Sleep has been avoiding me lately. It waits until I have given up on it and then gets me. It normally does so just before I have to get up. I lay awake last night watching my brain churning through increasingly bizarre thoughts. At some stage I was thinking about quantum multiverses and boltzmann brains. The apparent lack of activity in our universe could apparently be caused by the all aliens getting busy in the multiverse. It is depressing in the same way as children who lock their attention to flickering glass screens instead of climbing a tree or running across a field.

I was trying to imagine how we would interact with the multiverse. Phillip Pullman came up with the idea of a very sharp knife which a skilled user could use to cut between the worlds. He talked about using the I Ching to divine openings that had been already made. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter wrote about ‘Stepping’ between the worlds. I thought of a few others and realised it was almost a sci-fi sub-genre. Then I thought about what little I knew of the work done on quantum entanglement and wave or field theory. Very little, as it turned out. I imagined the dull reality of entering the multiverse would be as mundane as logging into a quantum computer with your VR headset or somesuch bollocks. My brain continued mashing through its synapses like a blind stoat until I fell asleep at dawn.