Trance Formation

Another Twilight Zone motivated “moment” from The Mike Malloy Show – August 29, 2013.

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Below is an excerpt. To read the rest of the words go here Permalink: http://www.voicesinourheads.com/2013/08/28/trance-formation/ ‎

There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Thus intoned Rod Serling at the beginning of the first episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone in 1959. It would be years before I read Kafka, Huxley, and Orwell, but I knew the territory well. Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson had already taken me there once every week for five years.

The Twilight Zone left me with powerful memories of stories of ordinary people who had somehow slipped almost casually across an unseen line, and into another world … another reality. And here we all are … 49 years after the last program was broadcast … living in The Twilight Zone. I wish we had better writers. The same plot devices from a handful of episodes are used over and over; overlap one another, and play simultaneously non-stop. And the kicker is … most people don’t even notice … and that in itself is an old Twilight Zone episode.

One of the present-day Twilight Zone episodes we’re living through is a nightmare story entitled “Resource.” It’s about a planet whose people have based their entire existence and survival upon a non-renewable resource that poisons the air, water, and land. Though the supply of this non-renewable resource is becoming increasingly scarce, the people on the planet insist on using it for almost everything they do. They burn it in their personal transportation vehicles. Their roads are made from it. They brush their teeth with toothbrushes made of it. They use it to entertain themselves and watch films and listen to music on disks made of it. They make their clothing from it. And strangest of all, they use it to produce their food.