Introduction

“I know I was born and I know that I’ll die. The in between is mine.”

—Eddie Vedder

The night my home team won the Superbowl (go Broncos!), someone broke into my home and shot me. Or rather, a version of them shot a version of me.

I’ll explain.

The logistics of my story are not uncommon. It was an attempted burglary gone wrong. I heard scratching at the back door and thought it was my cat, but when I opened it, right in front of me stood a kid in a hoodie. He was in the act of breaking into my home, and held a gun pointed directly at me. He fired a shot. I turned and ran back into the house, called the cops, and the whole thing ended with a bullet bouncing off my back. I’m lucky to be alive.

As anyone who has lived through a traumatic event knows, no matter how straightforward the facts are, the experience itself is never simple and the details rarely feel commonplace. But I believe there’s even more to it than that. In fact, I believe that each moment in time is much more than it appears to be. To explain, I want you to first understand what actually happened that night.

When I went to the door, still riding that post-Superbowl high, I was just worried about my cat. My cat had only ever been indoors, and one of my nightmares is that I will accidentally let him out and into danger. My fenced backyard has a pool, and beyond that is a park. So, when I heard an odd scratching at the sliding back door—one of those doors that can’t be opened or closed without a good amount of leverage—I didn’t think twice about the voice in my head telling me, Get up. You need to get up. I figured it was just the voice of concern for my cat speaking, and in the excitement of the evening, the cat must have somehow gotten out.

At the prompting of that inner voice, I shuffled over to the door, still half-listening to the recaps and news broadcasts singing the Broncos’ praise. When I looked up, I was stunned to see there was a gun in my face.

Now the voice told me, Shut the door, and again I listened. Everything seemed to slow down from there. I heaved the doubled-paned glass door shut and turned to run. A pop sounded as the .22 pistol unleashed a bullet that shattered both layers of glass. I could hear each layer of glass crack in slow motion. I let go and found a neutral place inside of me, as if I was observing it from afar. I ran without stopping to think about what direction I should run in. Somehow, I already knew.

I felt something bump against my back as I ran to my bedroom, and when I got there, I realized that I wasn’t alone. I was in the middle of a home invasion robbery, and someone else had come in through my bedroom.

He started shooting at me. I could feel the heat and see a flash of metal as a bullet crossed in front of my eyes and hit the wall, then three or four more flew behind me as I ran once again, this time toward the garage. From there, I was able to hide and call the police, worried all the while that the intruders would find me hiding in the garage.

When they arrived, the police saw blood on my back and immediately sent me to the hospital. There, I found out that the bullet that had gone through two panes of glass, found its way to my back, and bounced off of it. It was a miracle.

I had been given a second chance. I thought about what that might mean. I thought about my kids, the life I had led up to that point, and whether or not I had done anything to deserve this second chance.

When I peel back the layers of that night and all of the thoughts that were running through my head simultaneously, I now realize that something else was happening too. The thing that was happening wasn’t just adrenaline and fear or gratitude and a sense of mortality. It felt like I was living through a memory. It felt like I had already gone through all of this before, and I could see different versions of myself in those moments, each with different outcomes. I’m not talking about running through potential scenarios—it felt like I was actually remembering those experiences that hadn’t happened and seeing them play out.

I could see myself lying in a pool of blood. I could see myself crawling over to the kitchen table and being hit by another bullet. I don’t know any other way to describe this than by explaining to you that none of this was the result of fear; it was experience. I intricately knew about all the possible realities that could play out before me as if they were real. All the versions of me looked real, as if I could walk over and touch them.

What Happened After the Jump

The ambulance took me to the hospital in the same state I had been in when I was watching TV—in my boxers—so I had no wallet, no ID, and no clothes with me at the hospital. Since I didn’t have any serious injuries, they discharged me that same night. I called an Uber and went home in slippers and a paper gown from the hospital.

When the Uber dropped me off, I realized that the cul-de-sac where I lived had been cordoned off. Helicopters flew overhead, cops held K-9s at the end of harnesses, and a standoff was in progress. I started toward my driveway, only to be stopped at the barricade. The police told me there was a hostage situation in place. They had traced the culprits back to a house across the street, where the whole ruined escapade was ending in a shambles. Standing there half-naked on the wrong side of the yellow caution tape, without any way to prove who I was, I just wanted to get back into my house and check on my cat (luckily, he decided to stick around!).

When the dust finally settled and everything was back in place, I realized that nothing was back in place at all. Things just seemed…off. At first, I blew it off. I thought I might be experiencing some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that made everything seem a little strange—but enough oddities and reality shifts started to pile up that I could no longer ignore them.

Lots of stuff had changed. My kids were different. I noticed a lamp in the corner of the room that I did not remember buying. People called me acting as if we had talked just a few days before, when I had not spoken to them in years. There was suddenly an old building on the corner where there had previously been an empty lot. These are only some of the numerous shifts in my reality that were impossible to ignore.

Something had happened, though. A reality shift had happened. Previous to this incident I had been toying with and hoping to discover reality shifts, but I had no real concept of what they would actually mean.

I began to think that my near-death experience had been enough to propel me into a significantly different reality, but my scientific mind needed proof.

Had I written that sentence fifty or even twenty years ago, you would probably think I was insane. Perhaps even today you might wonder if I’m a little “off” (although, if that were the case, you probably wouldn’t be reading this book).

Conversations about parallel realities are becoming more and more commonplace as people notice little shifts in their memories. Things that seem to be concrete memories for millions of people are supposedly not true. I’m talking about seemingly little details like this. Despite what you know you remember, it is “fact” that Captain Crunch cereal has always been Cap’n Crunch, Jiffy peanut butter has always been Jif, and Ed McMahon never worked for Publisher’s Clearinghouse. There’s even a name for instances like this when you know you remember something, only to find out that it is incorrect or never happened; it’s called the Mandela Effect.

By the time I noticed that the world around me had shifted, I had already done some studying about the Mandela Effect but, still, I didn’t recognize it immediately. I had even embraced the ideas of surfing between different realities—not because I was out of my mind, but because I had recently become much more present in my own mind.

Experimenting with Reality

As a person who reads voraciously, listens to audiobooks at four times the normal speed so that I can digest more information more quickly, and accumulates information endlessly, I thought I had a basic grasp of the laws of the universe. At least I thought that until the night I lost everything. And, no, I didn’t lose it all on the night of the home invasion, but on the night the mother of my kids left me and moved from our home in Colorado to Oregon. I was devastated.

A good friend of mine in California had a home for rent that he offered me. It was in this home that the invasion occurred. I moved there so that I could have a fresh start, but instead I slipped into the abyss. My addictive personality landed on alcohol. I started drinking and could not stop. The pool in the backyard became a focus for my suicidal ideation. I had flashes in my mind of weighing myself down and sinking to the bottom. My kids were the only thing that held me back—I did not want them to find out I killed myself. My wonderful sister (who had found happiness...