THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
05/30/03 -- Vol. 21, No. 48

Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.

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Topics:
	Science with Your Eyes Closed (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
	This Week's Reading (TIME AND AGAIN) (book comments by
		Evelyn C. Leeper)

===================================================================

TOPIC:  Science with Your Eyes Closed (comments by Mark R. Leeper)

Last week I was discussing those odd images one gets on the inside
of ones eyelids when one closes their eyes at the end of the day.

When I look I see dark and light areas.  I see textures.
Sometimes there are stripes of light that cross the darkness like
the light from venetian blinds.  One of the common patches is to
see a little circle of light in the upper right.  As I watch it it
gets larger until it fills my while field of vision.  But at this
point it is no longer as bright.  It in fact becomes the dark
background.  And on this dark background there is another circle
of light.  And it starts taking over my whole field of vision.
The cycle typically takes about four seconds.

Even the regions I see are usually not uniform.  There are
textures to them.  In fact what I am seeing while abstract, seems
really complex.  If I was to paint a picture of it, and I never
could, there would be a lot of detail.  But I never could paint a
picture because I could never hold onto an image for more than a
split second.  The images are in constant motion and I have no
power to stop them from moving away, like clouds only much faster.

This raises the question do I have control over the images?  Well
the answer is yes and no.  I have limited control.  I have tried,
but I cannot change major patterns.  But if I try really hard I
can sculpt a letter A out of the light regions.  If I let it go it
fades into the background.

I get a frequent image of a relatively bright patch at the bottom
of the picture.  That's interesting, isn't it?  These people who
report bright lights as part of near-death experiences may get a
similar effect not too different by just closing their eyes in a
dark room.  Perhaps part of the experience of dying is the optic
nerve starting to play tricks.

I probably still see these images during the day if I close an eye
but the image of real light is so much stronger it washes out the
dark image I am seeing behind my closed eye.  Now that raises
other interesting questions I have not answered.  Suppose I close
my left eye and open right eye.  I am getting one dark image
behind my left eyelid.  If I reverse I am probably getting a
different image behind my right eyelid.  If I concentrate I can
just barely see enough to verify that.  Yet at night when I close
both eyes, I certainly get the impression that I am seeing just
one image.  But perhaps there are two images fighting for
dominance.  Am I really seeing a left eye image and a right eye
image superimposed?  Is my mind just unifying these into a single
image?  If it were two superimposed images, how would it be
different if I had been blind in one eye since birth?  Would I be
getting only one image because I am not used to binocular vision?
Does someone who is blinded in one eye still get these phantom
shadow images from where the eye was?  Or does the brain
automatically unify all the dark images into a single image?

And another big question that will be very difficult to answer: Do
other people get the same effect?  Unfortunately there are no good
tools to describe the experience and so there is no good way to
compare the experience with that of other people.

There are obviously more questions than answers.  Certainly this
is a field of scientific research that costs nothing and people
can easily fit experiments into their bedtime schedule.  I
frequently play with my images when I am going to sleep.  I have
to lie there with my eyes shut anyway and frequently looking at
this free light show puts me to sleep.  [-mrl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

Our library science fiction discussion group just read Jack
Finney's TIME AND AGAIN.  This is a book about a man who takes
part in a time-travel project involving living in a place designed
to be just like the destination time and place (think "1900 House"
or "Frontier House" or "Manor House").  In this case, Simon Morley
lives in an apartment in the Dakota which is exactly as it was in
1882, and so manages to transport himself back to then.  The
consensus was that Finney was too enamored of the time--the
details were at times overwhelming--and that there was really very
little science fiction content.  I felt if he could have written a
straight historical novel set in that time, he would have done
that instead.

The back blurbs bear this out, I think.  "Would you like to travel
back in time to a better, simpler world?"  Better or simpler
according to whom?  Morley gets to run around any hinderance
because he's male, and white, and knows about the era.  Come to
think of it, that's a major problem with most time-travel stories:
the protagonist is always so conveniently prepared.  I mentioned
this last week with FALLAM'S SECRET, but it goes way back.  The
Connecticut Yankee was certainly knowledgeable about all sorts of
technology, but if you went back in time, could you build a forge?
And L. Sprague de Camp's hero in LEST DARKNESS FALL just happens
to speak Latin.  Poul Anderson has been one of the few to treat
the topic more realistically (in "The Man Who Came Early"), but as
that story shows, you don't get a very exciting tale that way.

(A similar notion, though not dealing with time travel, is to be
found in Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's "Mute Inglorious
Tam".)

Another blurb (from the "Philadelphia Inquirer") describes TIME
AND AGAIN as a "Jules Verne-like fantasy", indicating a complete
ignorance of the type of work Verne wrote.  (Hint: Verne was very
strong on technology and pooh-poohed H. G. Wells's cavorite as
too much like magic.  What would he have made of thinking oneself
back in time?)

This book is not to be confused with BID TIME RETURN by Richard
Matheson, which was made into the film SOMEWHERE IN TIME with
Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, in which someone thinks
himself back to the 1890s and falls in love with an actress there.
Or with TIME AFTER TIME by Karl Alexander, in which H. G. Wells
uses his time machine (!) to chase Jack the Ripper into the
then-present.  It has a sequel, though, FROM TIME TO TIME.  [-ecl]

===================================================================

                                            Mark Leeper
                                            mleeper@optonline.net


             Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character
             is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
                                        -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe






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