At right angles to reality

Picture a street scene with buildings, plants, vehicles and so forth. There are then little changes, like the direction of the breeze and the position and exact nature of nearby litter, then the identities or positions of the people at adjacent tables at a cafe. Later, the plants around them change - a Sanseviera instead of a Ficus, for example - along with the clothes and hairstyles of the people. Later still, the fashions change, the names of the businesses, the kinds of cars, but not their age. More time passes as the nature of the buildings change, then the level and type of technology in the scene fluctuates wildly along with their physical features such as hair and skin colour, shapes of noses and lips, stature and build. Then their actual species morphs variously into other kinds of anthropoid ape. The street becomes a forest with increasingly alien-looking flora and fauna, like living jewelled helicopters and orange pulsating trees or organisms based on triangular symmetry. The sun changes colour and size and the forest is replaced by oceans, deserts and then cratered lunar landscapes, terrains of multicoloured ice with pink skies and so forth. Finally, the scene disappears entirely to be replaced by a starfield, the stars themselves shifting in colour and magnitude, then there is just blackness.

If universes are parallel and represent all possibilities, then the more probable ones can be thought of as spatially closer to this one and the less probable ones further away, and the further back the points of divergence were, the more distant these universes are. We are seeing a cross-section of the multiverse along the time axis, so we think of these universes as parallel. Another way of looking at the multiverse is as perpendicular. This is an example of a view of a perpendicular universe, at right angles to reality.