Short historia där en karaktär rör sig genom dimensioner via mentala övningar

"The Gostak and the Doshes" av Miles J. Breuer, MD ; först publicerad i Fantastiska berättelser , mars 1930 , återtryckt i ett antal antologier och i Avon Fantasy Reader nr 10, 1949 som finns tillgängligt på Internetarkiv . Det finns en recension på Alex Kasman s Matematisk fiktion -sida. Den fullständiga texten finns tillgänglig på Wikisource .

Om du läste den i en antologi runt 1985, kunde det ha varit The Treasury av Science Fiction-mästerverk (som publicerades i något förkortad form som Stora historier av science fiction ), eller kanske Fantastiska berättelser : 60 år av bästa science fiction .

Här är ett utdrag ur historien:

"According to fiction writers, to switch into the t dimension, some sort of apparatus with an electrical field ought to be necessary. It is not. You need nothing more to rotate into the t dimension than you do to stop the moon and make the trees move as you ride down the road; or than you do to turn the cubes upside down. It is a matter of relativity."

I had ceased trying to wonder or to understand.

"Show me!" was all I could gasp.

"The success of this experiment in changing from the z to the t co-ordinate has depended largely on my lucky discovery of a favourable location. It is just as, when you want the moon to ride the tree-tops successfully, there have to be favourable features in the topography or it won't work. The edge of this building and that little walk between the two rows of Norway poplars seems to be an angle between planes in the z and t dimensions. It seems to slope downward, does it not?—Now walk from here to the end and imagine yourself going upward. That is all. Instead of feeling this building behind and above you, conceive it as behind and below. Just as on your ride by moonlight, you must tell yourself that the moon is not moving while the trees ride by. Can you do that? Go ahead, then." He spoke in a confident tone, as though he knew exactly what would happen.

Titeln förklaras i Wikipedia-artikeln på Gostak :

Gostak is a meaningless noun that is used in the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes", which is an example of how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown.

[. . . .]

Coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham, the sentence became more widely known through its quotation in 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning (p. 46).

Ogden and Richards refer to Ingraham as an "able but little known writer", and quote his following dialogue:

"Suppose someone to assert: The gostak distims the doshes. You do not know what this means; nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak. We know too that one distimmer of doshes is a gostak. If, moreover, the doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on."

[. . . .]

In Amazing Stories, Dr. Miles Breuer wrote a story, now considered a classic, titled "The Gostak and the Doshes" whose protagonist pops into an alternate world in which the phrase is a political slogan that induces sufficient umbrage throughout the populace to declare justified, righteous war. Other writers have picked up on the reference, notably David Gerrold.

Det här låter mig som en Roger Zelazny-historia, men jag är inte helt säker på din beskrivning. Det kan vara en av de korta berättelserna han skrev i Amber-universum, men det får mig faktiskt att tänka på "Roadmarks", vilket skulle vara en kort bok snarare än en novell. Hoppas det hjälper.

Låter lite som Elsewhen från Robert Heinlein, men det finns förmodligen för många skillnader för att den ska vara den du letar efter.