A second possible explanation for dimensional reduction is that of asymptotic silence. General relativity exhibits so-called asymptotic silence in the vicinity of a spacelike singularity, which is the narrowing or focusing of light cones close to the Planck scale leading to a causal decoupling of nearby spacetime points. In this scenario, each point has a preferred spatial direction, and geodesics see a reduced (1 + 1)-dimensional spacetime.