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We are talking about a situation similar to the famous film The Others. In that movie, the characters believe that their house is haunted by ghosts, but by the end of the film, they realize that they themselves are the ghosts. This theory says exactly the same thing: the place we think of as the “real world” may actually be a copy, while the Upside Down—the place we see as “horrifying”—may in fact be the original world itself.

1. The Great Accident: The Collision of Two Worlds Normally, there were two separate worlds: ours, and the strange void that Henry fell into (Dimension X). When Eleven opened the gate in 1983, these two worlds were not merely connected by a doorway; they effectively collided with one another.

2. The Original World Became the Upside Down At the moment of this collision, our original world (Hawkins in 1983) suffered severe damage and became, in a sense, “corrupted.” According to the theory, the dark, dusty, monster-filled place we call the Upside Down is actually the ruined version of our original 1983 world. This is why time there is frozen in 1983—because the original world “died” on that day.

3. The World We Live In Is Only a “Copy” So what is the bright world where everything appears normal and where the characters live in the series? According to the theory, that world is a brand-new copy that was automatically created at the moment of the collision. In other words, while the original world was destroyed, the universe created a backup (a copy), and our characters unknowingly settled into this “fake” or “new” world.

Joseph Quinn, Catherine the Great Screening 2019.