The way the world is going

An old friend, Mr. J. W. Dunne, has recently sent me a new book he has written, “An Experiment with Time.” I find it a fantastically interesting book. It has stirred my imagination vividly and I think most imaginative people will be stirred by the queer things he has advanced in it. I do not think it has yet been given nearly enough attention.

Years ago, in the last century, Mr. Dunne came to see me for the first time. He was then a young captain in the army, and he had to go out to the South African war. He wanted to tell me something, an idea, that he didn’t want to have lost if, too abruptly for explanations, some Boer marksman chanced to wipe him out of existence. It was the idea of an aeroplane with V-shaped wings based on a number of experiments he had made with paper models—a perfectly sound idea, which has since been realized in a very stable but not very swift or agile machine. If Dunne had had money and opportunity for experiment, I am sure that about A.D. 1902–3 he would have constructed a practicable heavier-than-air machine, but he had to go off to his blockhouse work in the Orange River Colony, and he never got a free hand to build until other investigators had passed him by.

In those days it was extraordinarily hard to get people to show a practical interest in the air. He came to me because I had written what was considered very wild stuff about flight. I had said that we should fly before 1950! Not a dazzling hit, but better than the mighty majority opinion that we should never fly at all. This magnificent encouragement won Dunne’s gratitude and confidence; he put all he had done so far in my hands and I was to lock it up and keep it secret for him until he was either killed or could go on with his experiments again. He had to come to me, a perfect stranger, before he could find any one who would take him seriously enough to harbour what he had to deposit.

I still remember very cheerfully a funny afternoon we spent in my garden at Sandgate, while Dunne rushed about, climbing up walls and jumping on garden seats, to release little fluttering paper models which illustrated this or that aspect of his idea.

He struck me then as having one of the most patient and persistent minds I had ever encountered. None of the magnesium flare about his mind, the sort of thing that goes fizz and lights up everything—as much as it is ever going to light up everything—but wary, observing, and, when at last it gets on a trail, indefatigable. He worried on with aviation for a long time, bad health and the Great War used him up and partly veiled him from me, and it is only now that I learn of another scent that he has been following to the most remarkable conclusions.

What set him going was a very common experience, the fact that dreams in an odd, erratic way seem to foreshadow events. Many of us have had the experience of an anticipatory dream, and usually we have been so vague about it that the story was hardly worth the telling. Mr. Townley Searle, the London bookseller, told the other day of an unusually lucid one. He dreamt he was among the stalls in the Caledonian Market, and found and bought a first edition of Thomas Hardy’s “Desperate Remedies,” which is worth £100 nowadays. So vivid was the impression that he got up the next morning and went straight to the market, bought an umbrella for sixpence because it was coming on to rain, and then, recognizing the stall of his dream, went straight to it and got the three volumes for a shilling, a clear profit of £99, 18s. 6d.

That was a rarely simple case. The ordinary dream with foreshadowing elements is more mixed than that. One of my own has stuck in my mind for years and is much more typical. In my dream I was riding a bicycle on the Neva, which was frozen over; the bicycle skidded on the ice, went faster and faster, and got more and more out of control; ahead of me appeared a great sledge with a gaunt horse driven by a woman in white furs; I swept towards it helplessly and collided with the horse, clung to its head, and pulled it down as I awoke. The moment of clinging to the head of the horse was prolonged, and it haunted me. I had a vivid sense of the feel of the animal’s ears and long cheek. I was then actually learning to ride the bicycle and, a day or so after, I came round a corner on a little chariot-like milk-cart on the wrong side of the road. I lacked the skill to avoid this and found myself clinging to the head of the pony, which came down in exactly the mood of suspense, and with exactly the same feel as the sledge horse did in my dream. But as I am not of Dunne’s curious and persistent quality I never followed up that very striking experience. I had not told it to any one before the accident and I accepted very uncritically the current explanation of these apparently foreshadowing dreams.

Probably the reader knows that “explanation.” It is that there is lack of simultaneousness in the action of the two hemispheres of the brain so that one lags a little behind the other; there is a double impression and the second one has the effect of being a memory of some previous event. The theory is that there was no real dream at all, but only the delusion of a memory of a dream produced by the flagging impression. That accounts for the resemblances of the event to the pseudo-dream but manifestly it does not account for the differences; the lady in white furs and the Neva for example have still to be accounted for. If I never really had that dream, as a dream how did they get into my memory? Why wasn’t the dream exactly like the event?

