On a sultry June morning in Baltimore a successful psychiatrist named Dr. Robert Lindner recieved a phone call that would initiate the most remarkable case of his career, a case ht would later summarize in his book The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales.

The phone call was from a government physician at a classified installation in New Mexico, an installation where reserach on the H-Bomb was in progress (although Lindner does not mention the fact). The physician wanted to refer a patient to him. He was a brilliant research scientist in his thirties who was “perfectly normal in every way” except that he seemed to have acquired an amazing amount of detailed information about another world—a world with which he seemed to have become increasingly preoccupied to the point of neglecting his work.

When asked by his superiors about the drop in the efficiency of his department, Kirk apologized profusely and said he would “try to spend more time on this planet.” It is at that point that the government decided he needed expert help. They would fly the scientist to Baltimore as often as nescessary, all expenses paid.

Kirk Allen arrived in Dr. Lindner’s office three days later.

“Any speculations I had about him as a mad scientist evaporated when I saw him in my office,” writes the physician. “A vigorous-looking man of average height, clear-eyed and blonde, his seersucker unwrinkled despite the long trip and the humidity...he looked like a junior executiv. He spoke with just enough confidence to let me know that the situation he now found himself in was slightly embarrasing.”

During the first session, Dr. Lindener elicited detailed information about his patient’s background and childhood. He learned that Kirk Allen was an avid reader of science fiction and had somehow become convinced that a series of stories in which the main character had the same name as himself were really parts of his biography! The stories had to do with the faraway world of other planets. It became an obsession with him to complete this biography, to establish the continuity of his life, to resolve the contradictions between the various parts of what he called “the record.” The succeeded in doing it when he discovered that he had the power to travel psychically to the world of the other Kirk Allen.