Читать книгу An Experiment with Time - J. W. Dunne - Страница 11

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To my great relief, the next experience, which occurred some two years later, completely squashed the 'Identifying Paramnesia' theory.

I dreamed that I was standing on a footway of some kind, consisting of transverse planks flanked on my left side by some sort of railing, beyond which was a deep gulf filled with thick fog. Overhead, I had an impression of an awning. But this last was not clearly seen, for the fog partly hid everything except three or four yards of the planking ahead of me with its attendant portion of railing and gulf. Suddenly I noticed, projecting upwards from somewhere far down in the gulf, an immensely long, thin, shadowy thing like a gigantic lath. It reached above the plankway, and was slanted so that it would, had the upper end been visible through the fog, have impinged upon the awning. As I stared at it, it began to wave slowly up and down, brushing the railing. A moment later I realized what the object was. I had seen just such a thing once before in a cinema picture of a fire, in the early days of cinematography. Then, as now, I had undergone the same puzzlement as to what this sort of waving lath might be, until I had realized that it was the long water-jet from a fire-engine hose, as photographed through intervening smoke. Somewhere down in that gulf, then, there must be a fire-engine, and it was playing a stream of water upon the smoke-hidden, railed structure where I stood. As I perceived this, the dream became perfectly abominable. The wooden plankway became crowded with people, dimly visible through the smoke. They were dropping in heaps; and all the air was filled with horrible, choking, gasping ejaculations. Then the smoke, which had grown black and thick, rolled heavily over everything, hiding the entire scene. But a dreadful, suffocated moaning continued—and I was entirely thankful when I awoke.

I was taking no chances with 'Identifying Paramnesia' this time. I carefully recalled every detail of the dream after waking, and not till I had done this did I open the morning papers. There was nothing in these. But the evening editions brought the expected news.

There had been a big fire in a factory somewhere near Paris. I think it was a rubber factory, though I cannot be sure. At any rate it was a factory for some material which gave off vile fumes when burning. A large number of workgirls had been cut off by the flames, and had made their way out on to a balcony. There, for the moment, they had been comparatively safe, but the ladders available had been too short to admit of any rescue. While longer ones were being obtained, the fire-engines had directed streams of water on to the balcony to keep that refuge from catching alight. And then there happened a thing which must, I imagine, have been unique in the history of fires. From the broken windows behind the balcony the smoke from the burning rubber or other material came rolling out in such dense volumes that, although the unfortunate girls were standing actually in the open air, every one of them was suffocated before the new ladders could arrive.

This dream left the whole business more puzzling than ever. It seemed that nothing could explain it. For 'clairvoyance' is not an explanation. It is a meaningless expression, a mere admission of inexplicability. And 'telepathy' required an enormous amount of stretching before it could be made to fit the facts.

Then came a dream which somewhat simplified matters. For it ruled out definitely: insanity, clairvoyance, astral-wandering, spirit-messages, and telepathy. But it left me face to face with something much more staggering than any of these.

In 1904, a few months after the fire dream, I was staying at the Hotel Scholastika, on the borders of the Aachensee, in Austria. I dreamed one night that I was walking down a sort of pathway between two fields, separated from the latter by high iron railings, eight or nine feet high, on each side of the path. My attention was suddenly attracted to a horse in the field on my left. It had apparently gone mad, and was tearing about, kicking and plunging in a most frenzied fashion. I cast a hasty glance backwards and forwards along the railings to see if there were any openings by which the animal could get out. Satisfied that there was none, I continued on my way. A few moments later I heard hoofs thundering behind me. Glancing back I saw, to my dismay, that the brute had somehow got out after all, and was coming full tilt after me down the pathway. It was a full-fledged nightmare—and I ran like a hare. Ahead of me the path ended at the foot of a flight of wooden steps rising upward. I was striving frantically to reach these when I awoke.

Next day I went fishing with my brother down the little river which runs out of the Aachensee. It was wet-fly work, and I was industriously flogging the water when my brother called out: 'Look at that horse!' Glancing across the river, I saw the scene of my dream. But, though right in essentials, it was absolutely unlike in minor details. The two fields with the fenced-off pathway running between them were there. The horse was there, behaving just as it had done in the dream. The wooden steps at the end of the pathway were there (they led up to a bridge crossing the river). But the fences were wooden and small—not more than four or five feet high—and the fields were ordinary small fields, whereas those in the dream had been park-like expanses. Moreover, the horse was a small beast, and not the rampaging great monster of the dream—though its behaviour was equally alarming. Finally, it was in the wrong field, the field which would have been on my right, had I been walking, as in the dream, down the path towards the bridge. I began to tell my brother about the dream, but broke off because the beast was behaving so very oddly that I wanted to make sure that it could not escape. As in the dream, I ran my eye critically along the railings. As in the dream, I could see no gap, or even gate, in them anywhere. Satisfied, I said, 'At any rate, this horse cannot get out,' and re-commenced fishing. But my brother interrupted me by calling, 'Look out!' Glancing up again, I saw that there was no dodging fate. The beast had, inexplicably, just as in the dream, got out (probably it had jumped the fence), and, just as in the dream, it was thundering down the path towards the wooden steps. It swerved past these and plunged into the river, coming straight towards us. We both picked up stones, ran thirty yards or so back from the bank, and faced about. The end was tame, for, on emerging from the water on our side, the animal merely looked at us, snorted, and galloped off down a road.

Now, it seemed to me that from this incident one thing was abundantly clear. These dreams were not percepts (impressions) of distant or future events. They were the usual commonplace dreams composed of distorted images of waking experience, built together in the usual half-senseless fashion peculiar to dreams. That is to say, if they had happened on the nights after the corresponding events, they would have exhibited nothing in the smallest degree unusual, and would have yielded just as much true, and just as much false, information regarding the waking experiences which had given rise to them as does any ordinary dream—which is very little.

