The Universe in Our Minds Laura Liu

Have you ever made your own universe story? Sure, everyone can simply look to the Greeks for a cranky cast of characters. The Bible is certainly beautiful and very allegorical. Chinese mythology is a nice fit for anyone who fancies a giant man-god wielding a XXXL size axe.

say… Maybe you wanted to be silly but also a little sciency,

A certain little boy was playing with a stone. One day, he dropped that stone and that was the big bang. Every universe contains an infinite number of universes.

No one can prove you wrong. Or maybe you had trouble falling asleep because you made the bad decision of drinking a cup of coffee at midnight. You’ve been studying Shakespeare’s “everyone dies, that’s the end!” tragedies in school and the poetry and symbolism and all that Shakespeare stuff is getting to you.

My mind is full of strange and weird ideas, Carried on billowing waves of caffeine.

And so you begin to make a story in your head of how time is a lady with flowy silver hair (because if time had hair it would be silver and flowy), riding a black horse with a white diamond on its forehead (because everyone loves Black Beauty), and as she rides forward time passes (because obviously time only goes forward, no matter how much everyone wishes otherwise). Maybe you run track and that race track is turning your thoughts circular. You think: every time Ms.Time gets back to the starting point the universe starts over again.

Eventually what was supposed to be a deep and poetic Shakespearean universe story is turning into something silly. But that’s okay, because Shakespeare wrote comedy too. So you give up on what is supposed to be deep and meaningful and decide to go down the narcissistic route instead. You spare a brief feeling of pity to narcissuses- they’re beautiful flowers but they have such a bad reputation. Everyone is keeping something from me, you think. One day you’ll find out that the reason everyone is keeping that something from you is because you’re secretly the most powerful being in the world who created the universe, but you just don’t know it.

Or maybe you begin to think that the world revolves around you. The world is only what you perceive it to be, and if you simply thought hard enough the world would change, because the universe is but a paltry manifestation of your thoughts. But that doesn’t sound like much of a world creation story, but more of an I-seem-to-have-done-something-quiteembarrassing-in-front-of-a-large-audience thought. Or maybe an I-can't-believe-it's-8-o'clock-on-a-Mondaymorning-ugh-I-HAVE-SCHOOL thought. Or maybe every universe is contained within a story, and authors are the great possessors of knowledge sent by the CEO of UniverseCreation.co as ambassadors.

I personally know I am not one of those employees, but, should any one of those envoys happen to read this, I would gladly send in my (nonexistent) resume and come in for an interview.