CHAPTER 2: The ISLAND – Zip Cords, Green Screens and Time Travel

THE GREEN SCREEN

Remember in Chapter 1 where I described our losties existence as linear? Our losties are all together on a zipcord, and they can only go forward in their linear existence.  They are not time traveling because they can’t. They can only move forward on the zipcord. And they are all together at the same point on the same zipcord.

Their zipcord is surrounded by a green screen. The green screen can be the island, LA, a flashback, a flash forward, 1977 etc.  When they “time travel,” our losties do not leave their spot on their zip cord. Rather, the green screen around them changes to a different “time.” That’s why our losties all experience time at the same rate no matter where they “are.” [It's three years for the Oceanic Six and three years for Sawyer and Juliet.]

This is how the storytelling works. This is our characters’ existence on LOST.

Miles explains what Team LOST is up to when he and Hurley argue about paradoxes in “Whatever Happened, Happened.”

Here’s a handy-dandy example of what I mean.

_______________________________________________________________

SCENE: IMAGINARY DEPICTION OF OUR LOSTIES TRAVELING THROUGH TIME.

GREEN SCREEN – 2004

Hurley, Jack, Kate, Sawyer, and Juliet hang together on the zip cord of their existence/reality. They continue forward, always forward, as they talk.

• JACK: Shove over. Give us some room, will ya?
• JULIET:  It’s not like I’m hiding it! There isn’t any! (to Kate)  He’s so grumpy since you got back.
• KATE: Tell me about it.

A flash of light. BAM!!

GREEN SCREEN – 2006

• SAWYER:  Damn! I hate when that happens!
• HURLEY:  Me too.
• SAWYER:  Oh no you don’t! Turn that way. Puke on Mr. Happy.
• JACK:  Thanks a lot!
• KATE:  Is that a runway on Hydra Island?
• JULIET:  Yeah.

Flash of light. BAM!

GREEN SCREEN – 1977

• KATE:  That’s irony in a nutshell.
• JULIET:  Maybe you should’ve eased off the sex and escaping and hauled more rocks.

Jack and Sawyer trade looks.

• JACK:  Not this again.

Dharma Initiative members wave at them as they go by.

• HURLEY:  Dude! Check it out!

Flash of light. BAM!

GREEN SCREEN – 1988

Kate and Juliet squabble in the background.

• HURLEY:  Did you see the ‘fro on that guy?
• SAWYER:  The 70s! I hope we land there!
• JACK:  You miss bell bottoms?
• SAWYER:  Try NO bottoms! I can almost smell the weed. . .(to the girls)  Will you two knock it off? You’re hurtin’ my head!
• JACK:  No, that might be your nosebleed. Lemme see.

Flash of light. BAM!

GREEN SCREEN – 2004

• SAWYER:  Hands off, Doogie! I’m fine.
• KATE:  Sure, he’ll put his hands on you –
• HURLEY:  SNAP!
• JULIET:  You got more than I did. The man’s a nun.
• KATE:  A junkie nun.
• JACK:  OH. MY. GOD! Can you POSSIBLY talk about…

Flash of light. BAM!

GREEN SCREEN -1977

• JACK:  …ANYTHING else?!
• HURLEY:  Dude, I don’t feel so good.
• KATE:  We’ve stopped. Quick! Jump!

They scramble off the zip cord hangy thingy. Hurley vomits. They all wipe blood from their noses.

• JULIET:  That was close. This is 1977?
• SAWYER:  Yes! Thank you God!
• JULIET:  Maybe you can help Jack loosen up.
• KATE:  And put out.
• JACK:  Your harpy-like ways are so appealing. Why didn’t I notice before?  I have to have you. Take your pants off right now.
• KATE:  Ha ha.

Kate and Juliet head to the DI compound.

• JACK: (mutters) B*****s.
• HURLEY:  I feel better. Where are we?
• SAWYER:  (grins big) Hugo, my friend, we are in heaven.

They follow the girls. Jack trails behind.

END SCENE

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From the perspective of the island (the green screen), Hurley throws up in 1977 and the girls argue in 1988. But since our losties exist in their own linear time, for them, the argument takes place before Hurley pukes.

So how is that possible?  If you can’t change the past, and you can’t change the future, and you can’t change yourself (this “universe” will course correct to keep your identity/ghost intact), but you can skip back and forth “in time” on this island when the Frozen Donkey Wheel is turned, then what gives?

What’s making the green screen change?

Remember, the worlds of LOST (island and flash) are REAL, but they are not PHYSICAL worlds.

AMY’S THEORY, MEET “THE CONSTANT.” “THE CONSTANT,” AMY’S THEORY.

