Worlds within Worlds

Abstract

In his short story, The Damned Thing, the nineteenth-century American writer Ambrose Bierce describes the encounter of two beings from different planes of reality. In the tale, a lone hunter and his dog are scouting a mountain meadow one morning when what the hunter assumes to be a breeze flattens a path in the grass ahead of them at the edge of the woods. The dog cowers, whines and refuses to move. The hunter sees nothing except the crushed grass receeding in the distance. This phenomenon of the depressed grass repeats itself a number of times in the weeks that follow and each time it occurs closer to the man and dog. And every time the dog is terrified and cowers at his master’s feet. Gradually the man realizes that the dog is able to sense a presence from a plane that is beyond his own five senses which detect only the movement of the grass. The story reaches its climax when the paths of the hunter and this damned thing coincide.¹