J. W. Dunne and "An Experiment with Time"

[Zadius Sky]

Hi all,

I wanted to start a thread about J.W. Dunne's book, An Experiment with Time, and his background as there was no discussion about him or his theory on this forum except for a brief mention in an old thread entitled A New Interpretation of Psi Phenomena. I came across this title while searching the Web about the history of the lotteries (never before did I care about the lottery but the topic just came to me at one point last week) and then succumbed upon the topics about the precognitive dreams where people would obtain the lottery numbers from their lucid dreams to win a lottery - but hardly ever won (this line of thought, of course, is a highly contradiction to non-anticipatory when it comes to winning the lottery - however, that ain't easy to do). The book, An Experiment with Time, was brought up among the topics and the name of the title itself has interested me and I remembered thinking at the time: "Well, how did he experimented with time?" So, I've obtained the copy through my university library as a pdf file, but it turned out to be an uneasy yet interesting read.

An Experiment with Time was written in 1927, and because it was 1927, this book would consider to be a classic on the topic of the precognitive dreams (even though this subject was only in certain portions of the entire book) and an introduction of a Serialism theory. But, what I have found fascinating is the fact that Dunne was talking about déjà vu when that term itself was not at all mentioned anywhere in this book (the timing of this writing is a factor, of course).

Anyway, here is the blub from Amazon:

J.W. Dunne (1866-1949) was an accomplished English aeronautical engineer and a designer of Britian's early military aircraft. His An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927, sparked a great deal of scientific interest in—and controversy about—his new model of multidimensional time.

A series of strange, troubling precognitive dreams (including a vision of the then future catastrophic eruption of Mt. Pelee on the island of Martininque in 1902) led Dunne to re-evaluate the meaning and significance of dreams. Could dreams be a blend of memories of past and future events? What was most upsetting about his dreams was that they contradicted the accepted model of time as a series of events flowing only one way: into the future. What if time wasn't like that at all?

All of this prompted Dunne to think about time in an entirely new way. To do this, Dunne made, as he put it,"an extremely cautious" investigation in a "rather novel direction." He wanted to outline a provable way of accounting for multiple dimensions and precognition, that is, seeing events before they happen. The result was a challenging scientific theory of the "Infinite Regress," in which time, consciousness, and the universe are seen as serial, existing in four dimensions.

Astonishingly, Dunne's proposed model of time accounts for many of life's mysteries: the nature and purpose of dreams, how prophecy works, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of the all-seeing "general observer," the "Witness" behind consciousness (what is now commonly called the Higher Self).

Here in print again is the book English playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley called "one of the most fascinating, most curious, and perhaps the most important books of this age."

One of this book's reviewers on Amazon has recommended a book by J.B. Priestly, Man and Time, for a good analysis of Dunne's theory to which I haven't read but it is on my list.

And the below is from wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_Time

Basic concepts

Dunne's theory is, simply put, that all moments in time are taking place at once, at the same time. For example, if a cat were to spend its whole entire life living in a box, anyone looking into the box could see the cat's birth, life and death in the same instant - were it not for the human consciousness, which means that we perceive at a fixed rate.

According to Dunne, whilst human consciousness prevents us from seeing outside of the part of time we are "meant" to look at, whilst we are dreaming we have the ability to traverse all of time without the restriction of consciousness, leading to pre-cognitive dreams, resulting in the phenomena known as Deja vu. Henceforth, Dunne believes that we are existing in two parallel states, which requires a complete rethink of the way that we understand time.

Dunne's experiment

In An Experiment with Time, Dunne discusses how a theoretical ability to perceive events outside the normal observer's stream of consciousness might be proved to exist. He also discusses some of the possible other explanations of this effect, such as déjà vu.

He proposes that observers should place themselves in environments where consciousness might best be freed and then, immediately upon their waking, note down the memories of what had been dreamed, together with the date. Later, these notes should be scanned, with possible connections drawn between them and real life events that occurred after the notes had been written.

While the first half of the book is an explanation of the theory, the latter part comprises examples of notes and later interpretations of them as possible predictions. Statistical analysis was at that time in its infancy, and no calculation of the significance of the events reported was able to be made.

The book is broken into five parts: Definitions, The Puzzle, The Experiment, Temporal Endurance and Temporal Flow, and Serial Time. The first part eases the reader into the terms (i.e., "Attention," "Field of Presentation," etc.), stressing that this is not a book about "occultism" or "psycho-analysis," and an introduction to the upcoming parts. The next two parts deal with the author's dreams (as well others') and his experiments into studying the dreams. In this part, he related his own dreams (and incidents that happened), the dreams of his relatives and friends, and how one would record the dreams by keeping a journal (obviously). This is what I admired about this author - he had dreams and had experiences relating to his dreams, he had questions about them, then he did experiments (not just himself, but with other people), and later formulated a theory. Dream → Discovery.

In this part, he briefly surmised that when we dream, we are given glimpses into the past and into the future, and that time is displaced in our dreams. He was right to point out that the dreams are mostly about trivial things (things that happen daily about one's life - in other words, the dynamics of our own lives), but he also pointed out that the dynamics of our lives can be expressed from the future as well.

(My immediate thought on that was if our dynamics was pretty much the same in the past as well as in the future - one wouldn't notice much change - especially in oneself. I just remembered a phrase that Laura once delivered: "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten. Look at your past and see your future." If one is doing the Work and changed one's future by seeing one's past, that future would be changed to some degree and that could be expressed in a dream and one would later experience a déjà vu - in a sense, we are changing the "program." After all, we are STS beings. Anyway, that's just a thought)

And, the remaining parts of this book are focused towards a theory approach of time. It is these latter parts that will prompt you to read more than once (as they can force your eyes going sideways, or so I've experienced). So, he came up with a "time" theory called Serialism. In our daily lives, we are experiencing time as an "indefinite continued progress of existence" or a movement along a "length" where we comfortably divide into three perceptive "states:" Past, Present, and Future. According to Serialism theory, there exist a separate time to "time" that movement, and another time to "time" that movement, and another, and another, and so on. What interests me is about an "observer" where, according to this theory, there exist another observer, observing you, and another observer, observing that observer, and so on. These so-called "serial observers" do not exist in the Three-Dimensional Space model, but within a "multitudinous dimensions of time."

Dunne has laid down "The Laws of Serialism:"

The analysis will continue, evidently, in the same fashion to infinity. There we shall have a single multidimensional field of presentation in absolute motion, travelling over a fixed substratum of objective elements extended in all the dimensions of Time. The motion of this ultimate field causes the motion of an infinite number of places of intersection between that field and the fixed elements, these places of intersection constituting fewer-dimensional fields of presentation. At infinity, again, we shall have a Time which serves to time all movements of or in the various fields of presentation. This time will be "Absolute Time," which an absolute past, present, and future. The present moment of this absolute Time must contain all the moments, "past," "present," and "future," of all the subordinate dimensions of Time.

It will be noticed that we can never show the path which O really follows. In Fig. 9 this path appears as O'O'', but in Fig. 10 it appears as DB. We have to show it differently with each introduction of another dimension of Time. But it will be seen that, to the observer of each specific moving field in the ultimate, completed diagram, O's path will appear to lie within his field. (For example, to the observer of the field GH in Fig. 10, O appears as moving from G to H.)

The nature of the series is now beginning to become apparent. It is akin to the "Chinese boxes" type - the type where every term is contained in a similar but larger (in this case dimensionally larger) term.

Its law may easily be ascertained. As the first we have -

1. Every Time-travelling field of presentation is contained within a field one dimension larger, travelling in another dimension of Time, the larger field covering events which are "past" and "future," as well as "present," to the smaller field.

The second law brings in the serial observer. (This entity is not, of course, the same thing as a series of independently existing observers.)

We have seen that the contents of the instants of Time I can only be presented to the ultimate observer in succession on condition that the contents of the instants of Time 2 are being likewise successively presented, and so with the contents of the instants of all other Times in the series. This ultimate observer is, therefore, the observer of the field of presentation travelling up the dimension of Time at the infinity end of the series. As the observer of that field, he is the observer of all the lesser and contained travelling fields.

Again, O has been, from the beginning of the analysis, the place where conscious observation is taking place. So, at whatever stage we may halt, our ultimate observer at that stage is observing consciously at O. In Fig. 9, for example, observer 2, GH (coinciding with the field GH) is, like observer I, consciously observing at O. But the interesting thing is that no observer possesses this power of conscious observation in his own right; he owes it entirely to the conscious observer next above him in the series.

For the travelling conscious observer GH is the only thing which, by its intersection with the reagent O'O'', distinguishes in O'O'' the place O wherein that reagent is capable of conscious observation. Omit GH, and there is no O. Similarly, when we pass to Fig. 10, we see that the travelling field 3, G'G''H''H' coinciding with conscious observer 3, is the only thing which, by its intersection with reagent 2, DFBE, distinguishes in DFBE a line GH wherein that reagent is capable of consciously observing, as at O. Omit G'G''H''H' from the diagram, and GH, containing O, vanishes. And so it goes on throughout the series, to infinity. In short, leave out the higher conscious and successive observer, and the lower observer ceases to exist as either conscious or successive, though there still remains an unnecessary and unjustified diagonal reagent, unconscious, and reacting to everything at once.

Therefore, just as the phenomena presented for observation are all ultimately referable to the set of cerebral states with which we started at the "hither" end of the series, so all conscious observation, like all successive observation, is ultimately referable to the observer at the "far" end of the series; that is, to the observer at infinity.

("Observer at infinity" does not mean an observer infinitely remote, in either Time or Space. "Infinity" here refers merely to the numbers of terms in the series. The observer in question is merely your ordinary everyday self, "here" and "now.")

So for our second law we have -

2. The serialism of the fields of presentation involves the existence of a serial observer. In this respect every time-travelling field is the field apparent to a similarly travelling and similarly dimensioned conscious observer. Observation by any such observer is observation by all the conscious observers pertaining to the dimensionally larger fields, and is, ultimately, observation by a conscious observer at infinity.

Hence, since "attention" is only a name for concentrated conscious observation, the attention of the observer pertaining to any field must be referable to the attentions of the observers pertaining to the dimensionally larger fields, and so to the observer at infinity. But the focus of attention (the area covered by observation of a given degree of concentration must have, in each case, the same number of dimensions as have the observer and his field. In field 1 it is three-dimensional; in field 2 it is four-dimensional; and so on.

Consequently we have, as our third law -

3. The focus of attention in any field has the same number of dimensions as has that field, and is a dimensional centre of the focii of attention in all the higher fields, up to and including attention in the field at infinity.

Notice that the "field of presentation" is mentioned several times above - he has discussed about that term in Part I:

FIELD OF PRESENTATION - All such phenomena it styles "Presentations," and it regards them as located within the individual's private "Field of Presentation." (We shall employ this term in preference to the commoner "Field of Consciousness," which is insufficiently definite.) This field of presentation contains, at any given instant of Time, all the phenomena which happen to be offered for possible observation. Let us take a concrete example of what that means. You are now reading this book, and your field of presentation contains the visual phenomena connected with the printed letters of the word you are regarding. It contains also, at the same instant, that visual phenomenon pertaining to the little numeral at the bottom of the page. This you "failed to notice"; but the numeral in question was, clearly, inside the area covered by your vision - it was affecting your brain via the eye, its psychical "correlate" was being offered to your attention. And that statement holds good for a host of other visual phenomena. On reflection, you will also agree that the field must have then contained - presented to attention but left "unnoticed" - certain muscular sensations such as pressures against your body, quite a number of sounds, and the pleasant feeling produced by the air flowing into your lungs as you breathed.

