Star Trek: 10 Strangest Space Anomalies You May Have Forgotten

Chaotic space is a phenomenon that occurs all across the Milky Way galaxy, where random sections of space experience fluctuations in the laws of physics. Inside these zones, fundamental truths about reality like the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and the charges of particles rapidly change and become much more ambiguous.

When Voyager became engulfed in chaotic space in the episode The Fight, they flew in what they thought was a straight path to try to escape, only to find that they were actually travelling in a circle. Distortions of gravity damaged the hull as they moved, so, with no clear path out of the anomaly, they were completely trapped.

Chakotay experienced several hallucinations throughout the episode, and eventually the crew discovered that these hallucinations were actually caused by aliens native to chaotic space, who were trying to communicate with him to help the crew out of the anomaly by telling them exactly how to recalibrate their deflector dish. We found out at the end of the episode that the aliens chose to communicate with Chakotay because he had a dormant gene that made him predisposed to hallucinations, the same gene that caused his grandfather to lose control of his mind. This gene was suppressed before Chakotay was born to prevent him from suffering the same fate, but the aliens reactivated it in order to communicate with him through his hallucinations.