About a year ago I took a shot at a list of the top 10 portals between worlds, and the post got a lot of good comments. Ah, those were the days.

Anyhoo, we were talking about this w/r/t Alice hitting theaters this week, and I thought I'd revisit the subject in the form of a practical guide. A set of rules, if you will, for navigating between this world and others, deduced from the stories of those who have gone before.

1. Get bored and/or depressed. Happy people rarely get to go to other worlds. Look at Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth, or Dante in The Divine Comedy. Look at Harry Potter, or the little kid in Time Bandits. Try to work up a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with your humdrum existence. I know you can do it.

2. Fall asleep. Worth a shot. It worked for Alice. And Dorothy, though she got knocked unconscious, at least in the movie. Downside: a nagging sense of uncertainty later as to whether it was or was not all a dream.

3. Vary your tactics. Nobody seems to get into Narnia the same way twice. Once you activate a portal it apparently gets "used up." The exception being the Wood Between the Worlds, although that's problematic in other ways.

4. Don't try. That's the real Catch-22 of getting to another world: half the time it's the people who don't want to go who get to go. For every Lucy Pevensie there's a Eustace Scrubb. Or that cabbie who gets pulled along in The Magician's Nephew and ends up being King of Narnia. That dude must have been hitting the felix felicis pretty hard, is all I'm saying.

5. Make sure nobody else is looking. This also helps with alien abductions. If you're into that kind of thing.

6. Be a kid. Duh. Grown-ups never get go. Look what happened to Susan Pevensie. But on the plus side, you can now get laid. At least in theory.

7. Be a girl. Obviously more of a rule of thumb, but if you were picking the all-time all-star team of interdimensional border-crossers, your starting three would probably be all-girl: Lucy Pevensie, Alice and Dorothy.

8. Die. I think it's safe to file this one under 'last resorts.' But it worked for the Pevensie children. And if you don't get to Narnia, there's always the afterlife. Except if there isn't.

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