And, now, about the author. John William Dunne (J.W. Dunne), 1875–1949, was an aeronautical engineer and a Fellow of Royal Aeronautical Society. He has designed and built a number of biplane models based on a "tailless" configuration, including D.1 through D.10 models, as encouraged by H.G. Wells. These models were used during the First World War. (see for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Dunne). Dunne's ideas seemed to have influenced a number of figures such as Aldous Huxley and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and these ideas also formed "a basic for The Dark Tower a short story by C. S. Lewis, and the unpublished novel, The Notion Club Papers by J. R. R. Tolkien. Both Tolkien and Lewis were members of the Inklings" (see "An Experiment with Time" wiki page).

Speaking of Tolkien, there is a mention of Dunne in a review of A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien's Road to Faërie:

_http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/book_reviews_04.html

This book represents an approach to Tolkien's world little explored previously, save by the author herself who has discussed it in lectures and papers such as that given by her at the 1992 Tolkien Centenary Conference at Oxford, published in its Proceedings (Flieger, 1995). The interested reader or student may find it helpful to read or re-read that paper before tackling the book itself as it provides an outline of the more detailed commentary on "The Lost Road", and "The Notion Club Papers", the two principal landmarks in Tolkien's exploration of the possibilities of time travel into the past contained in this book.

The paper also usefully summarizes the essentials of the "theory of time", as it appears in J.W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, a book which Tolkien owned and read, and which he drew on as a kind of springboard for his own "experiments with time", as they might be called. The author's argument in this book, then, is that Tolkien's writings in general, and especially The Lord of the Rings, fall to be interpreted in terms of a twofold handling of the dimensions of time; time both as a linear progression as in our day-to-day experience, and as a unity outside that experience, and comprehending it. In this latter sense, "the field of time" can be viewed, or, "observed", from progressively wider stances up to that of the, "ultimate observer".

What is implied thereby is the ability of "the observer" at each stage to escape into "other time", especially into the past, or into past times. The primary mechanism by which such "escape" is handled for the purposes of narrative is by way of dreams or dreaming, which Tolkien treats in a variety of ways. If in his desire to travel backwards into past time, or times, he seems to be appealing to nostalgia, in his tendency to view the present critically through the lens of the past he is, paradoxically, as much of a "modernist" as other writers and artists who conventionally qualify for that title. The contrasting fates of Elves and Men, of the latter of whom it might be said that the past is their future, and the former of whom it might be said that their future is their past, typify this duality of feeling.

Tolkien was not, of course, alone in treading this kind of path. The author starts by tracing the evolving concept of "escape into past time" in the work of writers both of the previous generation and contemporary with Tolkien's formative years, writers as diverse as George du Maurier (especially the novel Peter Ibbetson (1891)), J.M. Bane (whose work Tolkien knew, of course, and criticised), Henry James and J.W. Dunne himself. Tolkien's interest in the concept of "escape into past time" emerged openly in his agreement with C. S. Lewis whereby the latter would write a story about "space travel" and he would do likewise as regards "time travel".

The immediate result was "The Lost Road" with its proposed structure of time travel by successive stages into the increasingly remote past, the climax to be reached with the involvement of the, "travellers", in the purely legendary "downfall of Númenor". The chief difficulty was to find a means of effecting the entry into, and the departure from, another past or imaginary world in a convincing manner, and Tolkien in order to solve it sought to merge the states of dreaming and waking in a seamless flow. The scheme as we know was never carried through and remained with one of the intermediate stages sketched, and a scene laid in Númenor itself. Subsequently in "The Notion Club Papers", the plan was greatly refined and elaborated, and its dramatic potential as a story much enhanced, by being placed in a "near future", time, and in the context of a real-life Oxford.
...

Also, in the wiki above about the book, there is one note that is really interesting:

In an article in the New Scientist in 1983 it was reported that Dunne had written a book just before his death admitting that he was a medium and a believer in spiritualism, the article reports that Dunne had deliberately chosen to leave this out of his An Experiment with Time book as he judged that it would have affected the reception of his theory.

The citation for the above was Ruth Brandon in her article "Scientists and the supernormal" in New Scientist (16 June 1983), and I looked for it and found it at the library to which a section about Dunne is discussed:

There are other, much more extreme cases. J. W. Dunne is best known for his famous book An Experiment with Time, an account of a series of prophetic dreams he experienced. This is written up in a highly scientific and philosophical style. Mathematics, quantum theory and relativity are adduced in Dunne's explanation of his dreams, much as the strange behaviour of sub-atomic particles is quoted by explorers of the paranormal today. Spiritualism is certainly never allowed to raise its unintellectual head. But the book appears in a very different light if it is read in conjunction with Dunne's autobiography, Intrusions, which he wrote just before his death in 1954. Here he reveals that he began his interest in such things as spiritualism, and was indeed for a time a medium - this book providing, incidentally, one of the very rare objective analyses of mediumistic possession as experienced from the inside. The omitted framework of the dreams that make up An Experiment with Time is fascinating; but even more fascinating is the fact that Dunne chose to leave it out of his original account. This was presumably because he judged, correctly, that it would affect the way that account was received.

The last book of Dunne was entitled Intrusions? (with a question mark) and it is not reviewed anywhere online except for Brandon's brief mention that it was an autobiography. I've managed to order it through Amazon and now awaiting for it as I'm rather curious (and will review here about that book). I'm currently reading his next book, The Serial Universe, from where I got the first one. It is more technical about the Serialism theory and also about the Regression of Time.

There is one guy who have it in for Dunne, or so it seemed, and that was a writer by the name of Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote an essay about Dunne and his theory (1940) entitled "Time and J.W. Dunne":

From Other Inquisitions (Jorge Luis Borges), 1937-1952, p. 18-21:

In Number 63 of Sur (December, 1939), I published a prehistory, a first basic history, of infinite regression. Not all my omissions were involuntary: I deliberately excluded the mention of J. W. Dunne, who has derived from the interminable regressus a rather surprising doctrine on time and the observer. The discussion (the mere exposition) of his thesis would have exceeded the limitations of my essay. Its complexity required a separate article, and I shall attempt it now, after having perused Dunne's latest book, Nothing Dies (1940), which repeats or summarizes the plots of his three earlier works.

Or rather, the plot. There is nothing new in its mechanism; but the author's inferences are most unusual, almost scandalous.

[...]

Dunne's procedure for the immediate attainment of an infinite number of times is less convincing and more ingenious. Like Juan de Mena in his El laberinto e Fortuna, like Uspenski in the Tertium Organum, he states that the future already exists, with its vicissitudes and its details. Toward the pre-existent future (or from the pre-existent future, as Bradley prefers) flows the absolute river of cosmic time, or the mortal rivers of our lives. That movement, that flowing requires a definite length of time, like all movement; we shall have a second time for the movement of the first; a third for the movement of the second, and so on to infinity. That is the system proposed by Dunne. In those hypothetical or illusory times, the imperceptible subjects multiplied by the other regressus have an interminable dwelling place.

I wonder what my reader may think of this. I don't pretend to know what sort of thing time is – or even if it is a "thing" – but I feel that the passage of time and time itself are a single mystery and not two. Dunne, I suspect, makes a mistake like the one made by the addled poets who speak of, say, the moon which reveals its red disk, thus substituting a subject, a verb and an object for an undivided visual image; because the object is merely the subject itself, flimsily disguised. Dunne is a famous victim of that bad intellectual habit denounced by Bergson: to conceive of time as a fourth dimension of space. He postulates that the future already exists and that we must move to it, but that postulate suffices to convert it into space and to require a second time (which is also conceived in spatial form, in the form of a line or a river) and then a third and a millionth. Not one of Dunne's four books fails to propose infinite dimension of time (Note: The phrase is revealing. In Chapter XXI of An Experiment with Time he speaks of one time that is perpendicular to another. What reasons are there for assuming that the future already exists? Dunne gives two: one, premonitory dreams; another, the relative simplicity that this hypothesis gives to the inextricable diagrams that are typical of his style. He also wishes to elude the problems of a continuous creation), but those dimensions are spatial. For Dunne, real time is the unattainable final boundary of an infinite series.

[...]

Dunne assures us that in death we shall learn how to handle eternity successfully. We shall recover all the moments of our lives and we shall combine them as we please. God and our friends and Shakespeare will collaborate with us.

With such a splendid thesis as that, any fallacy committed by the author becomes insignificant.

Anyway, I am finding An Experiment with Time to be a curious read and finding several ideas coming out of it that I'd like to play around with in relation to the materials here.

Finally, I am wondering if anyone here have read it and if so, what was your thoughts on it?

 

[Thomas Alan]

Thanks, Zadius: I haven't read this one but will put it on my Amazon shopping list.

I've been wondering about my dreams lately. Where do they come from? How are they formed? They do seem to be free of the usual concepts of time and space. People and pets from my past mix with those in my present life. And some beings that appear in my dreams are unknown to me in this lineal existence. But whoever I am in dream life seems to take the mixing of the known and unknown in stride, as a given so to speak.

Either I am different entity in dreams as opposed to waking life or whatever being I am in total has many different layers of which this serial existence is just a small part.

When I was in ECKANKAR some years ago I kept a dream diary. It was fascinating in many ways. Some dreams seemed filled with symbols, other were just experiences. Meaning, I was there (wherever there is) present in the situation. After years of dream study I felt I was little wiser about dreams and their origin.

The idea of past, present and future all existing together with us able to observe but a small slice of it at our level is intriguing. Observing this life, then a higher observer with a wider view, then a even higher observer and on and on.

I've often wondered about how Tolkien came write his stories. Did he "invent" them or did from a higher observation point see a world that exists in some parallel time and place and describe it? Similar thoughts about the Harry Potter books.

Mac

 

[mnmulchi]

Thanks for the information Zadius Sky, I have not yet read 'An Experiment with Time' but it has been on my wish list. Both T.C. Lethbridge and Martin Ebon referred to Dunne's book as a classic and a great read on analysis of dreams. I'm a little suprised to hear how technical he got with his explanation, even creating his own theory of time! His autobiography 'Instrusions?' sounds interesting too, I would enjoy hearing your take on it as well.

 

[Zadius Sky]

His autobiography 'Instrusions?' sounds interesting too, I would enjoy hearing your take on it as well.