Dunne seems to have had more than one such experience. He dreamt, for example, of the great volcanic outbreak in Martinique while he was soldiering in the Orange Free State. He saw it just about to happen, fissures opening in the ground and steam jetting out. What he saw was quite unlike what probably did happen. In his dream he made violent attempts to warn the inhabitants; he was very clear about the number. He woke up shouting, “Four thousand people will be killed.” Days later came a newspaper. Headlines proclaimed the disaster and the probable loss of forty thousand, not four thousand, lives. The reading of these headlines was the event foreshadowed by the dream. He read them hastily, misread the figures as four thousand, and the paper passed out of his reach. Long afterwards he found that these figures, both four thousand and forty thousand, were quite erroneous. His dream, it is plain, was not of the actual event, but merely an anticipation of his mental impression when he looked at the paper.

Several occurrences of this sort put Dunne on the alert. He decided to write down all his dreams so soon as he was awake. He kept a bedside notebook. He trained himself to watch for his dreams at the moment of awakening and acquired considerable skill at recovering his dreams as they slipped away into nothingness. He made a parallel daylight diary of his more vivid waking impressions. And he induced several other people to take up this business of dream watching. He has accumulated records. All this he tells very interestingly in this book of his. And the striking conclusion that emerges from these observations is this, that the share of future mental impressions is almost as important or quite as important in the making of dreams as mental impressions in the past. To-morrow’s happenings are just as likely to appear, clipped and disturbed, in the dream flow as yesterday’s.

We most of us have some idea of the making of dreams. Some sound, some internal or external disturbance lifts the mental existence out of the unconscious towards waking. The mind ceases to forget, memory and attention dawn, and the drifting mental content groups itself with an assumption of reasonable connectedness about the disturbing sensation. Then we either wake and remember, or the whole stir subsides back into forgetfulness and unconsciousness. Most of us realize how the impressions of yesterday in particular, and of remote yesterdays less patently, supply forms and colour to the stir, and how desires we have thwarted and temptations we have resisted escape into this dream of life and play havoc with our suppressions. What most of us do not realize, says Dunne, is the share which little scraps of tomorrow’s impressions also contribute. That is the essence of his discovery. It is difficult at the time to sift the foreshadowings from the recollections and the distorted, escaped suppressions, so unimportant and elusive they seem to be. It is only when the premonitions are exceptionally striking that they are remembered and recognized when they turn up in actual fact, and so detected. They have to be very vivid or very peculiar. But the more closely and skilfully you watch, he insists, the more of the futurist element is evident in the dream.

Moreover, he had added to the observation of what I may call natural dreaming the observation of states of mind when the attention is deliberately relaxed so as to leave the mental existence at a level hardly above the level of recording consciousness. He turns his back, as it were, on the mental existence, and then suddenly snatches what is there before it sails out of reach, and in these phases of mind also he finds the images of future and past impressions mingling together.

Now I think it may be possible to put these facts into a comprehensible relationship to quite a number of other facts which do not enter into Dunne’s speculation. I won’t exactly follow him in this statement that follows, which is necessarily in the space at my disposal a very sketchy statement. Partly it derives from him and partly I am adding something of my own. The point of interest is that our mind can be considered as existing in the past and in the future, as extending, so to speak, both ways beyond what we consider to be the actual moment. I hope that does not strike the reader as too crazy a proposition. Most of us have given very little thought to what we mean by the actual moment. What do we mean by “now”? How much time is it? Behind “now” stretches the past, ahead is the future, but is it itself an infinitesimal instant? Do we merely exist as a flash, as a series of flashes, so to speak, of no duration at all, between a past gone by and a future still to come, or does “now” bulge into both past and future? This will be a novel and amusing question to most people and a profoundly irritating one to certain types. They will be so accustomed to speak of past and future as though they were in actual contact at the present, that the assertion will be astonishing and difficult, and yet as they think it over it will acquire an insinuating and troublesome plausibility, that “now” is perhaps always a measurable, and may under certain circumstances be a quite considerable, piece of time. It sounds paradoxical to say that portions of the past and future both enter into “now,” but actual experience gives a feeling in favour of that illogical view. To be illogical is not necessarily to be in error. Mankind may have been thinking about past and future in the wrong way.

