How A Theory About A Popular Children’s Book Will Make You Believe In Time Travel And/Or Alternate Dimensions

Pictured: Bears Fucking With YOur Brain

Look at those sweet, adorable bears up there. There’s Ma Bear, Pa Bear, Brother Bear and Sister Bear. You remember them. You remember their surname, right?

Go ahead and say it out loud.

The Berenstein Bears.

Nope. Look at these book titles. You, me, everyone reading this is wrong.

Those are The Berenstain Bears. With an A. Berenstain. The easiest way to explain this is to chalk it up to poor memory. Same as how movie quotes get altered over time. Like how everyone says Jim Carrey’s quote from ‘Dumb and Dumber’ wrong.

But that’s stupid and lame and doesn’t involve parallel universes and/or time travel, and why fuck with theories that don’t use either of those explanations?

From a sketchy-ass looking Blogspot site from three years ago (I’m just seeing this) called the Wood between Worlds:

Those books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of whom clearly and distinctly remember “BerenstEin”, that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the “BerenstEin Bears” when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc.

In 1992 they were “stEin” in 1992, but in 2012 they were “stAin” in 1992.

I would like to make a modest proposal: We are all living in our own parallel universe.

And I, I would like to hear this.

The stEin universe was the world we resided in during the 1990s. Sometime after we all stopped reading kids books, that is when we were shifted in to the stAin universe. There may be more differences than just the surname of the Berenst_ins, in fact there almost certainly are more differences, and we just need to find them.

Like, maybe, body-building Carrot Top.

I am so over the moon for any theory that melds children’s books and jacked Carrot Top.

I further propose that the stEin and the stAin universes are actually just different hexadectants of the same universe: in the stEin universe, all three spatial dimensions are real and time is imaginary; in the stAin universe, all three spatial dimensions are imaginary and time is real.

WUT? Time can be real and not real? I also think hexadectants is a word you just made up to sound smart. But I’m still in.

Given the weak interaction of particles between these hexadectants, stEin and stAin both evolved in time along similar lines, staying very close to one another. Jan and Stan decided to write kids books about bears in both, for instance. But there have also been differences; like some 16th century scribe accidentally spilled some ink on a census page, changing “Berenstein” to “Berenstain” on accident, and they just left it that way.

Sure, this seems insane on face, but parallel universes aren’t that science fiction anymore. We are just beginning to wrap our heads around the implications of quantum physics. Maybe it will one day be proved that multiple universes exist, and that they can branch off at any point, anywhere, leading us all down divergent paths. Too which I say:

Meanwhile, others posit it isn’t alternate universes, but rather time travel that is to explain for all this.

My theory is this. At some point between the years 1986 and 2011, someone traveled back in time and inadvertently altered the timeline of human history so that the Berenstein Bears somehow became the Berenstain Bears. This is why everyone remembers the name incorrectly; it was Berenstein when we were kids, but at some point when we weren’t paying attention, someone went back in time and rippled our life experience ever so slightly. Perhaps other things have changed as well, but this is the only detail we’ve discovered so far.

What the goddamn dick is going on?

[Via Stranger Dimensions]