I won't get the book until in a couple of week. So, I was searching through a few online journals from my university's library and found one article by Victoria Stewart where she discussed the influence of Dunne's theory of time on the literary culture of the 1930s and 1940s, and there is a discussion of his last book, Intrusions? (since it's hardly mentioned anywhere else online):

Source: Victoria Steward, "J.W. Dunne and Literary Culture in the 1930s and 1940s," Literature and History 17 (2008): 62-81. (_http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/41556276/j-w-dunne-literary-culture-1930s-1940s)

The Second World War did not, of course, put an end to anxieties about the future, and Dunne was one of those who, in the aftermath of the war, predicted that the outcome of a further conflict, this time probably nuclear, would be even more devastating. In the late 1940s, Dunne, who had returned to aeronautical engineering during the war, but whose health had begun to fail, revisited his earlier account of his dream work. The resulting writings, posthumously published as Intrusions? (1955), although uncompleted and fragmented in form, share the earlier volumes' mix of scientific explication and dream work, and some passages are explicitly autobiographical in a way that the earlier writings resist. Towards the end of the book, Dunne suggests that predictions that another war could 'destroy Civilization' are never rooted in an accurate sense of what this destruction would actually mean. He cites Wells' depiction of the 'Sunset of the Human Race' in The Time Machine, and foresees a social and ecological disaster: "we should all go right back to the days of Primitive Man." Yet for Dunne, considering these matters in his final illness, the assurance, evidenced by his theories, that "our individual minds [are], so to say, shareholders in the great space-filling Universal Mind," offers a buffer against this apocalyptic vision.

In Intrusions? Dunne reveals that the early dreams that he recorded in An Experiment with Time had been accompanied by voices persuading him to pay special attention to the dream as it unfolded; it is this matter that he dismisses as "unimportant" in his account of the "Cape to Cairo" dream. Dunne compares these voices to those apparently heard by spiritualist mediums, and although sceptical about séances, suggests that it is voices such as these, emanating from the "observer at infinity" and termed "intrusions," that could in some cases be channelled by mediums. He explains his omission of this extra material from his original work by suggesting that the scientific evidence of his theories stands up whether or not these voices are taken into account. Evidently, he also wished, as I have suggested, to keep his work free from the "taint" of occultism. The voices, which began in late adolescence, were not a permanent phenomenon, and Dunne notes that he heard them last in 1913 in connection with the "Flying Scotsman" dream. He suggests that the purpose of the voices was precisely to draw his attention to these dreams and to assure him of the rightness of his theories: "Their final appearance in the dream of the Flying Scotsman was, presumably because this was an absolutely first-class example of what they had succeeded in making me realize – the fact of dream precognition – and so a good ending to their job." Dunne was probably right in thinking that to have foregrounded this aspect of his dreams earlier would have led to their dismissal by the scientifically minded: the tentative introduction of a spiritual aspect to his theories, particularly the idea of some form of survival after death, was part of what led Wells to dismiss Dunne's work of the later 1930s. Yet Dunne perhaps underestimated the extent to which it was precisely this aspect of his ideas, latent, though not explicitly expressed in An Experiment in Time, that could draw in the general reader.

The last bold line on the fear of being dismissed by scientifically minded is understandable. In Surfing Through Hyperspace, Clifford A. Pickover have this to say about that:

Early widespread interest in the fourth dimension did not take place in the scientific and mathematical communities, but among the spiritualists. The American medium and magician Henry Slade, became famous when he was expelled from England for fraud connected with spirit writing on slates. Astronomer C.F. Zöllner was almost completely discredited because of his association with spiritualism.

[...]

[T]he claims of...spiritualists...actually had some scientific value because they touched off a lively debate within the British scientific community.

I just found it interesting that the "voices" were speaking to Dunne and telling him to pay attention to his dreams, and he later developed a new "theory of time," which is now considered to be "outdated" and possibly a "young thought" on relativity and quantum theory. His ideas, however, were utilized for science fictions.

I am re-reading An Experiment with Time and making notes and conjuring ideas as I go before getting into The Serial Universe. There is one note that I'd like to share:

And then, what about that curious feeling which almost everyone has now and then experienced - that sudden fleeting, disturbing conviction that something which is happening at that moment has happened before?

What about those occasions when, receiving an unexpected letter from a friend who writes rarely, one recollects having dreamed of him during the previous night?

What about all those dreams which, after having been completely forgotten, are suddenly, for no apparent reason, recalled later in the day? What is the association which results them?

What about those puzzling dreams from which one is awakened by a noise or other sensory event - dreams in which the noise in question appears as the final dream incident? Why is it that this closing incident is always logically led up to by the earlier part of the dreams?

What, finally, of all those cases, collected and tabulated by the Society for Psychical Research, where a dream of a friend's death has been followed by the receipt, next day, of the confirmatory news? Those dreams were, clearly, not "spirit messages," but instances of my "effect" - simple dreams associated merely with the coming personal experience of reading the news.

I had done nothing but suppose, in hopelessly unscientific fashion, for a week or more, and it seemed to me that I might as well complete my sinning. So I took a final wild leap to the wildest supposition of all.

Was it possible that these phenomena were not abnormal, but normal?

That dreams - dreams in general, all dreams, everybody's dreams - were composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions?

[Note: the italics are the author's]

His comment on all dreams as being "composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions" suggested a linear time or predetermined (predestined) where one's future experience is already determined (since if you're dreaming of a future experience, you will have that experience, which becomes an experience of déjà vu). My thinking on that - sure but not really. But, I'm thinking visually here, so I'll try to explain.

Keeping in mind when the C's said, "déjà vu comes to you compliments of 4th density STS" and "or... some sensation of reality bridging" (Session 04 Jan 1997).

If a "program" or a reality was being changed by the STS forces, it was around that point in the future as being changed and echoed back in "time" like a ripple (in a dream since we would become "out of time") - and it became a predetermined future for that "moment." At least, that's just one thought - not sure if that'd make any sense.

To refresh myself, I took a look at an excerpt from The Secret History of the World where Laura wrote:

The Alpha and Omega. But we do not see this – at least very few of us do. And then we only see imperfectly, "through a glass darkly." We are snails crossing the fields of flowers of the universe, aware only momentarily of the earth, the leaf, the flower, or the raindrop before us. At any given moment we are only aware of a small fragment of the universe, and we continue to deny the existence of everything else: namely the coexistent past and future, and the possibility of perceiving it.

There are two main theories of the future – that of a predestined future and that of a free future. The theory of predestination asserts that every future event is the result of past events. If we know all the past, then we could know all the future. This is linear time. The idea of a free future is based on quantum "probabilities." The future is either only partially determined or undetermined because many of the varied interactions are possible at any given point. This probable future posits the idea of true free will and suggests that quite deliberate volitional acts may bring about a subsequent change in events.

Those who support predestination say that so-called "voluntary" actions are, in fact, not voluntary. Rather, they are but the results of incompletely understood causes, which have made them imperative acts – in short, nothing is accidental.

So on the one hand we have "cold predestination:" come what may, nothing can be changed. On the other hand, we have a reality that is only a point on some sort of needle named the present, surrounded on all sides by the Gulf of Non-existence – a world which is born and dies every moment. Ouspensky unifies these views:

At every given moment all the future of the world is predestined and existing, but it is predestined conditionally, i.e., there must be one or another future in accordance with the direction of events of the given moment, if no new factor comes in. And a new factor can come in only from the side of consciousness and the will resulting from it.

In other words, the snail can choose to change his direction if he increases his knowledge and becomes more aware. The snail may be following the scent of food or a need for warmth, and he may crawl into the path of a car, or into a field full of birds that wish to eat him. In practical terms, this means that snails and human beings, who are crawling through the universe very often, without knowledge, find themselves in the path of destruction. Quite often this destruction can only be overcome by mastering our instinctive urge for pleasure and avoidance of pain. This can only come about by becoming aware of the probable course he is on. If his natural tendencies were leading him to an abyss, which will plunge him into a blazing inferno below, then it would behoove him to learn exactly what it is he must do to avoid it. And therein lies the rub. In order to do that, a being must achieve a more aware higher state of consciousness, not a more intense state of feeling!

After reading the above, I recall Robert Lanza's article, "Does The Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone," where he wrote:

Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.

[...]

History is a biological phenomenon − it's the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment. Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.

"We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT.

And, in his Biocentrism, Lanza wrote:

[T]ime's nature is seen for what it is - a biocentric fabrication, a biologic creation that is solely a practical operating aid in the mental circuitry of some living organisms, to help with specific functioning activities.

Then, I was seeing Dunne's theory of "Observers," where Observer 1 is only conscious of his own "field" and Observer 2 is conscious of the Observer 1's "field" and his own, then Observer 3 is aware of both 1 and 2's fields and his own, and so on. And so, here I am, thinking that, with the above excerpts in mind, if I am an Observer 1 only conscious of my own "field" and I just made a choice to "investigate" my path (or past) and "increase" my knowledge, then I would "merge" with Observer 2 (becoming conscious of 2's field and my old "1" field) and thus effecting the "time" or "reality" in a most significant way (when the "probability waves" collapse).

At the same time, I'm thinking about Dunne as being an "Observer 1" and his own "Observer 2" self was the "voice" that he (as an Observer 1) heard in the early years, which prompt him to "pay attention."

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking and I could be wrong as I go along the readings.

 

[Zadius Sky]

Dunne's other two books, The New Immortality (1938) and Nothing Dies (1940), are the ones that I may not have to get.

Here's a review of The New Immortality from The Theosophical Forum (March 1939):

_http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/forum/f14n03p209_false-time-and-real-time.htm

FALSE TIME AND REAL TIME — H. T. Edge

Dr. J. W. Dunne has written a new book, The New Immortality (1) which is a continuation of his previous books, An Experiment with Time, and The Serial Universe, reviewed in our numbers for May and November, 1938. But it is much briefer and in more popular form, and the author must be congratulated for having made things as clear to the ordinary understanding as it is possible to make such a subject. But of course it will be necessary that the book should be studied through, since we cannot condense what is already a condensation.

It will be remembered that Mr. Dunne in his previous books speaks of an indefinite number of different orders of time, moving relatively to one another; but here, for simplicity's sake and as a first step, he limits himself to two, which he calls false time and real time. The false time, that which we wrongly call time, he represents as the traveling of a point of attention along the field of the real time. The present-moment view which we have of a thing is an abstraction from reality. The reality is four-dimensional, and we are to conceive ourselves as three-dimensional beings traveling through this four-dimensional world. Here we may appositely quote from The Secret Doctrine:

Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration. (I, 37)

What we call time therefore is a sort of spatial dimension, or, since it represents a velocity, the term "vector" may be more applicable. Past and future events exist in the real time, but we classify them as past and future according as we have left them behind or not yet arrived at them. This view of the world has a notable bearing on the philosophy of materialism, as shown in the following quotation:

If you mistake the hybrid thing of which I am speaking for real time, you will come inevitably to the conclusion that everything in the universe is transient and rushing to destruction. In real time the exact contrary is the case. Everything which has established its existence remains in existence. A rose which has bloomed once blooms for ever. As for Man, he is not accorded distinctive treatment; he merely remains with the rest.

This is the basis of the new immortality. This immortality is not a condition upon which we enter suddenly at death, as not having been in it before. It is a condition which exists now, but which we have overlooked. It is quite in accordance with the beliefs of Theosophists that immortality should be thus regarded.

