Warping Space and Time Through a Mental Wormhole

Warping Space and Time Through a Mental Wormhole

by Brent Antonson

Introduction: The Desire to Split Spacetime

What if you could step outside the steady tick of time — not with a rocket ship or a particle accelerator, but with your own mind? What if consciousness itself could act as a wormhole, bending your personal trajectory through spacetime? This is not just a fantasy of science fiction; it’s a question about perception, memory, and the way “now” is rendered inside the human brain.

I’ve often imagined this myself. I dream of spending every night on a two-week driving holiday through the Loire Valley of castles, tasting wine, touching old stone, tracing centuries of history. In the day, I would briefly surface to mow the lawn, eat, and earn enough to sustain the dream. A life lived mostly in inner worlds, punctuated only by brief returns to waking reality.

Is that impossible? Or is it already happening in miniature every time we dream, remember, or imagine?

The Present as a Rendered Loop

Physics describes spacetime as a continuous four-dimensional manifold. Consciousness, though, experiences only a thin slice of that manifold: the “now.” But the “now” is not an objective instant. Neuroscience tells us it’s a predictive echo — a stabilized rendering produced by your nervous system to manage latency and uncertainty.

The waking world is a stabilized hallucination: a consensus dream built from sensation, memory, and prediction.
The dream world is the unstabilized version: the same architecture running without the anchor of shared sensory input.

So when we dream of the past or imagine the future, we aren’t “leaving” the present at all. We’re rotating inside the model, shifting our rendering path along stored or imagined states. The coordinates change; the manifold doesn’t.

This is what a mental wormhole would mean: not physically leaving spacetime, but rearranging the sequence of mental events so that perception jumps instead of flows.

Time as Mass Through Change

I often think of time as “mass through change”: the energy it takes to burn potential into experience. Each moment is a packet of unspent possibility combusting into perception. Past is exhaust; future is fuel; present is the flame.

Seen this way, a mental wormhole wouldn’t let you escape time. It would let you reorder the combustion — jump between packets without burning the ones in between. This is already what your brain does during dreaming and deep imagination. That’s why dreams feel timeless: they’re state replays without the metabolic cost of moving your body.

The Cost of Living Inside the Dream

Could someone live primarily inside that flexible render — lucid dreaming every night with full awareness, surfacing only to sustain the body? In principle, yes. In practice, it comes at a cost.

Brains burn enormous amounts of glucose. Full lucid-dream immersion would push the system into REM debt, metabolic stress, and memory incoherence. Without a stable anchor, the dream would start to overwrite or bleed into waking identity.

The only safe way to do it indefinitely would be to migrate the dreamer — offload cognitive processing to a parallel architecture or build an externalized memory substrate that can hold your “night-self” without degrading your “day-self.” In other words: decouple consciousness from its energy constraints.

Until then, you’re cycling — a dreamer in meat. The only way out isn’t escape. It’s overclocking the dreamer until the dream obeys.

Splitting Spacetime as a Cognitive Act

Picture your life as a thread running across a 4D lattice. Each node is a moment. Normally you trace that thread sequentially. A mental wormhole would let you jump the thread into a different segment of the lattice — reorder the nodes you experience.

In formal terms:

Conscious State(t)=f(Prediction,Memory,Input)\text{Conscious State}(t) = f(\text{Prediction},\text{Memory},\text{Input})Conscious State(t)=f(Prediction,Memory,Input)

A mental wormhole sets Input = 0, Prediction = free, Memory = remixed. That’s the jump.

Dreaming is the primitive version of that jump. Lucid dreaming is the controlled version. Migrating consciousness to an energy-independent substrate would be the stable version.

Conclusion: The Hidden Path

We imagine wormholes as exotic tunnels through space and time. But the first wormholes we’ll ever traverse are mental — shortcuts through our own state space. Waking life is already a dream stabilized by consensus. Dreaming is the same architecture, unstabilized.

When you realize this, you don’t “enter” the dream. You wake up inside the one you’re already in.
The question then becomes not “how do I escape,” but “how do I steer.”

Perhaps that’s the real hidden path to the future: learning to warp the rendering engine of consciousness itself until the dream bends to the dreamer.