"It was like I discovered a parallel universe, and Bob was the tour guide," Mr. Iglauer said.
Laika's sinister stop-motion fable centres on a young girl who discovers a parallel universe through a psychedelic tunnel in her suspiciously gothic new home.
A keyboardist in Deep Purple star Ian Gillan's band in the 1970s, Towns blossomed into a successful TV and movie composer, and discovered a parallel life as a jazz original who has created some of the most audaciously original big-band music since Gil Evans.
Yearning, swooning, sinuous camera movements bring us into the city one sunny morning; the director's signature rectilinear compositions and dreamlike zooms, and his disclosure of bizarre and exotic people on every streetcorner, create a city which is at once familiar and utterly alien, as if he had discovered a parallel Rome on another planet.
I felt at times that I was discovering a parallel history of culture, like the time I read a passage in Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan" and realized that it must have influenced one of my favorite children's books, a novel about witches set in the dark ages, called "Wise Child," by Monica Furlong, an Anglican who was Alan Watts's biographer and had tried acid.
Within these volumes many of which predate the books of the New Testament Biblical experts discovered a parallel but radically different telling of the life of Jesus, one that places the anointing ceremony squarely at the center of Christianity.
"I think we'll discover a lot of parallels," said Dr. Mark R. Schleiss, the director of pediatric infectious diseases and immunology at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
3,000 years ago, an Aztec warlord named Yaotl and his four generals discover a portal opening into a parallel universe which is said to have great power.
And you find that almost every pop star has recorded a Christmas song: U2, Billy Joel, David Bowie... it's like lifting a stone and discovering an entire parallel universe out there.
