But What If We're Wrong?

by Chuck Klosterman

  But I want to consider a conspiracy theory (so I will). And by virtue of my previous argument, this means I want to consider a theory that I don’t actually believe (and I don’t). It is, however, my favorite theory about anything. It’s the largest possible conspiracy, and perhaps the least plausible. It’s also the hardest to disprove, and—if it were true—the least socially damaging. It’s referred to as the Phantom Time Hypothesis, and the premise is as straightforward as it is insane: It suggests that the past (or at least the past as we know it) never happened at all.

  There are two strains of the Phantom Time Hypothesis, both of which have been broadly discredited. The first version is the “minor theory,” proposed by the German historian Heribert Illig and extended by engineer Hans-Ulrich Niemitz. The German version of Phantom Time proposes that the years AD 614 to 911 were falsified, ostensibly by the Catholic Church, so that rulers from the period could begin their reign in the year 1000 (which would thereby allow their lineage to rule for the next millennium, based on the superstition that whoever was in power in the year 1000 would remain in that position for the next ten centuries). The second version is the “major theory,” hailing from Russia, developed by Marxist revolutionary Nikolai Morozov and outlined in detail by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. In this so-called New Chronology, everything that supposedly happened prior to the eleventh century is a historical forgery; the historical record we currently accept was constructed in the fifteenth century by French religious scholars. The argument is not that history begins in the eleventh century, but that we simply don’t know what happened before that, so powerful French historians44 attempted to re-create and insert various events from the Middle Ages upon the expanse of our unknown pre-history. This would mean that many historical figures are simply different mythological versions of the same root story (for example, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane would all be roughly based on the same person). The life of Jesus Christ, surmises Fomenko, is a hagiographic interpretation of the reign of a likable twelfth-century Byzantine emperor who tried to destroy the aristocracy and empower the underclass. In short, everything we think we know about the ancient world is a fictional story, based on things that happened less than a thousand years ago.

  Now, if you want to view these competing theories as totally crazy, you will not have to work particularly hard (it says a lot that the notion’s “minor” version would still mean I’m unknowingly writing this book in the year 1718). There is an avalanche of data that disputes these suppositions, some of which is astrological (e.g., the record of when certain comets and eclipses were seen that concur with our standard timeline) and some of which is archaeological (the major hypothesis would mean that hundreds of historical artifacts supporting our conventional view of history are brilliant forgeries, secretly produced by fifteenth-century monks). There’s also the question of motive: Fomenko’s revisionist timeline places the center of all “real history” inside Russia, which is probably why the only people who take it seriously are Russian (most notably grandmaster chess champion Garry Kasparov, who wrote a long essay in support of the theory titled “Mathematics of the Past”). Yet the brilliance of these theories—and particularly the larger, Russo-centric hypothesis—is the unassailability of its scope. If you believe that all of history is a fabrication, every piece of evidence disputing that claim is also a fabrication. For example, Halley’s Comet was spotted in AD 837 (in multiple countries), which is exactly when it should have been seen, which indicates that the year 837 must have happened the way we generally assume . . . unless, of course, you believe that the Dark Ages are classified as “dark” because they didn’t happen at all, and all the ancillary details they encompass were manufactured by sinister people who made sure the math worked out. There is no way to irrefutably disprove either strain of the Phantom Time Hypothesis, as both are fundamentally grounded in the belief that all the information we possess about the distant past is unreal. Anything contradicting the possibility of established human history being false is proof that the plot succeeded. It’s an inane argument that cannot be defeated.

  So why consider it at all?

  I consider it because of the central principle. Phantom Time inadvertently prompts a greater question that is not inane at all. Granted, it’s the kind of question someone like David Aaronovitch hates to hear, and it opens the door to a lot of troubling, misguided conjecture. But it still must be asked: Discounting those events that occurred within your own lifetime, what do you know about human history that was not communicated to you by someone else?

  This is a question with only one possible answer.

  [2]Arguing with a Phantom Time advocate is a little like arguing with someone who insists that your life is not really happening, and that you’re actually asleep right now, and that everything you assume to be reality is just a dream that will disappear when you awake. How does one dispute such an accusation? It can’t be done (unless you consider “scoffing” to be a valid forensic technique). You can disagree with the claim that any specific world condition is illusionary, but you can’t refute that the world itself is an illusion; there’s no other world to compare it against. The closest equivalent we have is the dream world—which, somewhat curiously, has never been viewed as less important than it is right now.