The mistakes made by physicists, according to Mr. Dunne (more fully explained in his Serial Universe) are largely due to their having confused the false time with the real, confused the abstraction with the reality from which it was abstracted. How many vexed problems can be cleared up by correcting this mistake is a matter too deep to go into here, but we understand that it has already profoundly impressed some competent scientific and philosophic thinkers.

One is glad to notice that Mr. Dunne complains of the absurdity of requiring people to prove the postulates which they have assumed for the purposes of an argument.

To demand that a writer on problems which are based upon the acceptance of space and time as elementary indefmables shall begin by denning either term, is to demand that he shall abandon these as terms, discover something more fundamental than either, and proceed to discuss a different problem.

This logical error is one of the most fertile sources of futile logomachy.

The first part of the book is devoted to "The two Nows," which is a way of naming the two sorts of time; one is a moving ever-changing now; the other is a fixed and unchanging now. Birth and death, says the author, are not episodes; they are states; they are there permanently in the real Now. We are three-dimensional beings with a four-dimensional outlook. We have at least two selves, one of which is the owner of the other. This is implied in the term "myself."

A good deal is said about the dream state. When we fall asleep, our senses cease to act, and our moving point of attention is no longer chained to its direct line; hence it becomes free to wander over the vast range of experiences, past, present, and future. But, not being accustomed to such a state of affairs, we stumble about and mix things up, so that events separated by lapses of time are seen together. If it be objected that this is a state of illusion, Mr. Dunne asks us wherein is this state more illusory than the waking state; and further reminds us that, in thinking of a dream, we are comparing a present experience with a mere memory — an unfair comparison; we should rather compare our memories of dreams with our memories of waking experience.

There is one place where the author says what will remind Theosophists of certain after-death states which are described as subjective or illusory. When liberated from the tyranny of the present moment, either by dream or in some other way, we can hold apparent communion with our loved ones. And, what seems best of all, these loved ones are far more agreeable than they were in life, for they respond to our every wish. But here comes the hitch: the reason they are so facile and complacent is that we have made them to order. And further, though we seem to be with our friend, yet our friend is not with us; he is enjoying a little paradise of his own. When we meet on earth, the attention of both parties is focused on the same instant of pseudo-time, and there is a true meeting. But in this other state —

You may hear again the spoken words, you may receive and give the same caresses. But the attention of that other may not be there. In that case there is no meeting.

This may sound discouraging, but there is a remedy, a sure and safe one. It is the old medicine — escape from self.

To avoid or to escape from that, you must be willing to surrender some of your sovereignty. You must be prepared to build to please others. Where there is unselfish love there must be obviously the required measure of agreement. Then you will meet very fully that other whom you seek. You will encounter once again that difference in outlook and desire which makes that other other than you. You two will do things together. Your solo will cease and become part of a duet.

And elsewhere we read that "God is the escape from Self. . . . He is Love. But he is not a distributor of rewards for "virtues" and of punishments for "iniquities." "

But the author does not see why we should not reach these conclusions by way of mathematics; nor did Pythagoras. Perhaps it is a fault of our times to consider mathematics in a derogatory or a jocular sense.

We regard these books of Mr. Dunne's as part of a movement now going on, by which we are escaping from what might be called a one-plane view of the universe. The universe as conceived by science has been a picture correlative with the physical senses. But this is only a partial picture, a cross-section of the universe, as some might call it. It has been found insufficient to explain the facts of experience. Science has found it necessary to go beyond it; and we have now so much evidence of supernormal faculties that it is no longer possible to explain it away. We have to admit that, if our physical senses can become inactive, our mind may thereby be enabled to function in another way, to contact the universe through other channels, and thus to make for itself a new picture of the universe, a new form of objectivity. This, in Theosophical language, would be called planes of consciousness and planes of objectivity corresponding thereto. Mr. Dunne's method of approach is original and highly suggestive. He has put his finger on a common logical error regarding "time," which many must have felt without being able to analyse; he has shown, as others have done before him, how science has been giving a fictitious reality to abstractions.

FOOTNOTE:

1. The New Immortality, by J. W. Dunne. Faber and Faber, London, 1938. 3s. 6d.

And, a short review of Nothing Dies from The Sydney Morning Herald (November 1940)

"TIME" THEORY

"Nothing Dies," by J. W. Dunne.
- Faber and Faber.

When J. W. Dunne's "An Experiment with Time" was first published it aroused criticism from the supporters of the materialistic philosophy only equaled in intensity by the praise of those critics who found in the work not only the evidences of a first class, original intellect, and completely new theory of Time and immortality.

The present outline is simplified version of Dunne's now famous "Time" theory, "written for those who wish to know merely without mathematics, "what it is all about." It is a book everybody should read, explaining as it does simply and by carefully built up logical steps, a philosophy which not only altered one's whole conception of the universe and self, but of "death" itself. Indeed, its greatest importance lies in the way in which it demonstrates that death, in the sense of an ending of things, does not exist.

A rose which bloomed once blooms for ever.

Serialism is the name applied to the science Dunne expounds. The empirical discoveries of modern science, he writes, "are extremely startling, because they consist for the most part of anomalies...They have to be accepted as unexplained miracles...it is like a Surrealist nightmare. Serialism deals with that Surrealism. It appears to provide the explanation of many of those apparent anomalies...

Unbroken Continuity.

In the four-dimensional world into which the study of Dunne's theories lead one dreams are recognized as reality, the past and the future extend through the present in unbroken continuity. His ingenuity in demonstrating his theory admirable. Music is used to build up a line of argument culminating in the conception of the individual as a musician capable of making his own harmonics out of a "keyboard which is a lifetime of human experience of every description...and there are other players operating other instruments, giving the possibility of orchestral effects."

To the seeker after a month, the most impression statement in the book will probably by the following:

"...I am now scienifically certain the Hand of the Great Conductor will become manifest and we shall discover that we are taking part in a Symphony of all Creation. The magnitude of your own share does not matter: for the smaller it may be, the better you will hear the whole."

The book is so much the quintessence of theory that to attempt to paraphrase it further would be impossible. It should be read. It has an importance to every life.

 

[Zadius Sky]

Adding more data to the pot here:

In An Experiment with Time, there was a couple of initial experiments that Dunne shared in regards to dream recall.

This one is pretty much obvious and the one that everyone knows by now (but it was a big deal back then):

The dodge for recalling the forgotten dreams is quite simple. A notebook and pencil is kept under the pillow, and, immediately on waking, before you even open your eyes, you set yourself to remember the rapidly vanishing dream. As a rule, a single incident is all that you can recall, and this appears so dim and small and isolated that you doubt the value of noting it down. Do not, however, attempt to remember anything more, but fix your attention on that single incident, and try to remember its details. Like a flash, a large section of the dream in which that incident occurred comes back. What is more important, however, is that with that section, there usually comes into view an isolated incident from a previous dream. Get hold of as many of these isolated incidents as you can, neglecting temporarily the rest of the dreams of which they formed part. Then jot down these incidents in your notebook as shortly as possible; a word or two for each should suffice.

And, later on, there is an useful suggestion as an addition to the above experiment:

The morning after the first night she came to me and told me that it was quite hopeless. She had tried to remember her dreams the very instant she woke; but there had been nothing to remember. So I told her not to bother about looking for the memories of dreams, but to endeavour instead to recollect what she had been thinking at the moment of waking, and, after she had got that, to try to recall why she had been thinking about it. That worked; as I had known it would; and on each of the next six mornings she was able to remember that she had had one short dream.

The above is very similar to the Work where we would self-observe our thinking/emotion during our waking moments and tracing back to the source; in regards to the dreams, we'd self-observe our thinking/emotions at the moment of waking which would trace us back to the specific dreams.

Elsewhere, he also mentioned that it is very easy for us to forget the dreams, even minutes after waking. Obviously, that is very true. Even when I recorded my dreams and put them aside for a while - I had forgotten all about it. When I looked at a certain dream that I wrote down, I had no recollection of that dream at all after reading it days later unless I worked with that dream during the evening on the same day of the dream (interpretations, analyzing, etc.), then I'd remember that dream afterwards.

Secondly, there is an experiment or an exercise that I haven't even heard of:

The waking mind refuses point-blank to accept the association between the dream and the subsequent event. For it, this association is the wrong way round, and no sooner does it make itself perceived than it is instantly rejected. The intellectual revolt is automatic and extremely powerful. Even when confronted with the indisputable evidence of the written record, one jumps at any excuse which nearly always seized is the dissimilarity of the adjacent parts in the "integration" which do not fit the incident; matters which do not, of course, in the least affect the fact that there are parts of the scene or integration which do fit with the required degree of exactitude.

The result is that, on reading over the record at the end of the succeeding day (or two days), one is apt to read straight on through the very thing one is looking for, without even noticing its connection with the waking incident. The reading should therefore be done slowly, with frequent pauses for consideration and for comparison with the day's events. In the cases of nearly all the results I am going to relate, the connection was, at first, only half glimpsed, was then immediately rejected, and was finally accepted only on account of the accumulating weight of the previously unnoticed points of corroborative detail.

The simplest way to avoid this initial failure to notice is to pretend to yourself that the records you are about to read are those of dreams which you are going to have during the coming night; and then to look for events in the past day which might legitimately be regarded as the causes of those dreams. This is not unfair. It is only a device to enable you to notice; not a device to assist you to judge. That you do later, concerning yourself then solely with the corroborative details, and giving no thought to the Time order.

That would be an interesting exercise, I think.

Anyway, I was looking more into Dunne's background (while waiting for Intrusion?) and found some interesting things:

1) Dunne was friends with H. G. Wells (see below).

2) Dunne has fought in The Second Boer War in South Africa, where he joined, at the age of 24-25, the Imperial Yeomanry in February 1900 (when he was one of 120 men recruited from Ireland - quite possibly after the Bloody Sunday of February when the British forces suffered the most casualties at the Battle of Paardeberg). I'm not sure if he seen much action since he became sick with typhoid (the first action that the Imperial Yeomanry ever seen was on 5 April 1900 near Boshof). Arthur Conan Doyle was involved in the said war, but he was only stationed at Langman Field Hospital at Bloemfontein between March and June 1900 on which he later wrote The Great Boer War (it's very unlikely that Doyle and Dunne have ever met, contrary to a later thought that they served together).

3) He was asked to write a foreword or a note to a book by Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain simply entitled An Adventure, which is about the event that happened on August 1901 in the gardens of the Petit Trianon in France or otherwise known as The Moberly–Jourdain incident. I've never heard of this before.

_http://wayfarerssanctuary.com/note.html

4) His works were known and respected by the Inklings, which was an informal literary discussion group associated with University of Oxford, England between 1930s and 1940s. The members of Inklings included C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield (whose works influenced by Rudolf Steiner), Charles Williams (involved in the occults in 1910s-20s), and Hugo Dyson (who, with Tolkien, "persuaded" Lewis to convert to Christianity).

I've found another review of Flieger's book, A Question of Time, on Dunne-Tolkien connection:

_http://www.mythsoc.org/reviews/a.question.of.time/

The main non-literary work she sees as a large influence on Tolkien is An Experiment with Time by J.W. Dunne (1927), an abstruse consideration of the hypothetically intersecting roles of sleeping dreams and time (past or future). Dunne's theories, now largely discredited, were a considerable phenomenon in the 1930s. A further book discussed by Flieger is An Adventure (1911), a purportedly true account of two women who experienced a time-slip in the gardens of the Trianon and spent an afternoon in the past.

