Imagine making your daily decisions by a roll of the die. A “six” might mean that you run to the office instead of taking the bus, a “four” might indicate that it’s time to “get busy” and have that affair that you’ve been waiting for, or a “three” might indicate that for one day (and probably one-day only), you are required to act Christ-like to all of the people that you encounter throughout your day.

Could you actually commit to living your life that way? I couldn't.

In “The Dice Man” which was written by George Cockcoft under the pseudonym of Luke Rhinehart in the early 1970’s, one psychiatrist (who is fictitious, but shares the name Luke Rhinehart), decides to live his life by the dice alone and rolls the dice for nearly every decision he has to make. At first, the choices are frivolous, and more about sex than anything else, but when he starts to incorporate what he calls ‘dice play’ into his marriage and into his psychiatric practice, his life and sanity quickly begin to unravel.

The book is written in a first-person narrative style, and is not lacking in humor or originality. It’s interesting to see how the writer uses his narrative contrasted by a combination of “reports” and “hearings” to tell the story of how the psychiatrist transformed from a fairly average “shrink” into the “Dice Man”.

I should say that women reading “The Dice Man” might have to take much of the narrative with a grain of salt; there is a lot of sex in the book, most of it is extra-marital, and the doctor’s respect for women is not quite as a high as it should be, nor is his ethical treatment of his female patients. You could argue, however, that the protaganist’s attitudes towards women are just more reflective of men during that time- I would hope that most men have come further in their treatment of women since the early 70’s .

George Cockcroft, who wrote the book, apparently based it on his own experiments using “the dice” to live by when he was a psychology student.  and has been banned in several countries for its sexual content and  is attributed to quite a few pop culture references.