Dream journal

I think the first sign I noticed was that the LIRR train schedules were all slightly different from what I remembered, and on asking around I learned that this wasn't a recent change. The obvious conclusion was that we're in a parallel universe to the one I was in yesterday. Further investigation revealed that the United States currency is backed by salt and the expected output of salt mines, and that there are under a million people living in Southern California, but somewhat more people in the Northeast commuting by ferry than I would have expected. At length I hypothesized that in this universe, some near-extinction event thousands of years ago had left the human race slightly more risk-averse and survival-oriented on average than in the world where I grew up.

We started visiting other parallel universes. In one, as we took off on a commercial flight from LaGuardia, the pilot pointed out the "famous New York lagoons", of which there were dozens or hundreds just inland from the Long Island and New Jersey shores. Some of the differences were innocuous, while others (like the world resembling The Handmaid's Tale) horrified me. I tried to explain the differences to our friendly host family, who were of course utterly bewildered, and somewhat offended, that I saw anything wrong with their society. I started plotting ways to cure some of these societies of their horrifying characteristics, and every strategy I came up with turned out to have negative unintended consequences. My cultural-relativist mind got preachy, pointing out that a parallel me in any one of these worlds, on visiting my own, could be developing similar schemes to "cure" it of what I considered good qualities, and overlooking what I considered problems in my own world.