Did a big crunch predate the big bang?

Let's speculate on what happened before everything expanded.

After a high dose of DMT I learnt that our rationalization of the Universe is just a grain of sand in an infinite desert mostly governed by what we could call Chaos. The so-called "expansion" is no more than an illusion, a mirage, only visible from certain places of the subgroup of entities that humans nominated "spacetime" (which is in fact yet another illusion, or if you prefer, human interpretation).

From ancient times Humans tried hard to find patterns everywhere. They used to see the sky at night, and started drawing lines between stars to crate complex figures, and then they named these figures. The position of these figures changed in harmony with the seasons: this was a significant discovery, that helped them to improve their life. For this reason they started to be in love with the patterns. Some people even started to practice ceremonies: they wanted to show how thankful they felt for this divine unidirectional communication... and the real passionate wanted to obtain more information from the sky, they wanted to learn more about these Gods. After a while they created tools to try understand them, and they found that it was much complex than they first though. Science is a branch of this school: they believe in it because it makes their life more predictable and secure. They still believe in the figures, but now are a bit more abstract.

The reality that humans will never be able to understand, but maybe at some point accept, is that the Universe is not intrinsically coherent. "Before" the "expansion" there was nothing.