My Theory of Time Travel in LOST

This is all pulled from a series of posts I made on a message board, so
hopefully it still makes some sense out of context.
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Oh shit, just thought of something. This whole time skipping thing means that
John's 'dreams' could really be memories, ala Desmond suddenly 'remembering'
his encounter with Danny Faraday.

Before all the time skips, John has a bunch of visionary dreams that give him
info about the island, such as how to find that plane. He thinks it's the
island communicating with him, since he hasn't experienced the time skips yet.
But once time starts skipping, John actually watches the plane crash, thus he
already knows where it is when he has those 'visions.' He just doesn't
recognize them as memories, because in his 'real time' consciousness, he
hasn't gone back to watch the plane crash yet.

Like that encounter with Goodspeed. I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of
those time skips drops John right next to Goodspeed building his cabin.

What if time uses the string analogy, and space uses the record analogy?
Imagine that the needle is 'real time' and there is a string tied to the top
of the needle. Normally space moves along the groove of the record and the
strings just stay aligned, but when the record starts skipping, the strings
bend. Then you have some special people like Desmond who can apparently bend
their string w/out the record skipping. If that makes any sense at all.

Trying to tie the record idea in with the big bang theory too. I could be
wrong on some details with how this works, but since a record always spins at
the same rate, as you get closer to the center the music has to be stretched
out to keep the tempo the same. So what if the big bang is like the start of a
record, were the 'recording' is as dense as it will ever be, and as time goes
by and the needle gets closer to the groove the 'recording' expands until you
reach the end of the record and...what next?

this would be a lot easier to illustrate with some diagrams.

Imagine a record player. The record represents space. The groove of the record
& the needle moving through it represents the linear progression of space in
time. Ignore the big bang stuff for now.

On top of the needle is a hole like the top of a sewing needle. Through that
loop billions+ strings are constantly being feed through as the needle moves
through the groove. These strings represent the consciousness of everybody
ever. Normally everything stays on course and you experience space in a linear
fashion over time.

But when Ben turns the wheel, the record starts skipping, and certain people
are now experiencing space in a non-linear fashion. As the needle skips into
the groove they appear to be moving back and forth in time, but in reality
time is still going in it's straight line and space is skipping.

Some people, like Desmond have special strings of consciousness, perhaps as a
result of exposure to large amounts of electro magnetically radiation. This
allows his string to skip outside the hole everybody else is threaded in,
without a corresponding skip in space.

There are some holes here. The needle might have to be both recording &
playing back at the same time. And why this only affects the island is another
major hole, but maybe the island is surrounded in some super advanced faraday
cage that allows it to operate on a separate space-time continuum in order to
conduct the experiments.

I was saying that the needle might need to be able to record as well as play
back. A gray area there. So as things are happening for the first time, they
are being recorded into the groove of space, but when you skip back your
actions gets recorded over something that already exists.

Still a big hole in that though, in terms of what the others in 1954 are
experiencing when these new people skip into their part of the groove.

By space I mean matter pretty much. Like the physical world. That's why I got
into the big bang stuff, to tie it into how matter/space/the universe is
supposedly expanding as time goes by.

Taking this model even further to support what happened to Desmond when he
remembered his encounter with Faraday. Say the grooves are not only recording
what is happening in time, but the collective consciousness of every single
person/string passing through the loop. So until that record skipped for the
first time, Desmond had no memory of ever encountering Faraday before he
arrived on the island.

As soon as the record skipped, the needle starts recording over history. Any
of the people who get pulled along in the skip can now alter history. Not
really change it, just add a layer if that makes sense. Everything that
happened will still happen, but now something else happened too, which Desmond
experiences as a memory.

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After watching s5e3 again, I've revised my original needle & string theory a
bit. Instead of having tons of string feeding through one needle, it now seems
more likely that each person has both a needle, and a string. The needle
represents a person's physical body, and the thread their consciousness. This
would explain why only some people on the island when the frozen donkey wheel
was turned are skipping, while people like Alpert and the others are
unaffected.

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Thoughts from Little Prince

After 70 hours, if everybody is where they need to be, I think the jumps will
stop.

Nothing that I saw this week makes me doubt the theories from last weak at
this point. I don't see any holes that aren't purposely left open as
storytelling mechanisms.

If Danielle hadn't bit the dust last season I believe she would soon be
experiencing a "memory" of meeting Jin on the beach after landing.

Definitely think Miles is Candle's kid.

I also now think that the sonic fence is actually some sort of time barrier or
something. So when Mikhail was pushed through it, he was actually getting
shoved through some sort of time jump, getting a jolt of that really bad jet
lag real quick and then "dying" like Charlotte appeared to be dead. Hole in
that theory is that Mikhail bled out his ears. Also, it doesn't make a whole
lot of sense haha.

I don't think the black smoke monster is affected by the time skips, because
it is some sort of artificial intelligence. And Ben seemed to have some
measure of control over it, and since Ben isn't around it's probably just
holed up in it's underground vents. When the smoke tried to cross the fence, I
think it didn't know how to handle a slight shift in time the fence created.

I want to know why Widmore & Ellie are supposedly with the original hostiles,
who I have been assuming are pretty much island natives, but they have British
accents. I think they are brother and sister, and eventually have a falling
out. What I've been assuming is the war between Ben & Widmore may actually be
a war between Widmore & Hawking, trying to regain control of the island.

I'm not sure if Faraday has been on the island before he landed with the
freighter crew. I think Miles & Charlotte definitely were, but I think Faraday
might only end up down in the Orchid after one of the time skips that are
going on now. I think his intentions are pretty much just scientific, there
are two forces battling for something very important and dangerous and he's
trying to play damage control. Same for Locke, except he is doing it from a
spiritual perspective.

What the 06 saw could have been the island "catching up" to real time, to a
point where the island no longer exists. It also seemed like normally the
island was not visible from open water, or else it wouldn't be so hard to
find, right?

I also think there is a chance that all the skips we are seeing actually
happened in that one bright flash that the 06 witnessed. What they saw as one
flash of light, could have been a sequence of flashes that all happened so
fast as to appear as one flash.

I think characters on the island are moving through space, appearing in spaces
that previously existed in time, but time is always moving forward.

Remember when Locke was watching the video in the orchid? The image on the
tape exists as a magnetic imprint, and when it starts scrolling back time is
still going forward, but the tape is being feed backwards through the head. I
think it's another clue towards the record analogy. That all of space and time
exists at once, and it's only your perception that determines where you are
along any of those axis's.

Oh Shit! French guys listening to the radio right before Danielle introduces
herself to Jin... anybody catch what was on the radio?

4 8 15 16 23 42!!! Numbers are back!

Also, Danielle is clutching an interesting looking book while on the raft.
Looks like we may have seen it before.