The Star Rover

The Star Rover by Jack London is about Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit using a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket that can be tightly laced to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.