Doppelgängers

Martin Downham said he saw his brother’s family, in their car, arrive on his drive 10 minutes before they actually did [ FT401:74].

In my book Our Holographic World (2014), I cited some 60 similar cases. I mentioned the vardøgr (vardoeger) phenomenon where someone appears to arrive before he actually does, but I emphasised the more important concept of doppelgängers. You meet an old friend in the street, you chat to him/her, and (s)he later denies all knowledge of the event, being at home at the time.

I tried to relate this to hologram theory, time slips, and the possibility of ghosts taking on the ‘full-bodied apparition’ of real people. This living ghost can be displaced from its proper time, being partly in and partly out of its surroundings. Only later does (s)he become ‘real’. This is related to quantum physics, where particles remain in an improbable state of reality until they are ‘decohered’. The quadrillions of atoms that go to make up the real human being are effectively in this state of improbability, in a kind of real and non-real overlap, so the living ghost remains as some kind of image until it is ‘decohered’.

Joan Forman, who wrote a book about time mysteries, suggests there is a kind of psychic or emotional interaction between the observer and the physics of the warp itself; the scene suddenly changes because you have just looked out of the window. Larry Flaxman and Marie D Jones, in The Déjà vu Enigma

(2010), say people can become ‘entangled’ via some unknown result of emotional bonding, while continuing to influence each other and their reality over vast distances.

Antony Milne

London