Let’s do the time warp again

Time Travel Tips and Parallel World Wisdom

As discovered by watching Netflix’s DARK series

We’re going to face it someday. The awkward moment when you’ve met your doppelganger from the parallel world. Or your alter ego has traveled forward or backward in time in your own world.

What will you need to know to survive this imminent encounter?

Here are your tips. Everything I learned about time travel and navigating parallel world travel from Netflix’s series DARK. In a nutshell. So you can save yourself the trouble of slogging through hours of three repetitive seasons while you’re in the time loop. We’re all busy people.

1. Your mom could be your dad.
2. Your dad could be your uncle.
3. If you don’t like how the day is going, find out who has the time machine and go back and change it.
4. You can’t change it unless you find a different gender doppelganger. On a parallel planet.
5. There is a real Adam and Eve. Both sides say they are on the side of the light and the other side is for the dark. The game is to figure out who’s telling the truth and who is lying.
6. You can go to the past or you can go to the future. But only in 33 year intervals from now.
7. Avoid the black sticky stuff at the nuke plant. Unless you want to time travel or cause a multi-world apocalypse. Your choice really.
8. Same goes for the cave in the woods. Or the cave in the desert. Depends on the year. Sometimes the cave will let you walk your way in and out of the 33 year time travel portal. But sometimes it won’t. The cave won’t always have a dug out tunnel.
9. The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. Think John Wallis’ infinity sign.
10. Worry a lot about the guys who show up with minister collars, inside OR outside of churches.
11. When the cool music starts, you’ve come to a reflection point. You get to see everyone in their natural environments of the moment. Just like an episode of SNL’s “The Californians.”
12. The people from the 1920s are a lot smarter than the people from the 1980s and 2020s. Much better with tech.
13. Pendants made of St. Christopher’s medals and German pfennigs are omens. Of something. You tell me.
14. Deja vu just means you used to live this life before OR you were time traveling too and just don’t remember doing it.
15. Don’t focus on people’s fingernails. Ever. Nobody who time travels cleans their fingernails or washes hands much, on either world. Unless they just killed someone. Then, maybe. Therefore, worry about too much hand washing.
16. Big institutional halls are where ALL the bad planning takes place.
17. Getting pregnant is still not a great proposal for women. But sex is still always amazing.
18. The play Ariadne tells you a lot about life in parallel worlds. Such as it is.
19. Yellow clothing, especially raincoats, are haute couture. On both worlds.
20. Face disfiguration is really common.
21. Everything you learned about the paradox of seeing yourself in another timeline is off the table.
22. People will keep killing each other, thinking it will solve some timeline problem. It will be difficult to tell what the problem is, or if the killing actually solved anything.
23. In the end, everyone dies anyway. It’s the apocalypse.

So you could watch DARK. Or you could just trust Schrodinger knew what he was talking about. Either way, with this list, now you’re prepared.

Don’t say nobody warned you.

Thanks to the very talented editors Amy Sea, Andrew Rodwin and BOFace for sending their fishing lines through the wormhole.

More weird time travel, alternate universes and realities from MuddyUm writers follow. And oh there’s more — I’ll have a volume 2 of this anthology. Don’t forget to share your own stories of alternate universe humor with us here at MuddyUm, so I can include yours in the next loop.

by Andrew Rodwin

by Sarah Paris

by David B. Clear

by Melissa Balick

by Krupesh Raikar

by Stefan Grieve

by Baqsam Behbehani

by Eric Filipkowski

by Matthew Thiele

by Don Be

by Hogan Torah

by Manasi Kudtarkar

Don’t delay! Join the fun! Come sail the universe with us!