The fine art of teleportation works like this:

You board a plane. Several hours later your debark a plane but the experience is such that one perceives it as the crossing over from one portal into the next uninterrupted.

Thus it was described to me by my good friend Greg Hoban.

"How was your trip back?"

Always the safest, easiest question to ask and answer a traveler. Even if the trip is shaped of nightmare proportions and only spoken of in the future in the obliquest of terms the trip back always ends on stable ground.

"Like teleporting!" he answered.

I admire Greg for his globe-trotting. Certainly he's the sort of guy who encourages me to go out and do more of it.

I understood what he meant completely, though I myself had only caught the rough edges of such a mental state several times before in unrelated circumstances.

Time, like Albert Einstein said, is relative. While we use a standard metric based on signal pulses from various objects to -tell- time, our perception of it varies a great deal depending on the overall circumstances.

We've all experienced the end-of-the day creep of the clock and the rush of a fun weekend.

The question then is how to manipulate this?

How indeed.

The abstract puzzle itself becomes part of the meditation: How does one detach themselves from time? Move forward, back.

On this very trip we are time travelers remaining in flight for very many real hours of our own lives but not very much actual elapsed time on the planet below. The sun, our most unportable signal, remains mostly the same.

The international date line is the only thing keeping one from a state of suspended animation.

I'd feel nervous flying over it, personally.

Part of the experiment is the removal of as much time-sequenced input from my diet as possible.

Most of the TV they have will be formatted to the standard broadcast time: 23 minutes or something. No point in watching shows.

Reading is not as good as just plain eyes closed.

Acoustic-canceling headphones remove the thrumming of engine noise, that most painful of harmonics. They say that if you block that out your trip is less stressful and its all about obliterating the sense of time.

Eat sparingly and to the target clock.

Listen to choice music.

Occasionally readjust to the passage of time so as not to find oneself out of joint with it.

Sleep when its bedtime.

Get up and stretch when its supposed to be morning.

Listen not to the complaints of your fellow traveler of of your own. Your mind is detached from this process. Only your shell is tied to this physical place.

Dance freely for a while.

Its harder to do westward, where time never changes and you've got to invent your own clock. Its always just mid-afternoon or early evening. Its not late, its seven o'clock. Forever.

This is the price for time travel forward -- getting back is a bitch.