I got this idea from a show called FRINGE. In the pilot, an FBI agent needs information from her dying, comatose boyfriend.  Her kooky scientist pal hooks her and her boyfriend up to a machine that will synchronize the frequencies of their brain function.  He dopes her up and puts her in a deprivation tank.  When the monitor shows the two brains syncing to the same frequency, the agent and her boyfriend connect in a mutual dream world, an environment created using memories from both of them (definitely keep this in mind for later).  They talk (mostly he’s like um, what’s going on, sweetie?), and she gets him to “show her” the guy who tried to kill them both.  He shows her by thinking about it. They both experience his memory of the bad guy.  The kooky scientist wakes her up, and she jets off to save the day.

In “The Constant,” Desmond finds a grumpy and poorly coiffed Daniel (same hair as Horace) at Oxford University.  He’s looking for some answers and hopefully some way to keep his brain from exploding and killing him.  He tells Daniel to set the numbers at 2.342 oscillating at eleven hertz.  So yes, I googled it, and I found the most EXCELLENT LOST fan blog that had everything I needed!  [PowellsBooks.blog] I won’t bog you down too much (I highly encourage you to visit the site, tho), but basically J.Wood (our blogger) was poking around in “The Constant” and found an interesting connection to an author named Robert Anton Wilson.

Turns out Wilson was fascinated with quantum physics, specifically with those that postulated the nature of reality as perceived by the physical brain. I put a nice long quote at the end of this post, but excerpts from Wilson’s work are most useful for us here.

“Consciousness ‘is a non-local function of the universe as a whole, and our brains are only local transceivers.’”

“He categorizes thoughts/consciousness (software) apart from its physical housing (hardware), and the function of the two is the self. He developed : “YOUR HARDWARE IS LOCALIZED: BRAIN CELLS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. YOUR SOFTWARE IS NON-LOCALIZED: POINT-EVENTS EVERYWHERE, EVERYWHEN.” What we consider to be the self is the conjunction of these points.”

“‘What Bell seemed to prove was that quantum effects are ‘non-local’ in [physicist David] Bohm’s sense; that is, they are not just here or there, but both. What this apparently means is that space and time are only real to our mammalian sense organs; they are not really real.’”

Hm.

THEN I found an online copy of Mr. Dean Cvetkovic’s Ph.D. thesis in electronic and biomedical engineering (from MIT. For those of you who don’t know, Ph.D.’s from MIT in any kind of engineering are about as prestigious as it gets).  His doctoral thesis is called, “Eletromagnetic and Audio-Visual Stimulation of the Human Brain at Low Frequencies.” If you turn to Chapter 8 “Conclusion and Future Research,” you’ll read:

The base establishment of this research investigation consisted on technologically mimicking the natural properties of light, sound and electromagnetic fields for exposure of human brain. The results from this research investigation firmly suggested that auditory, visual and electromagnetic stimulation could influence human conscious mood states and alter EEG activity by a possible transition from higher to lower EEG activity, characterized with the wakefulness-sleep transition. The findings from these results have also strengthen the consistency and solid evidence that changes in human EEG activity could be elicited when stimulated to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields.

Now maybe all that mumbo jumbo doesn’t impress you very much, but what Dr. Cvetkovic says here basically amounts to this:

“It is possible to zap a physical brain with low levels of EMF and put it into a dream state.”

Oh yeah, baby! I’m happy!

If you combine these two concepts with the groovy mind sync on FRINGE and Daniel’s little fried- rat-brain experiment, you can come up with what I think might be a HUGE interpretive tool for how the island works and what it does to our losties.

WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY JACOB?

First, I gotta share a few excerpts with you:

Recap and Analysis: The End of “The End” of LOST

Why would pulling the plug make a difference? I dunno. However, I do know that when Desmond walked through the water and the light [in Scooby-Doo Cave], it looked a LOT like the EMF Box Blasting Moment. Remember what Widmore says? Desmond has an immunity to eletromagnetic radiation [EMR]. If he is exposed to a deadly level of EMR after he pulls the plug [which knocks him down and out], then the EMR could be the light we see. After he pulls the plug, the water disappears and the EMR is changed, or, more specifically, diffused and amplified.

Now, remember what MIB/Adam tells Mother/Eve? He and his peeps dig a well and find a place “where the water focuses the light.” This is not completely off the mark. EMF’s or electromagnetic fields (created by eletromagnetic radiation) can be stablized, even neutralized when they come in contact with negative ions.

Do you know where the highest concentration of negative ions can be found in nature? Any place with moving air and water and/or concentrated sunlight — like a BEACH or a WATERFALL (SOURCE HERE).

Amy Smashes Through the Looking Glass: Origins of the LOST World

This following is a mock up metaphor of what I think the technology of the island or The System is and how it works.  It’s just fun speculation, but it works really well with what we’re doing here.