[...]

If I am to find any real flaw in the text itself, it would have to be in the approach and the selectivity of the coverage. I really want to know more about the phenomenon of Dunne and his influence upon literature. As early as 1944, the critic Edward Wagenknecht was remarking upon a literature based upon Dunne and his theories, one that in England "has now grown into a very respectable small industry." Wagenknecht cites several examples, including John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain (1932), which seems to be a good candidate for Tolkien to have read, but it isn't covered by Flieger.

And despite the abstruseness of Dunne's theories, I wish Flieger would have explored further some of Dunne's books beyond An Experiment with Time: The Serial Universe (1938), The New Immortality (1939), and Nothing Dies (1940). It seems to me that some elements of Dunne's "serialism" — at least from The Serial Universe — found their way into Tolkien via his use of the theme of reincarnation. Flieger touches upon this briefly, but leaves the topic itself mostly unexplored, and this feels to me like an omission. (In Flieger's defense it must be admitted that Dunne's books subsequent to An Experiment with Time were hardly well-received — and even Dunne's old friend H.G. Wells referred to them as "an entertaining paradox expanded into a humorless obsession.")

Still, these are very minor squabbles. A Question of Time is a first-rate exploration of Tolkien's obsession with time, and it has earned a secure position on the small shelf of absolutely essential books about Tolkien.

I'm adding Verlyn Flieger's A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien's Road to Faërie to my list as I'm curious about Tolkien's treatment of time and for more details on that.

Furthermore, I was also looking for Wells-Dunne connection, and came across this little note in J. Huntington's The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction:

1. Lest there be any doubt, Wells showed his skepticism about time travel in a review, which he wrote more than forty years after The Time Machine, of J. W. Dunne's The New Immortality. Dunne had claimed Wells as an inspiration for his theories about time. Wells demurs, saying that he was merely playing with paradoxes, not a theory of time. "The Immortality of Mr. J. W. Dunne," The Nineteenth Century and After (1933), 125: 13-17.

So, I searched around and found H. G. Wells' article, "The Immortality of Mr. J. W. Dunne" (dated January 7, 1939):

_http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1939jan07-00003

The Immortality of Mr. J. W. Dunne
BY H. G. WELLS

YEARS ago when we were young together, though he was the younger, I used to talk to J. W. Dunne about the stability of aeroplanes (he made a very remarkable one) and about a paradoxical story I wrote called "The Time Machine." In the eighties there was much mental play among science students about the fourth (and other) dimensions, and the trick of my story was to declare that every real object had not only three dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness at right angles to each other, but duration, and furthermore to ignore a certain difference between the former three and the latter. As for instance that you could turn objects about between these three spatial dimension, while time carried on remorselessly in one direction and would have no such interchangeability with the others. By a dexterous use of impudence and analogy one could present the Universe, past, present, and future, as a rigid four-dimensional system and before the reader had time to object, the story-teller had whisked him off on the Time Machine into the remote past or into the days to come.

There one chased him about and never gave him a breathing space. One had to be careful not to let him go slantingways into-time-and-up for example, or into-time-and-down, or away-from-the-world and the sun in their orbits, because that might have set him taking notice and asking awkward questions. Such as: would there be two of him to-morrow and three when he came back? And so one got him, a little giddy but quite credulous into the sombre future of the cooling globe and among degenerate human beings, Eloi and Morlocks and the like. In those days there seemed reason for supposing the world was cooling down at an alarming pace. Reasons have appeared since which throw doubt on that reduction of everything to "heat at a low potential," in a few million years or so, but anyhow it made an entertaining story, and that was all there to it.

I went on living in space and time with plenty of agreeable days that became memorable yesterdays, and an undying interest in the incalculable behavior of tomorrow. Being no sort of physicist I did not know then of the work in hand that presently flowered in the bright diagrams of Einstein. Because you know these theories of his are essentially diagrams, as he would be the first to admit, they are new and richly suggestive ways of plotting out the structure of our mysterious universe as a universe, but they are no contribution at all to the homely problems of everyday, personal experience, such as problems as Shall I meet some one I care for tomorrow? and Will it be fine enough to have breakfast in the garden? I wrote my fantasy and left it at that. But Dunne brooded on this idea of duration as a dimension of space. I think now he has brooded too much up on it.

Quite apart from that he brooded on something else. He began to notice an odd anticipation of coming events in his dreams. He gave that a lot of attention and put his observations on record in a really very exciting book, "An Experiment with Time." He devised a system of recording dreams at the moment of awakening, and he got together some passable evidence of dream premonitions. That set one thinking upon an often disregarded fact, that the "now" is not a mathematical instant but that it lasts a perceptible time.

[...]

Then appeared "The Serial Universe," in which, with a certain dismay, I discovered him enthusiastically piling dimension upon dimension and arranging Time A and Time B and so on like a nest of boxes, and my dear old Time Traveler multiplied to a whole succession of Time Travelers, the Dunne "Observers." It was done gravely. It was done with scientific and mathematical gestures calculated to make Jeans and Eddington feel insignificant, my friend J. B. Priestley that, having a highly responsive mind, he produced a book and three plays in rapid succession, taking the most remarkable liberties with our time limitations.

[...]

...and now here is another book to hand from him on "The New Immortality," in which he adopts the role of something between a cosmic
Sherlock Holmes and an Eastern sage, treats philosophers and men of science with a cheerful disdain, and has the most remarkable dialogues between " I " (Dunne) and a sort of Watson or Stooge called "You." They sustain a most harmonious duet and the stooge anticipates and helps out Dunne like an identical twin. The book will, I am quite sure, carry conviction to many, but I doubt if it will be read as muchh as it is accepted. It claims to be easily "understanded of the people." I doubt if the public is that much Stooge. I find it inconsecutive, incomprehensible, and unreadable.

[...]

What common people like you and me want, when the question of immortality is put to us fairly, is more of the same queer mixture, and to be able to go on doing things—particularly to go on doing things. Life is an encounter, not a spectacle, and immortality for us means just more of this same good common stuff. Only a religious maniac thinks of life as an "ante-chamber to eternal extinction." That is how Dunne puts it and it betrays the quality of his thought. Extinction is an end; it doesn't go on for a moment, there is question-begging mania, in that "eternal." No materialist thinks as badly as that. I wish I could get Dunne to come off that egg now. He has lost all sense of proportion. He says that this Serialism which he imagines peeps and stirs within it, is "sufficient to reduce to complete non-sense every discussion which has ever taken place concerning the question of survival. It is sufficient to convert into so much waste paper the greater part of the world's more serious books."

Well, it isn't. It is merely an entertaining paradox expanded into a humorless obsession.

That's the similar impression that I was getting while reading Dunne's first two books - it was his dreams that set him off on a direction where he went formulating a theory of time and became obsessed with it somewhat.

Both T.C. Lethbridge and Martin Ebon referred to Dunne's book as a classic and a great read on analysis of dreams.

While searching, I've found a section in the foreword by C. Wilson to T.C. Lethbridge: The Man Who Saw the Future (T. Welbourn) where it is mentioned that Lethbridge was aware of Dunne's theory:

It was quite clear to Lethbridge that human beings are surrounded by "hidden information" - in the form of impressions on an electrical field, exactly analogous to tape recordings. In fact, this idea had been suggested at the beginning of the twentieth century by the researcher Sir Oliver Lodge, who had suggested that the unpleasant "atmosphere" in certain haunted houses is simply a kind of recording on the walls of the house. Lethbridge came to feel that this is particularly true in the presence of damp.

During his years at Hole House, Lethbridge stumbled upon an incredible number of interesting theories. One of these concerned the nature of time. In May 1964, a BBC camera team went to Hole House to record an interview with Lethbridge about dowsing. A young cameraman looked so dazed and startled as he got out of the car that Lethbridge asked him, "Have you been here before?" The cameraman shook his head, "No, but I've dreamed about it." He asked if he could look behind the house. Pointing to the wall that Lethbridge had knocked down and rebuilt, he said, "That wasn't like that years ago. There used to be buildings against it." Lethbridge knew this was true - but not in his own time.

In the Herb Garden, the cameraman said, "There used to be buildings there, but they were pulled down."

Lethbridge knew about the "time theories" of J.W. Dunne, which had caused a great sensation in the 1930s. Dunne was an aeronautic engineer who, around the turn of the century, had a number of impressive dreams of the future - for example, he dreamed accurately about the fore-coming eruption of the volcano, Mount Pelee, on Martinique. Dunne had suggested that time is like a tape or film which may get twisted and tangled, so that we can catch glimpses of other times. He used to keep a notebook and pencil by his bed and jot down his dreams the moment he woke up. He was convinced that we all dream about the future - probably every night of our lives - but that we forget it almost as soon as we wake up. J.B. Priestly went on to write a series of remarkable plays in the 1930s based upon his theories.

From then, Lethbridge also kept a notebook and pencil at the side of his bed, and make a note of his dreams, particularly if they were exceptionally clear. One night, he dreamed about the face of a man who seemed to be looking at him out of a mirror. He was doing something with his hands which seemed to be moving in the area of his chin. Lethbridge thought he might be shaving.

The next day, Lethbridge was driving slowly along a narrow lane when a car came round the corner, and at the wheel was the same man he'd seen in his dream. His face was framed by a windscreen - which was why Lethbridge had mistaken it for a mirror - and his hands were moving in the area of his chin on top of the steering wheel. Lethbridge was certain that he had never seen the man before. In due course, these remarkable discoveries also went into another of Lethbridge's books.

And, from a review of The Power of the Pendulum:

Lethbridge had been greatly influenced by Dunne's Experiment with Time and he had come to accept, that on the next level, time and sequence were irrelevances and pertinent only for our earth level existence. Experiments with the pendulum had led him to discover other dimensions and that dreams also provided a glimpse into this "other" world.

Basically, I think Dunne did a very good job in creating a basic and interesting theory of time in relating to our dreams for that period (plus it gave other writers ideas for dealing with the issues of time).

 

[Zadius Sky]

Dunne's last book, Intrusions?, arrived yesterday and I have finished reading it earlier today. It is the first and only edition of this title, with up to 160 pages. I am just not sure why they didn't make any more editions of this title. The new editions of The Serial Universe was published on 2011 (Kessinger), The New Immortality as published on 2008 (Kessinger), and Nothing Dies in 2010 (Resonance). I had already read The Serial Universe, which is very technical about the theory (and I swear, while reading it, one of my eyes was threatening to leave the socket and to look somewhere else). I'm not too worried about the other books to read, though.

Anyway, the last chapter of this final book was suddenly stopped due to Dunne's death. So, this book was published six years after his death by his wife and friends. The writing of this book was done with a "strong sense of urgency" and he had to neglect designing new planes for the Second World War.

The "intrusions" that Dunne was referring to has to do with the "interference" by someone outside of "time." He listed at least three "intrusions" in this book, but his own son added the fourth "intrusion" (briefly) because his father died before he had the chance to write it down.