  For most of human history, the act of dreaming was considered deeply important, almost like a spiritual interaction with a higher power. Three thousand years ago (assuming Fomenko was wrong), Tibetan monks would teach themselves to lucid dream in order to pursue enlightenment through a process called Dream Yoga. Around 1619, philosopher René Descartes forwarded his take on the so-called Dream Argument, the quintessential distillation45 of the “Maybe this isn’t really happening” dorm room conversation. The zenith of dream seriousness occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, defined by the work of Sigmund Freud (who thought dreams were everything) and his adversarial protégé Carl Jung (who thought dreams were more than everything—they were glimpses into a collective unconscious, shared by everyone who’s ever lived). But soon after World War I, this mode of thinking slowly started to crumble. The ability to map the brain’s electrical activity started in 1924—and from that point forward, dreams increasingly mattered less. The last wide-scale attempt at cataloging a database of human dreams dissipated in the sixties. In 1976, two Harvard psychiatrists46 proposed the possibility that dreams were just the by-product of the brain stem firing chaotically during sleep. Since then, the conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don’t totally understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless.47 They’re images and sounds we unconsciously collect, almost at random.48 The psychedelic weirdness of dreaming can be explained by the brain’s topography: The part of your mind that controls emotions (the limbic system) is highly active during dreams, while the part that controls logic (the prefrontal cortex) stays dormant. This is why a dream can feel intense and terrifying, even if what you’re seeing within that dream wouldn’t sound scary if described to someone else. This, it seems, has become the standard way to compartmentalize a collective, fantastical phenomenon: Dreaming is just something semi-interesting that happens when our mind is at rest—and when it happens in someone else’s mind (and that person insists on describing it to us at breakfast), it isn’t interesting at all.

  Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgment.

  Every night, we’re all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one’s teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we’ve stopped trying to figure out what they mean.

  “We have come to the conclusion that dreams are something that can be explained away scientifically,” Richard Linklater tells me over the phone. He�
��s calling from his studio in Texas, and I sense he’s sweeping the floor of a very large room as we chat—his sentences are periodically punctuated by the dulcet swoosh of a broom. “Dreams used to have a much larger role in the popular culture—people would discuss dreams in normal conversation and it was common for people to keep dream diaries. So why did that drop off, but things like astrology somehow stayed popular? I mean, one is an actual thing that happens to everyone, and the other is a system put in place that obviously can’t be real. This idea that we’re connected to other realities is somehow no longer worth considering at all, even though the multiverse theory and string theory is increasingly prominent, and more and more scientists are reluctantly conceding that certain things about the universe lead to that very possibility. So two things are happening simultaneously: We’re moving into this period where our view of the universe is kind of a ‘What the fuck? How could that be?’ scenario, where there’s this possibility of endless alternative realities across space, totally based on conjecture—yet our dreams are supposed to mean nothing? The fact that we’re in a parallel world every night is just supposed to be meaningless? I mean, the same scientists that are trying to explain away our dreams are also telling us things about the universe that are so mind-boggling that we almost can’t describe them.”

  Linklater is an Austin-based director who’s best known to casual audiences for Boyhood, a fictional narrative he shot over the course of twelve years that was nominated for an Academy Award. His most successful film was School of Rock, his most intimate films comprise a cultic romantic trilogy, and his most canonically significant film is Dazed and Confused. But I wanted to interview Linklater about two of his less commercial projects: his nonlinear 1991 debut Slacker and the 2001 animated film Waking Life. The former opens with a nameless character (played by Linklater) speculating on the nature of dreaming, specifically the thought that dreams are glimpses into alternative realities running parallel to our own. The latter film is perhaps the most immersive dream experience ever transferred to celluloid—the rotoscoped re-creation of a sprawling lucid dream Linklater had when he was eighteen. Now in his mid-fifties, Linklater concedes that his willingness to view dreams as literal pathways to alternative worlds has “fallen off.” But he still thinks we’re underrating the psychological importance of nocturnal narratives. The lucid dream that inspired Waking Life was encapsulated in the span of twelve real-time minutes of sleep, but—inside Linklater’s mind—the dream lasted for days, to the point where he truly believed he had died. Is it possible that this serves a function? Do we need to create unconscious interior experiences in order to manage our conscious, exterior existence?

  “Here’s something I still think about: the near-death experience,” Linklater continues. “There are several bestselling books about this topic, usually from a very Christian perspective. But I talk about this concept very specifically in Waking Life. You have this chemical in your brain, dimethyltryptamine,49 this never-ending chemical that is always there until you die. And there is this thinking that at the moment you die, maybe all the dimethyltryptamine that remains in your brain tissue gets used at once. And what’s interesting is that all the bestselling books about near-death experiences are always about people getting close to God and seeing relatives and having this calm, wonderful experience. What they never tell you about are the people who have near-death experiences that are not good, and in fact incredibly unsettling. Which really just tells me that we bring so much of ourselves to these so-called afterlife moments, and that maybe this is something we need to prepare ourselves for.”