Originally, the applied research, still in the experimental phase and led by Dr. X, was intended to help the mentally ill.  It would work like rapid detox for a junkie.  The patient would be “put under,” “hooked up” to “the system” and given “self-healing” mental exercises in a therapeutic, safe, controlled and “realistic” way.  These “therapy” sessions were called “journeys” (An Australian doctor even called them “walkabouts,” because, he said, they were” spiritual journeys through the wilderness to heal deep emotional wounds and discover the true self.”).  They called the “realistic mini-worlds” they created “environments.”

[But there were too many problems. So they decided to fix it.]

The human brain is pretty dense.  It’s got plenty of room in there.  Let’s work with this EMF frequency thing and see what we come up with.  They figured out if they created a stable  EMF (electromagnetic field)  around the patient’s brain/body just before they entered the system (like a CT scan) and maintained that frequency during the entire session, any memories the patient had of the session would be stored in the brain with a different frequency trigger.

That is, the human brain works within a certain frequency range.  The body creates biochemical energy that works best in our given environment.  That’s why exposure to unnatural EMF’s (like from home electronics or cell phones) are blamed for weakening our bodies’ biochemical and molecular processes and making us more susceptible to cellular malfunction and immune system problems (which lead to CANCER).

What these turkeys did was fix it so if they zapped your brain/body with X frequency during your time in the system, the memories you experienced during your “journey” would be stored in your brain at X frequency.  Only exposure to X frequency would activate those memories, so they would be unable to confuse you in everyday life, but they would still be stored in your brain.  In their thinking, they were creating repressed memories in their patients.

After trying this out on a few SUICIDE victims (ARGH!), they discovered something they thought was pretty darn cool.  The memories they confined to this frequency were cumulative.  That is, each time they hooked up the collection of what they called “phased memories,” the “projection” (their words) of the patient within the system remembered what happened last time it was visiting but nothing about the patient’s experiences between sessions.

OOhhh! Here’s an oldie but goodie!

Why Walt is Special 4/05/08

Think of the island as a radio signal transmitter. I know that there are many different ideas about what the island actually is or actually can do, but I’m sticking with this one to explain an endgame theory. When Rose visited the healer in Australia, he noted that there were different places on the earth that had a kind of energy. Some people, like him, could channel or use this energy. In his case, he could use the energy to heal. I think of our island in that way. The energy is like a signal, originating from the island itself. I think of Jacob as having the ability to tap into and use that energy or signal.

I think Jacob is looking for people who have the physical ability (due to brain development, psychic energy, genetic predisposition, whatever) to tune into his radio signal. That is, their brains are set to Jacob’s “station.” The people that our survivors see are not real, and they are not the smoke “monster” changing shape, but they are projections of this signal from Jacob’s mind to theirs. The images are filtered through the receiver’s brain, and, therefore, their memory or experiences. This is why they see people they know or have seen before.

This also explains the variation between what our survivors can “see.” Claire and Charlie can only see dreams, and these are jumbled and surreal half messages that lend themselves to delusional interpretations by others. There were clear messages in both Claire and Charlie’s dreams that became muddled with their memories and anxieties. Jack can see the physical form of his father, but can’t speak to him or hear him speak. Sawyer and Kate can sense a subtext in the animals around them, but are unable to see or hear anything. However, Mr. Ecko can see, converse and recognize the image he sees as not what it seems. Even Boone, when given what we presume is a psychotropic by Locke, can see and experience a full on hallucination which I believe is from a signal by Jacob. [Turns out it was a signal by Mock Locke!]

The fact that a few survivors can share the same visions (Shannon and Sayid see Walt together) only means that they both have the ability to receive the signal, nothing more. Shannon’s vision of Walt soaking wet (the first two times she sees him) makes sense because, in her mind, the only way he can be in front of her is if he came off the boat and out of the ocean.

WOW!

Okay, let’s add to Hurley to our list.  Hurley is special because he can see the dead.  KIB (kid in black) has that same ability.  Ben, Eko, Jack — many of our losties can “see” people, places and things that aren’t there.

Last thing:  Daniel Faraday’s rat brain zapper.

OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB WE WEAVE

Think back to what Christian tells Jack in “The End”:

• Jack:  Where are we, Dad?
• Christian: This is a place that you – that you all made together so you could find one another. The most important part of your life – was the time that you spent with these people. That’s why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone, Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you.

Remember, NOTHING we’ve seen on LOST is taking place in a physical world — not the sideways, not the island, not the FB or FF, not LA (off island).  None of that is PHYSICAL.  However, as Christian says: “it is all real. Everything that’s happened to you is real.”  The sideways does not have to be a physical world to be a real world.

The only way that that the sideways world can be “real” and “made together” by “you all,” meaning our losties, is if it is made by their “real” minds — just like our girl and her comatose boyfriend did on FRINGE.  The only way it can be made together is if their minds are somehow connected — if they are all on the same page.  If they are in sync.

