We Earth folk are four-dimensional creatures in an 11-dimensional universe. We can navigate height, width and depth pretty well, but we’re tacked to a common framework in time. We’re all in the same “temporal field,” but the differences among us have to do with the relative boundaries of the time we inhabit. That doesn’t mean we’re not creatures of time as we are creatures of the other three dimensions. It just means we are not in control of our passage through it. For an analogy, when we are falling, our ability to navigate the vertical dimension is limited, but that doesn’t make us two-dimensional while we’re falling. When we perceive that we’re physically stable, we’re still falling through time out of control yet we nonetheless perceive and can measure the temporal dimension. Conceivably – and in my view likely – there are consciousnesses abroad in the continuum who are able to navigate time as well as some other dimensions of which we have no perception on other than a mathematical level.

As for Kryptonians, even in the crippling environment of their home world in the light of a red giant star, they can theorize and perceive along multiple-dimensional fields. They have to be able to do that or they’d be unable to pursue stable lives on a world like Krypton. Spending his formative years on Earth, this one Kryptonian is able through natural, ad hoc means, to extend his senses – as well as senses of which we are generally unaware – to navigate among dimensions over which we have no control or practical perception.

So the means through which he “flies” is not analogous to the flight of a bird or a plane. He is simply unbound by gravitation and conventional notions of dimension when he has the will to assume that condition. His flight “speed” is virtually unbound as well. He doesn’t actually teleport, but in a practical sense within the constraints of human perception, he might as well. When I wrote the Superman series, our general assumption was that Superman can actually move at up to eight times the speed of light – but in a physical sense, both the capacity to exceed light and the limitation to a factor of eight are ridiculous and arbitrary. We were even aware at the time – ten or more years before an elite coterie of physicists heard Ed Witten’s M-Theory create a unified perception of super-strings by applying it to an 11-dimensional continuum – that the boundary of the speed of light times eight was a metaphorical affectation.

But now, with the advent of super-strings and M-Theory, we are possibly on the edge of super powers ourselves. Perception is power.

Years ago, I asked my rabbi buddy to teach me Kabbala. He wanted to know why I wanted to study the Zohar and I said it was because I wanted magical powers; I wanted to fly. He said that was a lousy reason to study that stuff but I insisted that was the reason, and I convinced him to teach me a bunch of untranslateable stuff anyway. I’ve been reading a lot of physics too.

I’ll try and keep you posted.