The title is part of Rod Serling’s monologue at the beginning of each show of the first season of The Twilight Zone, which is arguably the best-written dramatic series ever broadcast on American television.

Today Stumbleupon found for me a wonderful list from Everything (a great site for free-form thinking exercises) of published works that induce one or more mindfucks — the most sublime element of that dimension.

Have fun!

~~~

Adams, Douglas

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
• Life, the Universe, and Everything
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
• Mostly Harmless
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Richard Adams

• Watership Down

Alighieri, Dante

• Inferno

Allende, Isobel

• The House of the Spirits

Asimov, Isaac

• Foundation
• The Bicentennial Man

Atwood, Margaret

• A Handmaid’s Tale
• The Edible Woman
• Surfacing

Ayliffe, John Stephen

• Blind Man’s Bluff

Banks, Iain or Banks, Iain M.

• The Bridge
• The Wasp Factory
• Use of Weapons

Bantok, Nick

• Griffin and Sabine

Barth, John

• Chimera

Bear, Greg

• Blood Music

Bester, Alfred

• Tiger! Tiger! (otherwise known as The Stars, My Destination — one of my personal favorites)

Bey, Hakim

• Temporary Autonomous Zone

Block, Francesca Lia

• Dangerous Angels – the Weetzie Bat books

Boethius

• Consolation of Philosophy

Borges, Jorge Luis

• Ficciones (Fictions)
• The Cirular Ruins

Bradbury, Ray

• Fahrenheit 451
• Dandelion Wine

Bryant, Dorothy

• The Kin Of Ata Are Waiting For You

Bulgakov, Mikhail

• The Master and Margarita
• The Heart of a Dog

Burgess, Anthony

• A Clockwork Orange
• The Wanting Seed

Burroughs, William S.

• Junkie
• Naked Lunch
• The Ticket That Exploded
• Junky’s Christmas

Camus, Albert

• The Outsider
• The Myth of Sisyphus
• The Stranger
• The Plague

Capote, Truman

• In Cold Blood

Carpenter, Edmund Snow

• They Became what They Beheld

Carroll, Lewis

• Alice In Wonderland
• Through the Looking-Glass

Carroll, Peter

• Liber Null
• Psychonaut
• Liber Kaos

Casares, Adolfo Bioy

Castaneda, Carlos

• The teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui way of knowledge
• A Separate Reality
• Journey to Ixtlan

Cervantes, Miguel de

• Don Quixote

Chase, Truddi

• When Rabbit Howls

Chayefsky, Paddy

• Altered States

Chuang Chou

• The Chuang-Tzu

Clark, Arthur C.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Childhood’s End

Cortázar, Julio

• End of the Game and Other Stories
• Rayuela (Hopscotch)

Coupland, Douglas

• Microserfs

Danielewski, Mark

• House of Leaves

Dawkins, Richard

• The Selfish Gene

DeLillo, Don

Dick, Philip K.

• A Scanner Darkly
• The Divine Invasion
• VALIS
• (and almost everything else he wrote)

Dickens, Charles

• A Tale of Two Cities

Dostoevsky, Fyodor

• Crime and Punishment
• Notes from the Underground
• The Brothers Karamazov

Eco, Umberto

• Foucalt’s Pendulum
• The Name of the Rose

Efsandiary, F.M.

• Upwingers

Egan, Greg

• Diaspora
• Distress
• Permutation City

Eliot, T.S.

• The Wasteland

Ellis, Bret Easton

• American Psycho

Ellis, Edward Robb

• A Nation in Torment

Ende, Michael

• The Never-ending Story

Euclid

• The Elements

Farmer, Philip Jose

• To Your Scattered Bodies Go

Faulkner, William

• As I Lay Dying

Feinberg, Leslie

• Stone Butch Blues

Foucault, Michel

• Discipline and Punish

Fowles, John

• The Magus

Freud, Sigmund

• Civilization and Its Discontents

Gaarder, Jostein

• Sophie’s World

Gardner, Laurence

• The Bloodline of the Holy Grail

Gaiman, Neil

• Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett)
• Neverwhere
• American Gods

Genet, Jean

• Miracle of The Rose

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

• Herland

Gibson, William

• Burning Chrome
• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive
• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow’s Parties

Gleick, James

• Chaos : Making a New Science

Gray, Alasdair

• Lanark

Gogol, Nikolai

• The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories

Golding, William

• Lord of the Flies

Grimwood, Ken

• Replay

Gurdjieff, G. I.

• Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson

Halperin, James L.

• The Truth Machine

Hand, Elizabeth

• Waking the Moon
• Glimmering
• Winterlong
• Aestival Tide
• Icarus Descending

Heinlein, Robert A.

• Stranger in a Strange Land
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Time Enough For Love

Heller, Joseph

• Catch-22

Herbert, Frank

• Dune

Hermans, W.F.

• Het behouden huis
• Nooit meer slapen

Herr, Michael

• Dispatches

Hesse, Herman

• Steppenwolf
• Siddhartha

Hofstadter, Douglas

• Godel, Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
• Metamagical Themas

Hugo, Victor

• Les Miserables

Huxley, Aldous

• Brave New World
• The Doors of Perception

Ibsen, Henrik

• A Doll’s House

Irving, John

• A Prayer for Owen Meany

Jotce, Graham

• The Tooth Fairy

Joyce, James

• Ulysses
• Finnegan’s Wake

Kafka, Franz

• The Penal Colony
• The Trial
• America
• The Castle
• Metamorphosis

Kaku, Michio

• Hyperspace

Kerouac, Jack

• On the Road
• Visions of Cody

Kesey, Ken}

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Keyes, J. Gregory

• Newton’s Cannon
• A Calculus of Angels
• Empire of Unreason
• The Waterborn
• The Blackgod

Kidder, Tracy

• The Soul of a New Machine

King, Stephen

• The Dark Tower series
• The Tommyknockers
• The Stand

Kingston, Maxine Hong

• The Woman Warrior

Knowles, John

• A Separate Peace

Land, Jon

• The Jared Kimberlain series

Kosinski, Jerry

• The Painted Bird

Lawrence, D. H.

