Time Haven, as the AI calls the newly invented simulating time machine, allows people to safely experience what life and survival used to mean. The simulated time can be defined, the avatar can be chosen and even the place of birth can be determined by the user. Time travel in Time Haven takes 6-8 hours, but feels like a lifetime to the traveller, i.e. 60-80 years on average. During this time, travellers can go through predefined experiences. They can therefore decide whether they want to experience separations, poverty, achievements or victories and with whom they want to experience this simulation. Families or close friends often join together to experience the same simulation from different perspectives.
When a person sleeps in the simulation, these are short breaks in which nothing new is experienced, but the experience is mentally processed and organised so that it can be easily recalled later. The scientists in the simulation explain dreaming by the fact that the experience has to be processed in order to be stored in long-term memory. In reality, the information has to find a place in the real person's brain in the real world in real time, and there is not only information from the current simulation, but also information from previously experienced simulations as well as memories from the real world. This can often lead to entanglements, which the dreamer then tries to explain with convoluted dream stories or nightmares or no longer remembers the dreams at all. This creates a kind of connection to the real world in which reality and simulation come together and no longer make sense to the brain. When dreaming, the most diverse simulations are interwoven with each other, the dreamer literally jumps back and forth between the countless simulations already experienced and the real world and has everything from moments of happiness to nightmares that he can associate with what has just happened.
We let our avatars travel back to a time when AI was just emerging. To the time right now. We want to find out in the real world how people felt during this time of upheaval, how they dealt with their old views and new ideas. What they thought about the future and what they were afraid of. It's a little reminder of the meta-world in which we live carefree together. We'll laugh about it when we wake up from the simulation in about four hours. About how exciting it was to read this text here for the first time, even though it was only a small comfort in the simulation we are currently in. The question is: how do we want to spend the next four hours?