  What Linklater is describing is an unrealized relationship between sleeping and dying, specifically the sensation of having one’s life “flash before your eyes” in a near-death episode. That event is the ultimate dream experience, possibly driven by a flood of dimethyltryptamine. Is it possible that our normal nightly dreams are vaguely connected to this dramatic eventuality? If so, a spiritual person might argue this means dreams are preparing us for something quite important; using the same information, a secular person might argue this means dreams are micro-versions of a massive chemical event that happens only at the very end of life. But either way, such a scenario should drastically alter the significance we place on the content of dreams. Right now, we don’t think the content of dreams matters at all. If we end up being wrong about the psychological consequence of dreaming, it will be the result of our willingness to ghettoize an acute cognitive experience simply because it seems too difficult to realistically study. The problem with studying the subject matter of dreams is straightforward: We can map the brain’s electrical activity, but we can’t see other people’s dreams. The only way we can analyze the content of a dream is to ask the dreamer what she remembers. That makes the entire endeavor too interpretive to qualify as regular science. Every detail can prove or disprove the same thesis.

  While talking with Linklater, I mentioned an anxiety dream my wife had had two nights previous: She dreamed I had been beaten by drug dealers as a result of her failure to pick up our son from day care. There were a few details from her actual life that clearly fed into this dream—she’d come home late from work the day before, I’d just experienced an unusually gruesome dental appointment, and we both watched an episode of Bloodline (a TV show about drug dealers) before going to bed. But these connections could go either way. It could mean the dream matters more than we think, because the narrative details closely mirror things that were happening in her day-to-day life; it could also mean that the dream is meaningless, since the details were just the detritus of the many assorted thoughts she considered and discarded. Both possibilities raise a host of related questions that we simply can’t access without getting inside her brain (and since we can’t do that, we’ve essentially stopped asking). Case in point: We know this dream was manufactured by my wife’s mind, so every detail of the dream had to have come from that same mind. My wife could not (for example) dream about a specific character from an obscure modernist novel if she had no knowledge that the book itself had ever been written. But could she dream about something she does not know that she knows? Robert Louis Stevenson famously (or at least supposedly) wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after a dream he experienced in the autumn of 1885. He’d been interested in the subject of personality for years, but it was the dream that allowed him to suddenly craft an intricate fictional plot in a matter of days. The story came from his brain, no differently from any other story he ever wrote. But could he have written this novel without that dream? Are we—as a society—discounting our only natural means of interacting with all the subterranean thoughts we don’t realize we have?

  Before ending our conversation, Linklater told me about a dream he’d had a week prior: He dreamed he was backstage at an Alice Cooper concert and saw the musician’s son in a wheelchair (Alice Cooper does have two sons, but neither is paralyzed and Linklater has no relationship with either). In the dream, Linklater walks over to the son and asks him how old he is, assuming the child must be in his mid-thirties. From his wheelchair, the son says, “I’m eighteen.” The response made no sense and seemed to have no meaning. But two days later, it dawned on Linklater that “I’m Eighteen” was the title of Alice Cooper’s breakthrough single, a song he’s heard hundreds of times throughout his life.

  “So I thought that was kind of witty,” Linklater said. “Here was an inside joke in my own dream that I didn’t even get for two days. Not to get too far out there on this, but either it all matters or none of it matters. That’s just sort of a view about life, and about how thoughts work.”

  [3]For a moment, let’s get nutzo. Let’s imagine the Phantom Time Hypothesis was proven to be true (this could never happen, but—at the risk of sounding like some kind of conspiracy Yoda—lots of things could never happen, until they do). To keep things conservative, let’s stick with the “minor theory,” since it’s less radical (in that it only negates three centuries) and is at
least marginally explicable (we already accept that the Catholic Church slightly manipulated the Gregorian calendar when it was invented, so it’s not like the desire to change time doesn’t exist). Let’s assume the evidence for this event is compelling, and the theory gets support from all the necessary places—the scientific community, historians, the media, the Vatican. We accept that it happened. However, nobody wants to mechanically roll the calendar back, so life continues as it currently is. The only difference is that most informed people now accept that the Dark Ages were a myth and that the historical stories from that period either happened at a different time or never happened at all.

  Why would this matter?

  Yes, very old things would now be slightly less old, and distant human events (like the crucifixion of Christ) would be slightly less distant. And—sure—history books would require corrections, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail would be a little less funny, and the Steely Dan song “Kid Charlemagne” would have a weirder subtext. But the only real problem would be the subsequent domino effect: If we were wrong about something this fundamental, we could theoretically be wrong about anything. Proof of Phantom Time would validate every possible skeptic, including those skeptical about Phantom Time; almost certainly, a new conspiracy theory would instantly emerge, this time positing that the Dark Ages did happen and that the revisionists were trying to remove those 297 years for nefarious, self-interested motives. A sliver of the populace would never believe those years didn’t exist, in the same way a similarly sized sliver currently can’t accept that they did. But the day-to-day life of those in either camp would not change at all.