Next I would suggest that as we become attentive to anything and excited by actual fact, “now” gathers itself together, and the more excited and attentive we are, the more “now” gathers itself together towards its central point. As we become increasingly active and “on the spot,” the acuter and the narrower does the “now” under attention become. In our crises we live, as we say, only for the moment. As we relapse towards inattention, reverie, dreaminess, “now” becomes obtuse and broader and broader. In the hypnotic condition, in dreaming, and still more so in dreamless sleep, “now” may broaden down towards and below the limit of consciousness, until it spreads, it may be, to large parts, and even to all of our mental life from beginning to end. In the sleeping mind or in the dead mind nothing is past or future. As we rouse ourselves, as we become alert, as we wake up and pay attention to things, that vague “now” is drawn together towards the moment of action. But as the attention leaps to action, it trails with it faint and rapidly fading impressions of the more diffused state of mind from which it has arisen.

This queer idea that the “now” of the dreaming and inattentive mind may extend to an undefined amount into both past and future is compatible with all Dunne’s dreaming and quasi-dreaming phenomena. On any other supposition they are inexplicable. And it is consistent with the remarkable story of Mr. Townley Searle, and many other like tales of premonition. Moreover, Professor Gilbert Murray recently published some disconcerting facts, disconcerting, that is, for the sceptic, with regard to what he considered to be telepathy. One would as soon doubt his word as one would doubt that of Aristides. He is above suspicion even of careless testimony. I have not the report of his experiments by me, but they were very puzzling and perplexing indeed. They went something in this way: he would, with various friends, read or be told or agree upon some strange scene and event, and his daughter would then come into the room and open her mind, as it were, to any floating impression that offered itself, while he and his friends fixed their minds on the chosen topic. On this theory it was unnecessary so to fix the mind, but that, I believe, was what was done. Presently she would describe what came to her. Many of her guesses were amazingly good. She was then told the actual thing chosen, and no doubt she saw it very vividly as it was described to her. She would be keen to know how near she had got to the chosen subject. But that she should see the thing before it was described to her and because it was presently to be described to her, is all of a piece with Dunne seeing the Martinique explosion before the newspaper headings evoked the picture in his imagination. It would be extremely interesting if Professor Murray would try to get scenes to his daughter which would not be revealed to her later. If he failed to do that, it would be confirmatory of this supposition, that what happened was merely the foreshadowing of a strong impression, exactly on the lines of Dunne’s anticipatory dreams.

The idea that the mental “now” prolongs itself into the past and future, as the attention flattens down from its waking acuteness into a state of suspense, also brings many of the more remarkable and hitherto abnormal phenomena of hypnotism into line with the general body of interpreted fact. The feats of many of the more successful mediums in producing the names and significant incidents in the lives of people hitherto unknown to them, but whose names and circumstances they were personally to know, cease to be isolated phenomena. They are no longer in the least discordant with everyday reality so soon as we clear our minds of the delusion that the practical, fleshly, substantial “now” of ordinary experience is a mathematical instant, a locus, an infinitesimal abstraction, and accept the view I am propounding here that it has duration, and that its duration in both directions, past and future, increases with the weakening of our attention and our lapse from acute contact with outer reality.

By this reasoning people must often be dreaming ahead of the winners of races, of winning numbers in lotteries, speculative opportunities and the like. They are. But dreams draw their material not only from the future but from the past, from our bodily desires and cravings, our hopes, our mental preoccupations, and the interpretation and misinterpretation of noises and other impressions. Very rarely have they a convincing quality of reality. The dream artist in us is essentially and incurably unsystematic and maundering. We all, as our attention sinks down towards the threshold of consciousness, become false and incoherent in our associations. Every sleeping, hypnotized, anæsthetized, or dreaming man is, so to speak, insane. Sanity is a waking state. Accordingly, I do not see any prospect of our keeping so sufficiently alive to what we are doing as to direct our minds to the next big race or the run of the numbers for the next hour at roulette, and at the same time letting ourselves go sufficiently to tap the mental states ahead. Things may and do happen as they happened to Mr. Townley Searle, but such dreams are gifts and cannot be forced or persuaded to come by any means now known to us. Practical life lies in the present. Dream states, like drug states, are a dangerous field of exploration for any but very specially endowed and guarded minds.

10 July, 1927.