From my first post here, it is mentioned that Ruth Brandon claimed Dunne was a medium, but I don't see it since he was insistently against it. I've found the autobiographical aspect of this book to be interesting about Dunne's perception of things. He was really afraid of what others think of him if he ever got involved in unorthodox activities as he tried, to the best of his abilities, to be "professional" and "scientific," which is why he seemed so obsessed with his own scientific theory of "time." And, what's interesting is that he came up with the "Serialism' theory when he was a child and he was doing the "re-examination" of this time theory after his "dream" experiences as an adult.

So, since this book is bit hard to get, I'll summarize some of it with the points made in this book. Keep in mind, I'm typing by hand here for the insertion of quotes from the book.

I'll post here a short "Introductory Note" as written by Dunne's wife as a starting point:

The arrangement of this book might well have been different if my husband had lived to complete it himself; but it seems best that it should now be published as nearly as possible as he left it.

It was written with a sense of urgency and in circumstances of chronic ill-health. Moreover, during the war, he felt impelled to put aside the writing in order to produce a modern version of his early aircraft design. But, as he wrote in a letter to a friend - "This was a long business; and in the middle of it, I went down with severe pneumonia.

"Then a very odd thing happened. Note that I had been putting off writing Intrusions? because I thought the aeroplane more immediately important. But bear in mind: I funked writing that book, and there would never have come a time when I should not have found something more important to do.

"Well, when I recovered from the pneumonia, I found that the pleura had stuck fast to the left ribs. Bending over the drawing board would bring on most violent attacks of pain. However, I struggled along. Then I had a half-waking dream in which I was being scolded. The gist of the tirade was the ridiculous assertion that it would be a two-thousand-years-long calamity for mankind if I failed to clear up what remained to be cleared up in the theory of Serialism; that I had been granted an extension of time in which to do so; and that I was to start using that time at once. Then, while I still hesitated, there developed suddenly an acute neuritis in my right triceps, which prevented me from lifting my arm to the drawing board at all!

"It was obvious that the projected aeroplane could never be finished now in time to be used in the war. While, as regards the neglected book: it was quite possible that I had missed something important and was subconsciously aware of the fact.

"Then the dream came again. "Hurry! Hurry!" said the voice, subconscious or otherwise. Two words only. But I left the drawings on the board and hurried. And it was lucky that I did so. I had missed something, and that something was the most important fact that it is possible to imagine.

"The book has taken me two years to work out and write. During that time the neuritis in the arm partly subsided; but the other troubles have increased and have been complicated by a weakening heart muscle. So the discovery in question might have been postponed for an indefinite period if I had expended those two years in aeronautical research."

In August 1946 my husband was operated on for a perforated duodenal ulcer, and this was followed by another operation in March 1947. His remaining time was devoted to the revision of his earlier book Nothing Dies.

The Introduction re-states the theory of Serial Time, and argues that every act of planning an experiment is itself an experiment proving the separateness of mind and brain. The author is concerned, as in his earlier books, to show two main things; first, that the mind and brain are separate, the relative movement between them being commonly called "the Passage of Time," and secondly, that minds are parts of a Universal Mind. The writing of this Introduction, however, led the author to make what he considered to be important additions stating the physical aspect of his theory and showing how it stands in relation to the work of Eddington; and this is the subject of the Appendix.

The central part of the book is mainly autobiographical and describes certain experiences, which my husband called "Intrusions."

I should like to express my gratitude to Mr. Michael Birkin for his invaluable help in editing my husband's work; particularly in constructing Diagram 4 which was missing and in bridging the gap which occurred in the MS. at that point (pp. 35, and 36). This gap was due to the fact that my husband had started a revision of the Introduction but had not been able to finish it. He had intended, furthermore, to re-write the first two chapters of the main book. Those parts of the Introduction which would probably have been re-written are indicated by a footnote at the pages concerned.

I should also like to express my thanks to Mr. R.H.I. de la Mare for his guidance and encouragement; to Rev. Dr. Leslie W.A. Ahrendt for his great help in correcting the proofs of the mathematical appendix and to my son for his account of the fourth Intrusion which my husband had related to us, but had not written down.

Cecily Dunne

Then came a brief foreword as written by Dunne to tell the reader that his chronicles were derived from a series of letters to his anonymous friend. But, before allowing the reader to go there, he wanted to insert an Introduction (and an Appendix), which actually lasted for 43 more pages. It's basically a re-statement of the Serialism theory, but this time, the style of writing this statement was done as a "dialogue" between the "Materialist" and the "Serialist," which was an interesting read. I just have to admit, this part was a little better reading about the theory than his previous books. I am not all that great with reading just the "technical explanations" of any theory, but this sort of "question-answer" conversations seemed to make the theory a slightly better understood. He did pointed out here that Serialism rules out predeterminism because of "interference" from other observers, which he tried to explain in details for the accounts of "intrusions" that followed later.

The first chapter is a start of a long letter to his friend about Serialism and explaining how the "restriction" of our time is paralleled to the creations of our brains, and how our minds are not "restricted" (this is an explanation of the separation between "mind" and the "brain"). Then, he talked about the difference between "attention" and "physical vision," the meaning of dreaming (which, basically, is when we sleep, we'd lost our "travelling mark" in "time" temporarily and our attention focuses in an unordered fashion within our four-dimensional field of observation).

In the second chapter, he further explained Serialism on a personal level and pointed out that our individual minds are individual aspects of the Universal Mind, and then more about "attention" and how it relate to the Universal Mind. He also pointed out that telepathy is impossible between two people in the same dimension (unless it is done in a "higher" dimension).

Chapter Three begins with the statement that there are no "physical miracles" and the intrusions "consist simply in influencing people's individual minds" (p. 78). Then, he talked about "God's Will" and people's belief in Him, etc. There is a section from this chapter that I found to be an interesting read:

I have pointed out that you reach God intellectually by a very simple process. You refuse to think of yourself as "the only apple on the tree." The rest, in Serialism, follows. And the converse is true. Refuse the act of faith in the existence of a Universal Mind, and you are (in Serialism) refusing that act of faith in the existence of other people like yourself which is the escape from solipsism. Similarly, of course, if you claim that your knowledge of "other people" is "intuitive," you are making the same claim to a knowledge of the Universal Mind. The two knowledges are (in Serialism) intellectually identical. Now, something of the same sort holds good, I suspect, in the sphere of what metaphysicians call "feelings." You refuse to feel yourself the only person that matters; you feel that other people matter equally; and - you find God. Moreover, there are many who are sick of their unpleasing selves. They long desperately to escape from self - to find something more satisfying. The way of escape was pointed out by a man who had found it; and it amounted to no more than granting to all men equal importance with yourself. He suggested a standard petition, and it is one which does not contain the words "I" or "me." Now, merely to despair of your "self" is weakness. If you do not like that "self," you should, at least, try to alter it. But that is a wearisome and, for many of us, a losing battle: the biological factor of inherited personality is too strong. Nevertheless, to "recoil" from your "self" in the world of mind is the same thing as to be attracted towards something external to that "self." "Recoil" and "attract" are, of course, words borrowed from the language of physics: but they do seem to fit very nicely in the world of mind, if we claim that "dislike" and "arouse liking" are analogies. For to recoil from your "self" is - as we saw in Chapter II - a recoiling from a particular aspect of the Universal Mind - the aspect which is you. And the only mental thing left for you to recoil to is the Universal Mind in its completeness. (This, as we saw earlier, is a great deal more than a synthesis of aspects presented to various personalities.) That mind has understanding and courage (remember that it experiences all our pains and troubles) and it is possessed of wisdom unequalled. It is, certainly, attractive.

Speaking from experience, I do not think that it rebuffs those minds which turn to it in the craving for something better than themselves. Such an approach is not a request for an intrusion. The "intrusion" - the apparently welcomed intrusion - is from the seeker.

Basically, he is pointing out that there are people who are "sick" of their "selves" which are considered to be "unpleasing" (I guess, for whatever reason). And, how our "inherited personality" is too strong for us to "alter" our selves and how it is a "losing battle." If he had read Gurdjieff's works, he would have change that statement slightly where "altering" our "false" selves is difficult to do because of the strength of the "inherited personality" (falsus persona).

Back to this chapter, the author further talked about his reactions as a kid and his questions about religion ("Why God didn't kill the Devil?) and how he was shut up when told that "We must not question God." How he became an "odd" child by reading too much into mathematics and was developing a sense of inferiority due to his inability to do what other children did.

The next chapter looks at the time when he was seventeen in South Africa and how he was experiencing a sensation of being "two diametrically different persons occupying the same body" and called this period his "Jekyll-Hyde" episode. A couple years after this episode, he went on to "investigate" Spiritualism which he believed to be a cult. This is an interesting bit because he talked about "expectation" (anticipation) in regarding the Ouija board and séances where he wrote: "Unconscious muscular adaptation always accompanies expectation...if you expect to move in a certain direction, your muscles get ready to make that movement, and in so doing, block all other routes of travel" and how a rapid speed of such movement can produce good results.

Here's the section regarding his thoughts on spiritualism:

Such is the unnoticed power of Expectation.

Almost all spiritualistic phenomena at séances where there is no trance-medium present, are based upon that power.

A public séance of this kind, where there are some thirty or forty people present, can become like a scene in a lunatic asylum. Half of those present, the half who are obeying strictly the Director's order to resist no impulse, however, absurd, are rocking and shuddering like negroes at a revivalist meeting. Some will be even rolling on the floor. A few will be making unintelligible noises, believing themselves to be on the way to "voice mediumship." But nothing occurs which is not the most obvious self-deception. One is reminded strongly of St. Paul's rebuke in one of his Epistles. Of what use was it, he demanded, to speak with voices if none could understand what was said?

But the most horrible thing to be seen in all the ramifications of spiritualism is the state of the old men who have become permanent victims of the self-deception involved in obtaining answers from automatic writing, "Ouija board" or table tilting. They have lost all initiative; they fear to make any decision without first consulting their spirit "guides"; they are poor, because their timidity and spinelessness have put an end to any chance of promotions in their various employments; they have lost all critical faculty through long indulgence in credulity; and they sell or buy on response to "messages" dictated to themselves by themselves with what little remains of their brains.

The above, I think, is the cause of his fear to talk about the "voices" for his first book.

The next chapter focused on his first experience in the séance where the medium was claiming that Dunne will be "the greatest medium that the world has ever seen," and it won't happen for a long time but he "must give up smoking." Dunne of course ignored that last bit, which he believed to be a classical tenet of spiritualism (which made sense because smoking increases a thinking process but the spiritualism prohibited it). Then, he goes on with this "thesis" about the "controls" and the "expectations" of the medium (how medium's "expectation" blocks the "unexpected class" of the "control" - in other words, he could be talking about medium's beliefs blocking the "true messages" from the spirits). And, he further warns against "expectations."

The seventh chapter begins with the warning about trusting any messages from "other worlds." Then, he goes on to talk about the dreams he had and the voices involved, and I am including the quote that is relevant:

In An Experiment with Time I wrote:

"The dream had been a peculiar one (in ways which have nothing to do with this book) and the net result of it all was that I let a match to see whether the watch had really stopped."

