Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/21/the-jet-propelled-couch-is-the-most-interesting-psychiatric-case-in-history.html
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Sounds like a combination of John Carter of Mars and that Kevin Spacey film K-PAX.
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Now you’ve made me think about Kevin Spacey. Thanks.
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I’ve read the original case history and K-Pax did seem very similar. Although, K-PAX apparently also borrowed heavily from the Argentinian film Man Facing Southeast.
The entire book containing “The J-PC”, The Fifty-Minute Hour is a great read, partially for the “official” case-histories, and also for the unofficial one Lindner inadvertently provides for himself throughout.
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One has to wonder why he is seeing the shrink tho… it there’s no distress or danger to others, where’s the mental illness? I mean seriously most of us have t take dangerous psychoactive drugs for that kind of good time, amirite?
(Also, like :“past lives,” howcome nobody ever has another life as an assistant pig keeper or accounting clerk trainee or something? Its always lords and princesses and such…)
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As I recall, he had an important government job and his bosses found out about his “journeys.” They insisted that he see a shrink.
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Its a very very crappy remake of a truly sublime film.
I quite enjoyed K-PAX, but admittedly I might not have if I had seen the original.
It’s obviously some kind of (non-dangerous, probably?) fantasy that’s made up, consciously or not… the relative technology levels give it away. An “envelope of photographs” was really a only a relevant thing for a fairly short period in our own history, and believing that some far-off galaxy has exactly the same tech level at exactly the same time is a bit fantastic, not to mention such obvious cultural synchronization as clothes, desks and filing cabinets. More likely he has some fun miswiring in his brain that periodically affects (afflicts?) him with fantastic visions.
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In regards to “past lives,” while I don’t necessarily believe that those experiences actually reflect “past lives,” if you hang out with people who do (which I have – Mom was big into the New Age growing up), they often do describe very mundane lives. Those just don’t often get written about or published. I’ve had a “regression session” myself, and I “remembered” being a medieval doctor, which I guess is a little glamorous, and a rural widow living alone in a sod house. Both of those were obviously unconsciously fabricated, probably from movies or books I read, but neither was a prince or princess. (That said, I met more than a few Cleopatras, and only one of them had any real grasp of Roman history or politics. And you don’t have to dig hard to find any number of Aleister Crowleys online. I like to ask them about the finer points of mountain climbing, about which they are all universally ignorant).
For my part, I lost interest in past lives when I entered college, deciding that if reincarnation was real, it didn’t much matter anyway, because those people were still dead and not really me. Taking philosophy courses will do that to you.
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They found more of those Ancients communication stones?
He got to see all of Jack’s life & it drove him crazy. Jack got to see his life & found it relaxing.
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A very long time ago I was a night-shift janitor at the Kodak plant and one of my co-workers was really into out-of-body travel. He’d race through his assigned tasks and spend the rest of the shift hiding in a dark corner where he’d embark on his journeys. Never any mention of time travel or interplanetary stuff - just routine, mundane, leave the body and go scooting around the world before the morning shift kicks in.
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You know, I’ve spent my whole life trying to be that kinda weird and never made it – had to settle for writing.
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I think if I truly believed I could teleport through space and time to somewhere and somewhen far more interesting than today, I would feel horribly depressed that I couldn’t stay in that distant reality.
Occasionally I’ve felt that way with dreams. I’ll discover in my dreams that I can fly like Superman or control objects telekinetically, only to wake up to my normal boring, helpless self.
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What a coinkydink, I was literally just now reading that new novel by Susanna Clarke (who wrote Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell), which without giving too much away revolves around a closely related conceit. Perhaps reality is dissolving! That’d be a relief in many ways.
Anyway the book is good, at least based on the first half of it. If it exists in your reality you should check it out!
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I reach into my filing cabinet and take out the Engine plans.
Yes, those are the 3-electrode vacuum-globes, high-power models, since this is an older design, not yet using modulators of deoxidized Black Silica. Many aluminium lines in flex-glass. Those things there are thin carbon-impeancers, plus their required rotary-blade. Those coils there, they shift potentials using resonance, with the high-values embedded in solid quartz. But what is that thing? It’s a common, mirror-ended parametric amplifier, for invisible light signals in long flexible glass whiskers. We also use those for metal-cutting with black light, but they don’t make good weapons, except for blinding the Enemy lacking proper goggles. This here is the gravity-wave emitter stack, with the shielded radiant mineral on one end. A little version, only for attitude control, capable of lofting a couple of tons of mass. They work via gamma-rays emitted from the mineral source, passing through a long stack of metal membranes suspended in vacuum, alternating layers of beryllium and some rare metal I don’t recall, one end connected to that quartz-embeded high-potential resonator coil. Don’t be caught lacking a supply of the radiant mineral pellets, since in this application they become exhausted after a thousand-day, because of reverse-beam of the Positives, causing rapid transmutal degradation. Nobody yet licked that particular problem. The quartz disk alongside it is the radiant life-gauge, becoming visibly darkened when replacement-time is near.
Now you return to late-40s America! But you don’t bother to take out any patents. It’s all fantasy, of course. (It would be very bad for your mental health, if you built and tested any of these devices, and found that, after all, THEY WERE REAL.)
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and then you return to Earth …and write it all down! In Xana-du the Kublai Kahn his stately pleasure Dome did decree…
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I just finished Permutation City by Greg Egan which feels related but isn’t really?
Being assigned to read The Fifty Minute Hour was one of the high points of my college career.
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Devastated by PTSD, Billy Pilgrim claims he was kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians
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