees those people at relative speeds. Imagine a strip of invisible land, in a space, where nothing can be seen except a car. That car drives past you at 60 miles per hour, both you and the driver see each other. From your perspective the driver seems to be moving very fast while passing you. From the perspective of the driver, you are moving very quickly past him. If you start running after the driver at 60 miles per hour, then the driver isn't moving away from you, anymore. In those rooms it is just the same. The people that live in a room where there is only one second in a day, will not be able to see us because they move too swiftly past us, while we will not be able to see them because we are going so much slower. Interestingly enough, our body moves at the same speed that our mind moves at. If our mind goes to a room where the whole day is compressed into one second, then the body must start moving much faster.
“Only during the day can our bodies move around the world, while our consciousness only roams the "time" hotel during the night. But while our bodies are roaming around the world, our consciousness does not just sit all day in a room. For the day to pass, our consciousness must also do something. Our consciousness decides when our day will end and that is why sometimes we don't want to go to sleep, and at other times we can't keep our eyes open. Our consciousness must cross the room we are located in and exit it. That is why we go to sleep. When we sleep the consciousness roams the "time" hotel to find a more pleasant room, so when we are awake that consciousness is trying to escape the room that is does not find as welcoming. It is walking across our 60-second room while we are walking the Earth. It moves across our room until it finally escapes and we go to sleep. The only reason it comes back, is because the body has a certain amount of control over the mind. The body pulls the mind back from the endless rows of rooms in the hotel. When the body is no longer able to control the mind, the person sleeps forever and never again wakes up.
