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Lecture 4:
AMONG THE DIMENSIONS
Adam Blatner

This is the fourth in a series given to the Senior University Georgetown in the Fall of 2014.


Let me fend off critics who may accuse me of being wacky, crazy, mad, etc. This is fiction, people! I'm using a literary trope to stretch people's imaginations! Okay? Lay off.

Having made the requisite disclaimers, here we go. As a few of you know and some have guessed, I'm not altogether human. Mainly I'm just this guy, ordinary, professional, earned degrees, very reality based. Indeed, to quote the comedian Mel Brooks who in the late 1960s played a psychiatrist on a record he made with Carl Reiner, Mel said, in character, "Yep, I'm the guy who says who's crazy and who's just (wink) foolin' around." So I'm both. I'm a reputable both feet on the ground reality-bound psychiatrist AND I'm a bit of an elf myself, playing with this funny category of "reality," as have done many a comedian and cartoonist.

Today I will take you on a trip upon my magic flying ship (to coin a phrase from Bob Dylan's song, "Tambourine Man" in the late 1960s). We will travel not into space---so three-dimensional! Height, width, depth, measurable quantities!---but between dimensions, where human notions of size and time are not basic principles. Very psychedelic, surrealistic, mind-stretching, as I said I'd do. The main thing here is to use your imaginations.

I'll try to make the transitions plausible, so you don't become too disoriented. Just pretend that we could have a spaceship of sorts that traveled not to other planets, but to other dimensions. Not up or down, in or out, but in an imaginative sense, just... over... there! Ah!  (Sort of like over the rainbow.)

The Transdimensional "Vehicle."

I can't just say use your imagination. We have to go in a vehicle which I have had help in building---well, my friends the elves and extraterrestrials do the engineering---I just suggest some specifications: Not to disorienting to tiny human minds, now....

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