THE STORY OF A STORY

There is a story floating about the internet about an anonymous man who claims that in 2009, he traveled to a parallel universe. It has all the seemingly vivid details of an actual occurrence, but the hook is what puts people into the strange, whacko camp.

The man was driving with his through rural California. The dog gets restless so he stops the car in a remote area. The dog does it's business, but then is distracted by a rabbit and runs off. The man chases his dog, but as he is running he steps into a hole, falls and becomes unconscious.

He wakes up inside a small trailer-like home. There is a greasy haired man who tells him that he is 20 feet away from where he fell. But the man says that cannot be possible since there was no house where he fell. The stranger then tells him he found the unconscious guy baking in the desert sun , so brought him back to his home  - - - in a parallel universe.

Inside the house, the stranger tells the man that in his world, there is expensive technology that allows people to travel between the infinite parallel universes. It was developed in his world in the 1950s as part of a space exploration project. During this discussion, the stranger says that there are multiple Earths each with its own path. As he wanders to the living room, he sees a music system with cassette tapes. The stranger and the man discuss music briefly, and the stranger tells him about the "new" Beatles album called Everyday Chemistry. The man says in his world the Beatles broke up, and two are dead. The stranger says in his world, the Beatles never broke up. The man could not believe it.

The stranger told him that the machine that allows him and others to travel between worlds is dangerous. Many people teleport to places where there is an ocean (and drown), or there is no ground (and fall from space and die). Travelers are not allowed to take things to their destination or bring things back because that would violate the rules for dimension travel (and endanger one's life).

The stranger goes to answer the doorbell, and the man decides to take a cassette tape for this Beatles album.  He then leaves back through the Parallel Machine which he describes as feeling wet but without an liquid. When the man returns to his world, he has a copy of the Beatles tape in his pocket. He listens to it and believes that it is indeed the Beatles.

Now many people believe that it is a hoax, an elaborate story, or a fantasy induced by secondary means. Whatever the status, it does raise as possible ode to the LOST mythology.

In the Dharma camp, we first thought it odd that the equipment, including stereos, were not up to date but really older technology from the 1970s. This sort of matches the man's desert story where a world with fantastic technology of portals to other Earth dimensions would create lower levels of technology such as cassette tapes as being the current music standard.

In LOST, there is a reference to other "Earth gates" in the hieroglyphs in the FDW chamber. So it is possible that turning the wheel was really a functioning parallel dimension transportation machine. So when the island "disappeared" it was not a real disappearance but removal to another dimension. As the sideways world was also a different dimension but with the same characters and similar lifestyles, the theory that LOST was not a show about time travel but parallel universes does have some plot event support.

The idea that one earth dimension is in the Pacific Ocean, but the machine drops a user into the African desert is similar to the man's story. The dimensions can have the same components but at the same time be completely different. If you think every time there was an "incident" with the FDW, the life force energy bursts, then the LOST story is not one dimension or even two: every jump was another card in the deck. So we really don't know where the characters began or where they ended up.
Perhaps the resolution is when the characters jump from one dimension and find themselves in another. The merger of experiences actually kills them. Then in death, with the merged memories, they can move on to another plane of existence.