• Lady Chatterly’s Lover

Leary, Timothy

• Politics of Ecstasy and Info-Psychology (aka Exo-Psychology)

Lee, Tanith

• The Silver Metal Lover

Lem, Stanislaw

• The Cyberiad
• Solaris
• The Futurological Congress
• Eden

Lewis, C.S.

• Out of the Silent Planet
• Perelandra
• That Hideous Strength

Leyner, Mark

• Et Tu, Babe
• The Tetherballs of Bouganville

Lilly, John C.

• Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer

Llewellyn, Grace

• The Teenage Liberation Handbook

Longyear, Barry B.

• Sea of Glass

Mailer, Norman

• Why Are We In Vietnam?

Mandela, Nelson

• Long Walk to Freedom

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia

• One Hundred Years of Solitude

Mayle, Peter

• Where Did I Come From?

McKenna, Terence

• The Archaic Revival
• The Invisible Landscape (with Dennis McKenna
• True Hallucinations

Miller, Walter

• A Canticle for Leibowitz

Miller, Henry

• Plexus

Milton, John

• Paradise Lost

More, Thomas

• Utopia

Morrison, Tony

• The Bluest Eye

Murakami, Haruki

• A Wild Sheep Chase
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicles

Musashi, Miyamoto

• The Book of Five Rings

Musil, Robert

• The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften)

Nabokov, Vladimir

• Lolita

Neville, Katherine

• The Eight

Nietzsche, Friedrich

• The Gay Science

Noon, Jeff

• Vurt
• Nymphomation

Nørretranders, Tor

• The User Illusion

Oates, Joyce Carol

• Blonde

O’Brien, Flann

• The Third Policeman

O’Brien, Timothy

• The Things They Carried

Orwell, George

• 1984
• Animal Farm

Paglia, Camille

• Sexual Personae

Palahniuk, Chuck

• Fight Club
• Survivor
• Choke
• Invisible Monsters

Perec, Georges

• A Void

Plath, Sylvia

• The Bell Jar

Pirsig, Robert

• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Poe, Edgar Allan

Pynchon, Thomas

• The Crying of Lot 49
• Gravity’s Rainbow

Quinn, Daniel

• Ishmael and The Story of B

Rand, Ayn

• The Fountainhead

Rhinehart, Luke

• The Dice Man
• Adventures of Wim
• Search for the Dice Man

Rooney, Andy

• Not That You Asked

Rosen, Robert

• Life Itself

Ross, John

• Unintended Consequences

Roy, Arundhati

• The Cost of Living
• The God of Small Things

Rucker, Rudy

• Software, Wetware, and Freeware

Rushkoff, David

• The Ecstasy Club

Sacks, Oliver

• Seeing Voices

Sagan, Carl

• Pale Blue Dot
• The Demon-Haunted World

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de

• The Little Prince

Saramago, Jose

• Blindness

Sartre, Jean-Paul

• Nausea

Shakespeare, William

• Hamlet

Shelley, Mary

• Frankenstein

Shem, Samuel

• The House of God
• Mount Misery

Shepard, Lucius

• Life During Wartime

Simmons, Dan

• Hyperion
• The Fall of Hyperion

St. Augustine

• Confessions

Stapledon, Olaf

• Starmaker
• Sirius

Stein, Gertrude

• How to Write

Stephenson, Neal

• Snow Crash
• Cryptonomicon
• Zodiac
• Diamond Age

Süskind, Patrick

• Das Parfum

Tan, Amy

• The Joy Luck Club

Thich Nhat Hanh

• Old Path, White Clouds

Thompson, Hunter S.

• Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas

Thurber, James

• The 13 Clocks

Tolstoy, Leo

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich
• The Kreuzer Sonata

Twain, Mark

• Letters from the Earth
• The Mysterious Stranger
• Autobiography

Ullman, Ellen

• Close to the Machine

Various

• The Bible

Vian, Boris

• I Shall Spit On Your Grave

Vinge, Vernor

• A Fire upon the Deep

Vonnegut, Kurt

• Breakfast of Champions
• Cat’s Cradle
• Player Piano
• Sirens of Titan
• Slaughter-house Five

Wallace, David Foster

• Infinite Jest

Welsh, Irvine

• Filth

Walsh, Lawrence E.

• Firewall

Watts, Alan

• The Book
• The Joyous Cosmology
• The Wisdom of Insecurity
• The Way Of Zen

Wilbur, Ken

• Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Wilde, Oscar

• The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilder, Thornton

• The Bridge of San Luis Ray

Wilson, Robert Anton

• The Illuminatus! Trilogy (with Robert Shea)
• Prometheus Rising
• Cosmic Trigger
• Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy (note: originally published as three volumes: The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons. Thanks to Wobbly Tech)

Wolfe, Gene

• Peace

Woolf, Virginia

• To the Lighthouse

Wright, Robert

Yogananda, Paramahansa

• Autobiography Of A Yogi

Yourcenar, Marguerite

• Anna… Soror
• Alexis
• Memoirs of Hadrian

Yevgeny Zamyatin, Zamyatin, Yevgeny

• We

Zinn, Howard

• A People’s History of the United States

Zukav, Gary

• Seat Of The Soul