I'm a musician first and foremost. I wrote a little in high school and always enjoyed it, but I never seriously pursued it. Now, for some weird reason, for the past year or so I've incrementally been developing an idea for a story. But not having been exposed much to fantasy or sci-fi, I'm not sure if this is just a rehash - and perhaps a poor one at that. Can anyone tell me if this has been done already?

My idea, loosely relies on the notion that the earth and universe, life as we know it as 4 dimensional, exists as thoughts within a poly-dimensional being. Physics, mass, energy - all properties of the infrastructure as we are physiologically built to understand it, interact with it. Our deaths, are more or less "forgotten thoughts".

Upon our deaths, being "forgotten", we remain unprocessed by the conscious systems of this being. Our souls being the summation of our existence, we propogate ourselves by accessing what we might relate to as the subconscious. Our "afterlife" therefore, is our self propogated existence via the subconscious of the poly-dimensional being we exist within - along with other thoughts that have suffered the same fate. We don't do this deliberately, rather coincidentally, it's a relative subconcious or "instinctive" intent on the part of every life form.

We experience this as a somewhat similar world to Earth, but since it is the summation of all thoughts propogating themselves, it takes on qualities and characteristics of other worlds we've never seen. So, grass and trees may be present in some form, but also animals and minerals we've never seen - size and shape shockingly out of scale with our experience. The idea being that these life forms could come from alternate universes - or just simply worlds in our own universe that exist in another time - the beings of which, just like us, can only draw from their own experience to create this afterlife. We don't really know for sure.



Anyway, that's a loose summary of the foundation of my idea. My story doesn't dwell on this and obviously would never be spelled out quite so crudely and is more of an explanation saved for the end - helps to explain the "supernatural" nature of this existence, but really isn't the point of the story.

Is this a rip-off? Has someone already traversed this ground? Did they take it much further or...??