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By Root 519 0

but not monkeys. Only a being with a sense of “self” can do this, it is supposed. One way of testing for this sense-of-self capacity is through mirrors. Does an animal looking at its reflection in a mirror recognize the reflection as itself? Intriguing experiments have been done in which elephants are presented with elephant-sized mirrors, having first had a visible mark painted on one side of the head and an invisible mark painted on the other side to exclude the sense of touch as a factor. If the elephant sees the mark on its reflected image and then touches the real mark on its head with its trunk, it must know that the reflection is “itself.” Often, before coming to the realization that the reflection is indeed itself, an elephant will look behind the mirror. So will a human child.

If you can image—or imagine—yourself, you can image—or imagine—a being not-yourself; and you can also imagine how such a being may see the world, a world that includes you. You can see yourself from outside. To the imagined being, you may look like a cherished loved one or a potential friend, or you may look like a tasty dinner or a bitter enemy. When a young child is imagining what’s under the bed, it is also imagining what it might represent to that unseen creature: usually prey. It is possibly not a good idea to tell the little ones that they look good enough to eat. Frisky the Cat wouldn’t be bothered by such a statement, lacking as she does a capacity for empathy, but Charlie the Child may well have hysterics.

One of the more brilliant innovations of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds is that it so clearly sets forth what we puny human beings might look like to godlike intellects far superior to ours. From that time to this, we’ve been told many stories along these lines. Or, as Shakespeare put it, about gods thought of as somewhat closer to home than Mars: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,/They kill us for their sport.”

Other worlds with strange inhabitants have been numerous in human mythologies and literatures. I’d speculate that, including all the fantasylands devised by children that never see publication, there are many more imaginary locations than there are real ones. Whether they are places we go after death—good or bad—or homes of the gods or supernaturals, or lost civilizations, or planets in a galaxy far, far away, they all have this in common: they aren’t here and now. They may be long ago or far away; they may be situated in that nebulous region, “the future”; they may even be given real estate in “another dimension” of the space-time we ourselves inhabit. The convention seems to be that other beings can pop into our living rooms from somewhere else, but they can’t drag along the entire other world from which they come. We, on the other hand, can slip through a cupboard or through a wormhole in space and find ourselves transported to their realm. Stories about encounters with other beings thus always involve travel, one way or another. Something or someone moves from “there” to “here,” or we ourselves move from “here” to “there.” Portals, gateways, waystations, and vehicles abound, as in—come to think of it—ancient myths, with their cave entrances and chariots of fire.

Our ability to conceive of imaginary places—a somewhere that isn’t immediately tangible in the way that the dinnertime pork chop is tangible—appears very early in our individual lives. At first—when we’re extremely young—it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind: objects hidden from our view simply disappear, then appear again. It takes us a while to figure out that the rubber duck that went behind the curtain is still somewhere rather than nowhere.

Once we’ve decided things go to another place rather than simply ceasing to exist, we find it hard to shake that notion. Being “here,” then suddenly not being here: is that where the concepts of, for instance, afterlives and teleportation originate? Does Star Trek’s Scotty derive his ability to beam people up from the discovery that the rubber duck in our early games of peek-a-boo was still