Let's say for the moment... in the Twilight Zone.A married couple, Chris and Ruth Miller, are awakened by the whimpering of their little daughter, Tina.
Chris phones his physicist friend, Bill, for help, and opens the door to let the incessantly barking Mack into the house.
Bill arrives and helps Chris move the bed so that he can physically scan the area where it was, marking the legs with books.
He explains to Chris and Ruth that sometimes lines in a three-dimensional universe run parallel with, rather than perpendicular to, the fourth dimension.
He warns them that they know nothing of what might lie beyond this portal, and should they follow Tina into the fourth dimension, they would only become hopelessly lost as well, since it is not manifested like the three humans can perceive.
Despite Bill's warnings, Chris reaches into the portal and falls into the fourth dimension, an abstract, crystalline landscape that seems distorted, and constantly turning upside down and sideways.
Despite a battery of research physicists equipped with every device known to man, electronic and otherwise, no result was ever achieved, except perhaps a little more respect for and uncertainty about the mechanisms of the Twilight Zone.The opening is slightly altered beginning with this episode.
Matheson wrote the short story based on a real-life incident involving his young daughter, who fell off her bed while asleep and rolled against a wall.
The critic Camille Paglia calls "Little Girl Lost" the "first great script" of The Twilight Zone in Sexual Personae (1990).
[1] "Little Girl Lost" was parodied in "Homer3", a segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI", an episode from the seventh season of The Simpsons.
[2] An area of the queue for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror theme park attractions in California and Paris uses subtle effects to simulate air currents coming out of a solid wall, as well as playing a subtle recording of the little girl's dialogue at intervals.
Although not intended by the writers, the hole into the other dimension was later given as an example of a "Riemannian cut",[4] which is a type of wormhole formed when two spaces join at the same set of points.