They were the ordinary, appropriate, expectable dreams; but they were occurring on the wrong nights.

Even the watch dreams were merely the dreams I ought to have had after seeing the watch. In the first of those incidents I had, when awake, seen the watch lying face upwards on the chest of drawers, with the hands stopped; and the corresponding dream image had been of a stopped watch, face upwards. In the second instance I had held the watch up facing me about a foot from my nose, while lying with my head on my pillow; and the reader will remember that the corresponding dozing image had been of a watch in precisely that position. The white mist had been, of course, the image of the mosquito curtains, out of focus, as these were, when I looked at the real watch.

No, there was nothing unusual in any of these dreams as dreams. They were merely displaced in Time.

That, of course, was staggering enough. But I felt, nevertheless, that it had been a great advance to resolve all these varied phenomena into one single class of incident—a simple, if mysterious, transposition of dates.

But in all this speculation I was still a long way from the truth.

The two remaining incidents I propose to relate in this section contained nothing to alter my half-formed opinion that temporal aberration constituted the whole of the mystery involved. But, had I not made this semi-discovery, I should certainly have regarded the following incident as a message from the 'spirit-world' or a 'phantasm of the dying'.

In 1912 I spent a good deal of time at Salisbury Plain, experimenting with one of my stable aeroplanes. A military aeroplane competition was in progress, and most of the officers of the then tiny Royal Flying Corps were there. One of these I had not met before, nor did I see very much of him; in fact, I do not think I spoke to him more than twice. Since these records are not evidence, or intended to be regarded as such, it will suffice if I refer to him as Lieutenant B. The other officers were all old friends of mine. Shortly after the conclusion of the competition the annual army manœuvres began, and, having nothing to do with these, I went to Paris to inspect another machine which was being built there to my design.

One morning while in that city I dreamed that I was standing in a very large meadow, situated in a landscape which I did not recognize. In this meadow a monoplane landed, crashing rather badly some fifty yards away. Immediately afterwards I saw B. coming to me from the direction of the wreck. I asked if much damage had been done. He replied, 'Oh no, not much,' and then added, 'It's all that beastly engine; but I've got the hang of it now.' The dream was a longish one, all about aeroplane accidents (a common form of nightmare with me, even to this day), and B.'s smash was by no means the worst thing I saw. I awoke to find the servant by my bedside with the morning tea, from which fact I was subsequently able to fix the hour of the dream as close on 8 a.m.

B. was killed between 7 and 8 that morning, falling into a meadow near Oxford. But I did not read of the accident till about two days and a night later.

But now, note the following points:

1. Engine failure had nothing whatever to do with the accident, nor could B. for one moment have ever thought that it had. For the monoplane was planing down—with the engine partly or entirely stopped—at the time; and the accident was due to the uncoupling of a quick-release gadget in one of the main 'lift' wires, and the consequent breaking upward of one wing. Of course, the planing down may have been compulsory, and due to engine failure; but there could have been no doubt in B.'s mind that his wing had broken.

On the other hand, B. had made to my sister, while we were at the Plain, a remark about the engine almost exactly like that I heard him make in the dream, and it is more than likely that she had repeated it to me. She would naturally have done so.

2. B. was merely a passenger in the machine. It was being piloted by another man, a stranger to me, who was also killed. There was nothing of this in the dream.

But when I read the paragraph about the catastrophe, it was B.'s name alone which caught and held my attention; and I did not know of the death of the other man until I looked up the record of the accident several years later.

3. The paragraph did not state the cause of the accident, and so left me with nothing to go upon but (possibly) B.'s past remark about the engine.

4. The coincidence in time was not really remarkable. Dreams of aeroplane accidents were, as I have said, very frequent with me in those days, and between seven and eight, when the noise of motor traffic in the streets begins to penetrate to one's consciousness, has always been my hour for this particular class of nightmare.

So I concluded that here, again, the dream was associated with the personal experience of reading the paragraph.

In the last incident of this series, the chronological aberration was far more considerable.

The dream occurred in the autumn of 1913. The scene I saw was a high railway embankment. I knew in that dream—knew without questioning, as anyone acquainted with the locality would have known—that the place was just north of the Firth of Forth Bridge, in Scotland. The terrain below the embankment was open grassland, with people walking in small groups thereon. The scene came and went several times, but the last time I saw that a train going north had just fallen over the embankment. I saw several carriages lying towards the bottom of the slope, and I saw large blocks of stone rolling and sliding down. Realizing that this was probably one of those odd dreams of mine, I tried to ascertain if I could 'get' the date of the real occurrence. All I could gather was that this date was somewhere in the following spring. My own recollection is that I pitched finally upon the middle of April, but my sister thinks I mentioned March when I told her the dream next morning. We agreed, jokingly, that we must warn our friends against travelling north in Scotland at any time in the succeeding spring.

On April the 14th of that spring the 'Flying Scotsman', one of the most famous mail trains of the period, jumped the parapet near Burntisland Station, about fifteen miles north of the Forth Bridge, and fell on to the golf links twenty feet below.

The above-described incidents have been selected from a group of about twenty, simply because they were closely studied and carefully memorized at the time of their occurrence. Most of the others were merely noted, so to say, en passant, and are now almost completely forgotten. Curiously, I can remember no dreams of the coming Great War—except one. That one related to the bombardment of Lowestoft by the German fleet. I recognized the place as Lowestoft, but had no idea of the nationality of the bombarding vessels.