There was a book that explored this exact time-travel/rebirth variant; the protagonist lives dozens of “life-variants,” suffering a heart attack in his fifties and “waking up” as a teenager. He does the get-rich-because-I-know thing, the duplicate-my-former-life thing, and along the way discovers other people also reliving. As I recall, in one cycle he discovers another such person when she unites George Lucas and Steven Spielberg before either of them hit it big as she produces a “dolphins are intelligent beings from another planet” SF blockbuster. I also remember them trying to find others by placing ads in papers in 1970 saying things like, “If you remember Hinckley shooting Brady and others, if you remember hostages in Iran, call 800-xxxxx.”
When I was a really irresponsible teenage idiot, a friend and I told his sister there was an escaped madman on the loose. Then we told her we were going out. He didn’t actually leave the house - he hid and made spooky noises. Meanwhile I got a knife and covered it in ketchup, which I then tapped on the living room window.
She was certainly convinced that there was a psycho coming to get her.
Needless to say she didn’t speak to me for a year, her brother and I were grounded for two months, and I had to write a letter of apology to her and to her mother. :smack:
I’m a bit surprised at the number of people who would sooner believe in their own insanity than in a paranormal situation. That decision doesn’t SOLVE anything!
Consider: if you look around, realize that all available sensory input confirms that you’re 18 again, and then decide “Okay, I’m seriously insane.” What do you do then?
Even if you believe none of it is actually happening, you still get hungry and sleepy and horny, injuries still hurt, being laughed at is still embarrassing, spending all your time hanging around the asylum in your bathrobe is still boring as heck…
Never work under the assumption that you’re incurably insane. Not because it can’t be true: It can be. Rather because such an assumption is useless. If you’re willing to accept that level of insanity, then you might as well consider everything before the weird event (whatever it was) to be hallucination, as well or instead. And if your delusion is so detailed that not only can you remember life in the 20th century, but you can delude yourself into thinking that you can reproduce useful technology from the 20th century, then go ahead, have some deluded fun.
Who said I wouldn’t? I’d just do it, secure in the “knowledge” that I was actually tied to a bed in an asylum somewhere. (But at first, I’d probably worry that I was actually out wandering the streets somewhere, putting myself and others in danger)
Come to think of it, that would probably result in my taking insane risks with my life…because, after all, if everything’s a delusion, then either I couldn’t die, or I’d be better off dead anyway.
As I understand it, Ranchoth could be presented with evidence sufficient to convince him or her of the existence of zombies, yetis, etc., but not time travel. That seems odd to me. While I’ve never had any credible observation of any “unnatural” beings such as extraterrestrials, “undead”, or yetis, I have experienced time travel. We are all doing it right now, so at least the concept isn’t totally outside of my experience.
I guess I’d be more likely to be convinced that I had jumped forward in time than that a vampire was lurking in the abandoned house on the hill. I’ve traveled forward in time before. OTOH, traveling backwards in time is another kettle of fish altogether…
And the reason that a zombie or a Yeti would be more believable to me than time travel? Well…
A fantastic creature would be just that: a creature. Even if it was undead, it wouldn’t necessarily shake one’s entire world view, like suddenly arriving in another time period would.
Unless I was the only one who saw it, of course. Then I’d just think I had suffered a bout of insanity.
I guess it all comes down to outside corroboration…I suppose if I was swept into another time with a large group of other people, or if the people I met in the past actually believed that I had traveled time, I’d be a little more “open” towards accepting the time-travel possibility.
…or, like Chronos said, if I’d been working with a high-energy particle accelerator (or the like) moments before being swept back in time, that’d probably help to convince me, too.
A distinction I should have made. When I refer to “time travel”, unless specified otherwise, I mean into the past. There are a lot of plausible ways to explain a jump forward: You fell into a coma, you got “frozen” somehow (literally or otherwise), you went through it normally but lost part of your intervening memory, etc. Given any evidence that I had gone forward, I would very easily latch onto such an explanation. Going back, though, would be a mojo big deal, no matter how you slice it.
