From 3D to ?siD

I've been pondering the subject of psychic powers and magic. Here's an odd and possibly even horrifying look at how they might work.

To understand the idea we need to think about the differences between 2D and 3D. Imagine a 2D world, strung across the room you're now in and perfectly immaterial. Imagine tiny 2D lifeforms getting on with their lives inside, moving across the surface and around each other of course because they can't go over or under.

Now imagine you step up to that flat world and make contact with the very tip of your finger. What's that going to look like from their point of view? Maybe an area of their world fills with an alien material, and friends and colleagues vanish.

Keep pushing and as the finger widens from the tip, the area of destruction in their world widens, and more bystanders are lost. If the world isn't perfectly immaterial, some of those individuals might even get pushed out of their world, either on or in your finger. What would happen if you blew on the world? Or sneezed?

Now imagine you did the same with a spoon, cruelly placing it parallel to the surface of the now panicking world and pushing both the end of the handle and the cup into contact. Now the weirdness manifests in two places, one smaller, one larger. Imagine what would happen if one of those 2D lifeforms could climb out of the world at one of the points and re-enter at another. How would that look to his buddies?

How about if one species of 2D lifeforms evolved 3D extensions? Like the spoon, they could make contact with another point simultaneously. They could goose each other pretty well. It would make them better hunters too. If natural selection is the driver of evolution, they might well be expanding into more dimensions.

Ours? Not necessarily. According to the current 'best' model, M-theory, our universe has 11 dimensions. Not the dimensions the scope of fiction tries to cover, but physical dimensions, like the two in 2D and three in 3D.

What if we evolved too? Well, who's to say we didn't, haven't or won't? In a fictional world, no one. So how about the idea that our bodies have a presence in another dimension? Maybe the mind is the connective tissue? Remember, there's apparently a lot of capacity in there not being used. Yup. Maybe we've got bits of us we don't know about waving around up there now, completely out of control?

But what if we could learn to control those extensions? What if we could use them to interfere with other parts of the 3D, in the same way as those little 2D guys? We could play with each other's minds, move objects, latch onto things in the beyond and catapult ourselves to new places. That sounds familiar.

Think of a power, any power. Name a spell. Could it be caused by this?

I've coined a silly name for the idea, at least provisionally, the one in the title. Not 3D, but psiD, or rather ?siD to make clear there's plenty of mystery involved.

So where's that possible horror I mentioned?

Imagine if creatures existed in those other dimensions. They might be watching us flail through their space, but not recognise it for what it is. Or maybe they recognise it, but the scales of size and time mean they can't do anything about, yet at least. Or worse, that they're in the process of reacting and a proboscis is stabbing down at us right now.

Maybe one of their dimensions is also one of ours? If so, they're already here.