One of the comments to this story was: "I dunno -- you can get the same results described herein by smoking too much weed. Fun story, though."

My personal experience is that these "slightly different timelines" can be arrived at via altered states. Only recently I experienced a visual of entering a "wormhole" and understood that I had arrived at the end in a slightly different place/time/space. (This was before coming across this story) . At the time, I wondered why I would even want to do this...it had occurred spontaneously.