Saturday, March 11, 2006

(186) Concerning real experiences... (perhaps!?)

At 9:20 p.m. on February 14th 2003 I was amending this part of the original text of Coincidences -

In 1987, I had read a book by Ian Wilson called The After Death Experience in which Sabom’s work was also mentioned. The simplicity and importance of checking whether people who reported such experiences could verify events that took place when they were technically unconscious struck me immediately. Why all this waffle about "it could all just be a chemical reaction in the brain" when a perfect method of establishing whether it were or not existed?

It appears here between Points (41) and (42) of the Part Two: The Narrative, Epilogues and Appendices section, which itself is to be found after Entry 22. I amended the piece in inverted commas to "it could just be all in the brain". As I did so I heard a remark made on the TV kids programme which my son was watching behind me.

It was called Goosebumps and a boy said "I am in and out of the book!"
I turned to watch it carefully and saw that the plot was that a boy finds the characters in his comic magazine coming to life around him. Then one of them, "The Masked Mutant", tells the boy, called "Skipper", that he too is now a comic book character.

The boy had previously bragged that, unlike The Masked Mutant, he was real, but upon being told by the Mutant that he has become no more than blobs of ink, he gets unnerved.

He comes up with a way of defeating his adversary: he says that he IS a comic book character. He is "The Amazing Elastic Boy".
He then "lets slip" that the only way to defeat himself is through immersion in sulphuric acid.
The Masked Mutant promptly starts to turn into the acid, but only succeeds thereby in doing away with himself.

It ended with the next morning’s post bringing a new comic magazine for Skipper: The Amazing Elastic Boy. His mother had been trying to scrub patterns of coloured ink off his palm, when Skipper starts being able to "elasticate" his body, and then he exalts himself as this comic book hero; The Amazing Elastic Boy.

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