Curiously enough, nobody has ever asked me what were those undescribed "ways" in which that dream had been peculiar.

This is what happened:

In the dream, at the end of it, I was looking down on the stopped watch lying in my hands. At that moment I became aware of a growing din made by an immense multitude of voices. They were all shouting at me - shouting in the wildest excitement - but there was no unison in what they cried, and the clamour was a veritable babel. Then, as the visual part of the dream began to fade, someone said, "That will do!," and the babel ceased for an instant. "Now, then!" he cried, and all the multitude shouted in unison, "Look!...Look!...Look!...Look!...Look!...Look!"

And I awoke with the memory of those voices almost ringing in my ears.

Naturally, I struck a match and looked.

The similar "multitude of voices" occurred again in his further dreams, such as "Cape to Cairo" and "Flying Scotsman," with the latter being the last time that those voices occurred. He then pointed out that the "voices" made him realize the fact of dream precognition and that realization was "a good ending to their job."

The next chapter is briefly discussed about a "voiceless intrusion" where he saw a scene of a sky rolling down to a complete blackness when he was praying to Jesus and realized that he was really addressing to no one that would answer him. Then, he sent out thanks to God for ..., and suddenly, before he could finish, a scene suddenly revealed to him of an unspeakable beauty that was "overflowing." This made him to realize that he made a ridiculous promise of being "unquestioning a Christian as any Catholic might desire" and how this scene released him from that promise. This occurred right after the Second Boer War.

The ninth chapter talked about the very vivid dream where he first saw an "Angel," which Dunne believed to be allegorical. He asked him why there are God's shadow everywhere, and the answer came: "Because it has no edges." After this dream, he surmised that it is impossible to search anywhere for evidence of God. This dream occurred in 1905. He pointed out that he remained cautious about the "Angel" as he could be a "creature of [his] own imagination, constructed to accord with the supposed information he was conveying" (p. 124).

The following chapter expressed the author's thoughts on Nature, Wars, Evil, and Human Race. The following quote is rather fascinating as it seemed to be relevant to our understanding of rituals and our state as "unconscious automaton":

In brief, suppressed mental distress craving mental anodynes and finding none save mental somnolence would be the first outcome of a civilization in which there were no risks to run. But there would be another result, and this would lead to a situation far uglier than that which was pictured by H. G. Wells.

The flow of nervous energy in any system of nervous matter tends to follow paths of least resistance. A flow of that kind is called, of course, "automatic." Such automatic flows tend to become (in the life-history of the genus concerned) uncontrollable and unconscious. For example, your breathing is automatic, but it is quite controllable and, although it seldom engages your attention, is well within your field of observation. Again, the beating of your heart is automatic and uncontrollable, yet you can still, occasionally, be conscious thereof. But there are a great number of activities proceeding in your nervous system which are both completely uncontrollable and completely unobservable by you. In general, the procedure may be summed up thus: Allow a specific automatic activity to function for many generations without frequent interference and it will become first uncontrollable and then unconscious.

Now then: picture a civilization in which all stress, danger and difficulty in meeting daily needs have long disappeared; in which adherence to a code of mutual social respect coupled with mutual social compliance has become second nature to all, so that no individual suffers from lack of companionship or rejected emotional cravings; a world in which music, art and entertainment are all State-provided and in accordance with the demands of the mediocre majority; a world in which "flaming souls" would be shocking anachronisms. What would happen?

Man's marvellous brain would, of course, adapt itself swiftly to the new stereotyped conditions. Its response to each recurring situation would be perfect, and leave nothing for the mind to do. Mind could rest. It could sit placidly admiring the sycophantic activities of its mechanical servitor, the brain. There would be no longer the smallest need for mind's interference.

Let the Human Race continue in this condition without interruption from a conquered Nature. What, in the long run would be the result?

Man would become an almost entirely unconscious automaton.

Like the bee, he might still imitate, ritualistically, the intelligence he had once possessed. But that means merely that "Ritual" would have been a major factor in his decline. Despite the appearance of motive, he would have become, inherently, as vacuous as the bee which buzzes itself to death against an unexpected window-pane. Nature, in her great experiment with the Human Race, would have reached one more blind alley. Ritual is the purely animal tendency to allow neural activity to follow a course which has been rendered, by constant repetition, the path of least resistance. Cultivated ritual, whether this lies in the negroid beatings of the tom-tom, in the stereotyped sequences of popular films, in the exigencies of "fashion," in the "proper behaviour suited to the circumstances," or even in the beauty of a Cathedral Service, always wins if left undisturbed; because it has prepared for the flow of nervous energy a path exceptionally easy to follow, and the following of that facile path is a restful and soothing process. In small doses it is a useful mental anodyne. In large doses it is a powerful hypnotic, with a strong drugging effect on the will. (The Fascists made great use of that in their youth-training.) But the end of any prolonged failure to control is inability to control, followed by complete unconsciousness of the cerebral activity which is proceeding. And, for the man who is trying to rise to greater mental, artistic or spiritual heights, ritual is a clogging poison.

Dragoon Man into complete security, smother him with luxury, frown upon his birthright - the "flaming soul" - warn him that the displeasure of the herd awaits any effort to be finer than the standard type, nurse him in his new captivity until the last vestige of rebellion has disappeared: the whirlpool life of Total Ritual to which you have condemned him will ensure that his degradation is completed in the shortest possible time.

On to turmoil and destruction! Forward to the Mindless Automaton! There is the Scylla and there is the Charybdis between which Man the Flaming Soul has to steer a course which Nature herself has not yet been able to discover.

Scylla is the nearest, now. We have to dodge those snapping jaws before we can give heed to anything else; and, fortunately, our ship's crew is in complete accord on that point. Unfortunately, however, the majority of them are clamouring for a helm hard down and a course - the shortest possible - laid straight for the centre of Charybdis.

If we reached that, what would it matter whether we circled there for a thousand years or a million years before disappearing down the vortex? We should have bungled the whole voyage, and have missed making the open sea.

What lies in the open sea? All our hopes for the future of the Human Race.

It's interesting how he was seeing the danger of "rituals" and how that created a "Mindless Automaton" race.

The next chapter goes on to the second account of the "Angel" where, in a dream, the author saw the "Angel" (whom he haven't seen for 23 years) whom he asked, "How can I be sure that it is going to turn out all right for us?" And, the "Angel" slowly answered, "Always remember this: Whatever the game is, YOU had a hand in the making of it." This occurred immediately after the publication of An Experiment with Time. He then tried to analyze the possibilities of this "message" with technical explanations.

Finally, the last chapter detailed the author's thoughts about the Universal Mind and his experiences with the "Angel" as well as indulging into the speculations on the "mind-sharing" theory of telepathy. This is where the author stopped, and the account of "Fourth Intrusion" now enters.

The fourth intrusion, as written by his son, read as follows:

In the third appearance he described the scenery as having grown dark and stormy so that he could barely see the "Angel." In the fourth and final appearance it was pitch black with a raging tempest. All that he could see of the "Angel" was a white something which he took to be his robe and which he caught hold of, for (here I quote his own words) "I knew that it was the last time I should see him."

This Appearance was very brief and I think it took him by surprise. He said that he thought rapidly for some question to ask the "Angel." The question which had always worried him came out - "Christianity, is it true?" and the "Angel" replied: "God lets it be true for those who want it to be true."

He said that he had no interpretation of the "Angel's" reply to his final question.

Well, that was really a good read, I think. Dunne was a very cautious gentleman and a Christian. It would seemed that there is a part of him that was getting him to "think" about certain things. He created this theory to include the possibility of "interference" from an entity outside of "time" and also tried to explain his experiences in a more "scientific" way as possible. He sure doesn't want to be known as a "psychic nut-job" if he ever present his experiences in dreams with "voices" talking to him. So, by presenting a "scientific" theory (and it was 1920s) about the dreams and an "explanation" for déjà vu experiences. As a result, his book An Experiment with Time was popular in the 1930s and now considered to be a "classic."

 

[mcblaggard]

I've taken the opportunity to get the Second Edition of An Experiment With Time and made it into a text e-Book with re-drawn illustrations, graphics etc.

I formatted the text, and included links in the document to make navigation a little easier. I also included J. W. Dunne's biography from Wikipedia and information on his book (some of which I see posted here) and his aircraft.

​

An Experiment With Time (2nd Ed., e-Book v0.1.1a).pdf (1.27 MB)
http://www.multiupload.nl/SQLDOSGCYG

Many thanks to the Open Archive.
http://archive.org/details/AnExperimentWithTime

Please share if you know anyone interested in this book, it's free :) A smart Irish guy, back before when they didn't drink fluoride and shoot up mercury every winter.

 

[Palinurus]

Hi mcblaggard and to the forum,

Thank you for taking the trouble and putting in the effort to reformat and share with us this important text and in doing so signaling the existence once again of this interesting topic which I for one had missed out on so far and didn't know it exists. From first glance I'd say you did a very good job with it. Thanks again. :)

As this apparently is your first post ever, if you plan to stay here a little longer and participate some more, please go to the Newbies board here: http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/board,39.0.html in order to properly introduce yourself, as is customary around here. There is no need for personal information, just a bit about how you found this forum. whether you have read any of the recommended literature -- http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,4718.0.html -- and anything more in similar vein. You can browse that board to see how others have done this, would you be in any uncertainty about what is asked for.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO OTHER READERS: please make sure you chose the Direct Download button on Multiupload.nl if you're interested in this file, as some of the other possibilities gave me a hard time without any result while intruding with spam, advertisements and other unnecessary distractions.

 

[mcblaggard]

I'll post an update here (since I can't "edit" posts yet.)

Updated e-book, v0.1.2a.
An Experiment With Time, 2nd Ed., 1929


http://archive.org/details/AnExperimentWithTimeEbook
An_Experiment_With_Time_(2nd_Ed.,_e-Book_v0.1.2a).pdf (1.27MB)

(Download PDF from archive.org)​

 

[Palinurus]

Thanks mcblaggard! This new link works fine without any disturbances whatsoever.

I also read your posts in the Newbie section. I would say: give us a try before leaving; you might get surprised... ;)

J.W. Dunne isn't the only person or subject of interest around here, you know. Plenty to choose from or to add to, if you'd be so inclined. :P

 

[Buddy]

I became aware of this thread when mcblaggard posted that link to his reformatted ebook version of "An Experiment with Time", so I downloaded a copy and read it. I spent the larger part of my free time for the last three days reading and studying this book.

It was a bit annoying to start with, until I realized that the case for Serialization he was presenting is a double case - logical and empirical. The logical case is presented backwards. That is, the more difficult ideas and reasoning are presented first and the easy introductory stuff is near the end. The empirical case is presented forwards (normally) as a reader might expect.

The next annoying thing was realizing that the geometry was difficult for me to grasp. To me there is something sooo wrong about having to construct and grasp mental geometrical models from text and line drawings read from a two dimensional sheet of paper or a monitor screen. :)

Anyway, once I thought I understood his diagrams, I found I had to go back through and study each one more than once to make sure I:

1) didn't read more into them than the author wanted me too, and
2) didn't miss anything that he wanted me to see

I finally got through my personal difficulties and started enjoying the book all the way to the end. And just to make sure I understood the theory, I then read the book backwards, starting with the last chapter and proceeding to the next-to-last and so on up to the beginning.