If they are all on the same FREQUENCY.

We’ll explore more of this concept in Chapter 3 when we discuss how identity works on LOST, so let’s just stick to the basics:  location.  Remember, our losties are all on a zipcord, and they are all in the same exact SPOT on the zipcord.  As they zip down their zipcord of linear existence, the green screen around them changes:  island, flashback, flashforward, L.A. etc.

Our question remains: how does the green screen change?

The answer is:  I think Scooby-Doo Cave, where the “water focuses the light” is generating an electromagnetic field [EMF]. A stable EMF.  The frequency of the Scooby Doo Cave EMF determines what the green screen is for our losties.   I think the CAVE EMF cycles its frequencies naturally (flashes), and I think that process was “corrupted” by whatever Jacob did to the CAVE EMF.  When that happened, the effect on our losties was the flashbacks and flashforwards.  When Desmond unplugs the island, Jack is able to kill Mock Locke (undoing Jacob’s “mistake”).  When Jack replugs the island, it resets the EMF field back into its natural cycle.

So the green screen is changed by the “heart” of the island.  The frequency of the EMF created at Scooby Doo Cave determines what’s on the green screen [including all the flashes (back, forward and sideways)].

Still balking? That’s okay. I totally understand.  However, ask yourself how Ben moved the island.  If our losties minds are synched to the island’s frequency (our losties are on Island Channel 4), then that’s their reality.  That’s their green screen.  However, if Ben changes the Island to Channel 8, and you stay on Island Channel 4, oh, I dunno, because you are in a helicopter in the air and don’t have physical contact with the island as it changes channels, guess what happens?

The island disappears right before your eyes.

Ben didn’t “move” the island. He changed the green screen channel!  That’s why the peeps on the island get “jet lag” when they are “skipping through time.” They are unable to adjust to the changing frequencies before the island changes again.  Result? Brain bleed and frequency crossover  [Not good].

That’s also why Hurley and KIB (kid in black) can see the dead. Their minds are able to tap into their frequency.

I’m so glad we brought up Hurley! He is an excellent example of what makes this entire time travel thing so convincing as a distraction.  Just because our losties are all on the same point on the zipcord, doesn’t mean they are all on the same frequency.

The very best analogy I could come up with, besides the zipcord/green screen one, was that of a train.  If we are all on the same train, we are all moving at the same rate at the same time.  If we are all in the same car on that train, then we are all on the same frequency.  If I leave that car and head to another, now I’m on a different frequency.  Maybe you come with me. Now we’re both in the same car; we’re both on the same frequency, BUT we are still on the train with everyone else. Even though we can’t see them, even though we can’t interact with them, everyone else is still on the train with us. They are just in a different car.

That’s why there’s NO TIME TRAVEL on LOST.  Our losties’ train, their existence, is still on track, no matter what car they are in.  So if the dining car is the island, when Kate has a flashback, she’s left the island car and gone to the flashback car.  When she crosses paths with another losties in her flashback, that means that lostie is in the flashback car with her (STILL ON THE TRAIN).

How we doin’?  Hangin’ in there?  Good show!  Don’t let the analogies get you down! Just think of the train or the zipcord and roll with it.  In our next chapter, we will be discussing character:  who’s who, and how our losties work their identities within The System.

UP NEXT:  Chapter 3: Who’s Who — When, How and Why.

QUOTES/NOTES:

quote from Powell’s Books.blog

One thing that had a profound effect on RAW was when physicist John S. Bell published his theorem on nonlocality in 1964. The match showed that at the quantum level, particles can effect each other, or communicate, even at great distances. The physical particles had location in space and time, but the information communicated seemed to be everywhere and everywhen. “What Bell seemed to prove was that quantum effects are ‘non-local’ in [physicist David] Bohm’s sense; that is, they are not just here or there, but both. What this apparently means is that space and time are only real to our mammalian sense organs; they are not really real.”

In a 1993 interview published in the book Mavericks of the Mind, RAW builds on this idea with his hunch that consciousness “is a non-local function of the universe as a whole, and our brains are only local transceivers. As a matter of fact, it’s a very strong hunch, but I’m not going to dogmatize about it.” RAW later developed this non-local notion of consciousness in his book about Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model of consciousness, Prometheus Rising; he categorizes thoughts/consciousness (software) apart from its physical housing (hardware), and the function of the two is the self. He developed : “YOUR HARDWARE IS LOCALIZED: BRAIN CELLS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. YOUR SOFTWARE IS NON-LOCALIZED: POINT-EVENTS EVERYWHERE, EVERYWHEN.” What we consider to be the self is the conjunction of these points. More is to be made of this later, but this whole problem of being unstuck gives a new meaning to “double-consciousness,” which may not be far from the mark.

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