It all started with a traffic accident which with luck we avoided. We were on the road going back to İzmir from Susurluk. I was driving and rather tired. The music in the background did not help either because it relaxed me. Near the exit for Balikesir, a truck started to follow close on our tail. He kept flashing his headlights; although, we were in the far right lane. It was obvious we had a maniac behind us! We traveled a few kilometers like that.
At the first opportunity, I moved to the left lane hoping he would drive by, since he gave no intention of passing us. I did this thinking it was a four-lane highway; however, what I didn’t know was that due to road repairs the left lane was reserved for oncoming traffic. I had missed the road sign that warned drivers.
As a truck came towards us on this curvy road, I thought he was in the next lane. We were quickly approaching each other. Next to me in the right lane was the maniac who had been following us. About that time my wife, who had been sleeping in the back seat, woke up and screamed that I was heading into the truck. At that point I made a big mistake and steered right. Luckily, the maniac had passed, and we had avoided crashing into him. We had avoided a terrible accident, but I was in shock. I pulled over, and my wife took the driver’s seat.
A few days later, we were in Çeşme at the beach. As yet, I hadn’t recovered from the shock, but more strange was the fact I kept having a strange vision. The accident had taken place, and I saw my family and myself in the hospital. We were all in bandages, and the vision was so real I could smell the antiseptic hospital air. I just couldn’t understand what I was seeing. Then, when I was swimming, I saw the same vision and smelled the same air. I was at a loss. I got out of the water and had lain down. At the same time, I observed my wife and two kids getting out of the water. I watched them as they approached me. When I raised my head and looked into my wife’s face, I was in for another shock; her face was not the face of my wife in this life. I knew that I was married to her, and I also clearly remembered how we had met. But, she wasn’t my wife. I had no emotions for her. As she dried her hair with a towel, I watched her mouth open as she told me something. This vision lasted for a while and then vanished. Everything was back to normal. Right in front of me was my wife and children. I was in the real world I knew…Really?
After returning from Çeşme, we went to a shopping mall. I stood in front of a café waiting for my children to return from toy store window shopping. As I looked at the café with little interest, I saw myself sitting in the café. A girl in red sat across from me, and we were chatting. It was as if I were watching a film. I held the leading role, and I could feel everything the “me” felt sitting at that table. The moment was intense. All of a sudden the “me” sitting at the table turned to face me, as if he had felt he was being watched. I shuddered and the vision stopped.
It was after these experiences that I started investigating “parallel universes.” Were my experiences fantasies created by my brain or had I experienced something hard to explain?
I tend to call them fantasies because the person I recognized as my wife was someone I saw on Facebook and affected me enough to add her as a friend. In this life we had no relationship. We only shared a few activities together. Then why was I so affected when I first saw her? I also knew the girl sitting in front of me at the café. All of them were in my present life but in different roles. I started questioning what I was experiencing.
At this point I posted a message on my Facebook account asking people who have had experiences regarding “parallel universes” to contact me. Some of the messages that came were really fantasies, but some included similar experiences. Those messages really interested me. I read the experiences of some, who were living a different scenario, due to different choices. And slowly, I began to accept that I wasn’t living a fantasy, but an experience beyond fantasy. There were breaking points in my life, and at each point, I had made decisions. Every decision I made or refused to make was in a different universe. In another universe I was married with two kids, but in yet another universe, none of them existed and I was just flirting. Who knows what lives I was leading and not aware of? But how was this knowledge going to help me?
I always ask myself this question: So now that you have this information, how is it going to help your spiritual development? I couldn’t find the answer to my question for a long time. I had more questions as well. Which one of us was the real “me”? What, in fact, is “real”? What was this knowledge telling me? How could it be enlightening for my spiritual development?
To be honest, I still don’t know the exact answers to my questions, and I keep thinking out loud. As a matter of fact, in the third issue of The Wise, our writers joined me in this thinking out loud and wrote on the topic of “parallel universes.” I hope the articles in our new issue will be enlightening for us all.
With all my love to all of you in this universe and all the other universes…

Hasan Sonsuz