So, now I feel like I understand the theory, his diagrams, his analogies and the physics and I fully agree with his summary of points.

On a side note: I was particularly delighted when I came upon the mention of Henri Bergson as I'm fully aware of Bergson's case on Time, so I thought I was about to learn something completely new or at least read a novel perspective. As it turns out, there's no real disagreement between Dunne and Bergson. Dunne's explanations of 'endurance' shed even more light on Bergson's "pure duration" and I found Dunne's weaving of normal, linear time with the Time that tracks 'duration' to somehow be even more satisfying than Bergson's - not more or less correct in the logic - just more clarifying.


-----------

J.W. Dunne isn't the only person or subject of interest around here, you know. Plenty to choose from or to add to, if you'd be so inclined. :P

I agree. And based on my understanding of the material in Dunne's book, I don't see anything there that contradicts anything on here.

 

[trendsetter37]

Sooo...I finished "Experiment with time" and "Intrusions?" a few week ago. I must say that I needed to let all of the information settle. Growing up I can remember reading books that were fun to read because it was an interesting story with a fictional plot that really took you in.

Well...this book was fun to read but not like my former description. It was fun and yet not easy at all. I had to work through it. Read a few pages, go back through the diagrams, contemplate; Read a few more pages, revisit diagrams, recollect similar notions discussed by the C's. In short these books seem like they are important but I can't quite put my finger on how to explain that feeling I get.

Some of the things that really stood out is his Serialism theory and the concept of serial observers. All of which had access to a greater scope of awareness (and/or more timelines) relative to that of the preceding observers. For me this sort of makes some sense of the C’s notion that one cannot look up but can look down regarding the different entities in different levels of Density. Hence, we ourselves are aware of and can observe entities that reside in levels 1 through 3 but we aren’t usually privy of happenings in 4th Density. Even if it is present and exist concurrently in our same physical location. Dunne seemingly points to this in both of his books. However, I could be reaching a bit

If I am understanding his descriptions correctly it also almost seems as though an observer, if high enough on the scale of observers, is not relegated to simply observing only one point in the present. He also isn’t restricted to just observing his own particular present (implications of telepathy or shared dreams) he could also observe others as well . But also all of the other potentialities for that certain individual as well as his own. Case in point, certain decisions you make at your present may open or close certain potentialities that already existed and for that matter do still exist. Your experience of those potentialities is fully contingent upon your present choices (this is where I really picked up on the colinearity with laura’s recent video series if i’m not mistakened). Furthermore, the only reason a higher observer is paying attention at your particular “present” is because your physical or actual existence brings forth strong stimuli provided by your mind located at that present which warrants paying attention to. He then goes onto posit that this may be why dreams seem so ephemeral relative to waking existence. They are outside the present of your waking existence’s mind and associated stimuli receptors.

One could theoretically dream about future potentialities but one isn’t necessarily at that moment in time therefore the stimuli is dull. I gathered that this is also why dreams can seem so scrambled with scenes you would never expect to occur in real life but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist somewhere on some timeline. This also brings me to another point which leads to dunne’s interesting theory for dreams. Especially precognitive dreams.

Supposedly, our waking mind is only accustomed to experiencing events linearly. In contrast when we are asleep we are experiencing a perspective that is one level above (that has access to multiple timelines simultaneously) our waking consciousness. Putting you in the next dimension of time or having a perspective from the “Time I”/ 4th Dimensional perspective. Which encompasses all of the different timeline potentialities associated to your “3rd Density” waking state. Having access to all of the different timelines or potentialities, this observer isn’t necessarily accustomed to viewing things in order either linearly or within the same context of your current timeline.

So yes you could dream about yourself on another timeline in the future or past. And never actually experience the events of that dream in waking life. This usually results to you chalking it up to oh these are just dreams and are not real. But this also reminds me of a quote by the C’s stating, and I’m paraphrasing here:

You would not exist if someone didn’t think you up.

Keeping that in mind I have experienced several very specific and detailed precognitive dreams in my life. One of which actually happened while reading these books. Dunne touched on that as well.

He goes on to theorize that precognitive dreams are nothing more than actually observing something on a future timeline that is highly probable to take place within your current timeline’s trajectory. Again timelines are infinite you may not get all the details down to the T but one can generally recognize whether or not it was a hit or miss based on the percentage of details that were accurately observed. This is the part of the book that was also really fascinating.

I cannot say for certain that his theory is accurate but I think it makes sense to a certain degree.

One thing I am curious about is variable physicality that supposedly is a feature of 4th Density. Kind of as a thought experiment I wondered if an observer above waking 3rd density experience could foresee the many different potentialities of said 3rd density entity, could this translate to also being aware of certain other physical potentialities of that particular physical body? Dunne seem to think that anything that is able to be observed or actualized is loosely governed by the higher entity/observers ability or awareness to see the different possibilities or potentialities of that physical body.

Example, say i’m born with blue eyes in this timeline which is a consequence of the observer that is observing me owing to my present “me” and physical body to be the one with blue eyes. However, physical green eyes me still exist but is just a potentiality and for me to experience myself with green eyes that observer would simply observe more closely the physical present or potentiality that consisted of my awareness being apart of the physical body that had green eyes. After typing that I realize that it seems convoluted but could that be a mechanism for variable physicality? In the context of Serialism?

One, having access and awareness to other potentialities and the wherewithal to jump to different potentialities at will because of the fact that you are aware of them. Giving you the choice to pick and choose what reality and existence you wish to observe. I guess this would go in line with the fact that you cannot make a choice if you are not aware that the choice exist and if you are not aware of the choices. I guess that kind of ties into the fact that growing awareness and objective knowledge is key if you wish to DO anything at all. Ahhh and I guess this may be how

paraphrasing:

C’s

wishful thinking on 4th level becomes your awareness

would work. Hmm

I will wrap it up here to get your thoughts because I may be rambling at this point but I will say I don’t think I would have understood or grasped what he was attempting to convey had I not already been familiar with the cass material. However my interpretations of his works could be way off mark thus far as the information in his books does seem very dense and packed with information that I perceive as being somewhat esoteric relative to the mainstream view of dreams and the universe in general.

 

[martinwill2]

Thanks for an excellent piece on J. W. Dunne and "An Experiment With Time," Zadius Sky. I first encountered this book at my local library in Saffron Walden, Essex, England some 56 years ago. I have since bought all of his books including "Intrusions?" What I do not see mentioned here is the experiment and TV series by J. B.Priestley, "Man and Time." The book was published in 1964, by Aldus Books. It is a story of our approach to Time through history, and as such, J. W. Dunne's writings are mentioned along with references to many other authors.

Priestley conducted the experiment, by asking TV viewers to send in their experiences of precognitive dreams, which included some remarkable results. The TV series then reenacted several of these events. In Part 3 of the book, Priestley is seen poring over a tabletop full of viewer letters, his famous pipe in hand. The TV program Monitor aired in 1963, as a series of around six programs, as far as I recall. Priestley had long been interested in Dunne's theory, of course, and his play "Time and the Conways" also made into a movie, was based on the idea of precognitive dreams. In addition. "The House of the Arrow," as mentioned by Dunne, was based on the idea of recording one's dreams and finding examples of the "Dunne effect". Priestley's book mentions a precognitive dream some ten years prior to his first visit to the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

My own experiences when I first read "An Experiment With Time" included a dream about a car near-accident outside a cottage in Ashdon, Essex, England, where we lived. I had obtained the paperback edition of the book, and was carrying out the experiment during the summer of 1958, when I was using a small caravan as a summer bedroom. I awoke one morning during the experiment with a loud squealing of tires noise (in my dream) not apparently occasioned by an actual noise other than my alarm clock. Working back from the noise the dream unfolded and I was able to write up an account of it, since lost, in which I had dreamed that I had just stepped out of the front door of the cottage where we lived, and was close to the front gate, when I saw a lorry coming down Church Hill a bit too fast, and looking down the hill there was a light green car heading up at a good rate. I knew they could not see each other as the cottage was on the outside of a fairly sharp curve, on the inside of which was a high embankment that blocked the view of both parties. I heard the squeal of tires as both vehicles braked, and they ended up separated by inches right beyond our parked car, but my dream didn't include the noise of a crash. There was no "bang" after the squealing tires noise. There was also no "waking event" prior to the dream and it was nearly six weeks later, almost at the end of the experiment, that I came home from work, and heard my sister, who was visiting, say "We nearly had a serious accident outside the house this morning." She then recounted the event just as I had seen it in my dream, and I quizzed her about the colors of the car and lorry and the make of the car (there was a flying "A" hood emblem signifying Austin) as I had recorded them. When the vehicles stopped, they were literally six inches apart, and as a result there was not an impact noise.

Using Dunne's suggested statistical approach, the probability of the dream matching the event in such detail was at least 1/10,000, and yet I had dreamed of my sister's experience. I was not present when it happened. So that raises the question about telepathic communication between me and my sister, as an alternative to me having had the dream and invented the truck and car colors in my dream based on what she recounted to me that evening. Either way, the dream was of a future event some six weeks later.

I have of course had many other precognitive dreams. One of the most important was at a time when I was not doing the experiment, but long afterward, when I was visiting Northern California in 1974. I dreamed of walking hand in hand with a very beautiful girl in some kind of park, in brilliant sunshine, and feeling extreme happiness. That was the Tuesday night. On the following Thursday, back in Marina del Rey, I met two young women at a bar where there was dancing, and one of them asked me "Have you ever been to Disneyland?" I said "No" and she replied "I'll take you!", and the following Saturday she arrived at my hotel in her '67 Camaro convertible and drove us to Anaheim. It was some time into our visit when we were walking toward the Pirate Ship that I suddenly recalled the scene from my dream. What a great first date! The girl in question became my first wife some five months later, and though I lived in England, she moved there with me after our marriage, and we returned to California after I got my immigrant visa, some two years later. So there was absolutely no doubt that the dream was related to a significant event in my life that occurred four days after the dream. Before we moved to America, I also searched the London used book stores for copies of the remaining Dunne books -- I had read all of them out of the local library -- and wound up with the complete set.

 

[Merlin]

Quote from Zadius Sky

After reading the above, I recall Robert Lanza's article, "Does The Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone," where he wrote:

Quote

Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.

[...]

History is a biological phenomenon − it's the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment. Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.

"We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT.

My two bits:-

The First - After I read this post, a weird feeling of deja vu persisted - something like 'Where have I read this before?' - and then I recalled Jane Roberts in Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul where she asks 'Why is there no archaeological evidence for this (some event) and he replies 'Because the Past hasn't been invented yet' Though this was a decade ago and the book is not presently available or I'd have given the page number, it suddenly makes some sort of weird sense . . .

The Second - My niece was leafing through some pulp fiction, and the title looked interesting. It was Life After Life: A Novel by Kate Atkinson (January 7, 2014) in which the author revisits her life events and 'corrects' them to make the present more appealing. Shades of the movie About Time, I agree, but how utterly blissful if this could be true . . .