Читать книгу An Experiment with Time - J. W. Dunne - Страница 13

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No one, I imagine, can derive any considerable pleasure from the supposition that he is a freak; and, personally, I would almost sooner have discovered myself to be a 'medium'. There might have been a chance of company there. Unfortunately it was abundantly clear that there was no 'mediumship' in this matter, no 'sensitiveness', no 'clairvoyance'. I was suffering, seemingly, from some extraordinary fault in my relation to reality, something so uniquely wrong that it compelled me to perceive, at rare intervals, large blocks of otherwise perfectly normal personal experience displaced from their proper positions in Time. That such things could occur at all was a most interesting piece of knowledge. But, unfortunately, in the circumstances it could be knowledge to only one person—myself.

There was, however, a very remote possibility that, by employing this piece of curiously acquired knowledge as a guide, I might be able to discover some hitherto overlooked peculiarity in the structure of Time; and to that task I applied myself.

Progress here was definite, but it was terribly slow. There was no help to be found in the conception of Time as a fourth dimension. For Time has always been treated by men of science as if it were a fourth dimension. What had to be shown was the possibility of displacement in that dimension. Nor did I gather much comfort from Bergson; for to tell a man who is confronted with parts of Time clearly transposed that Time has no parts is distinctly futile. I cared not a whit whether Time were 'a form of thought', or an aspect of reality, or (this was later) compoundable with Space. What I wanted to know was: How it got mixed?

For 'mixed' was the right word. Between the dream and the corresponding waking experience came the memory of the dream, while the memory of the waking experience followed them all!

However, the coming of the first world war put a temporary stop to further investigation; and it was not until 1917 that any new developments occurred.

In January of that year I was in Guy's Hospital, recovering from an operation. There, one morning, when reading a book, I came upon a reference to one of those 'combination' locks which are released by the twisting of rings embossed with letters of the alphabet. As I read this, something seemed, for one fleeting instant, to be stirring, so to say, in my memory; but, whatever it was, it immediately subsided. I paused for a second, but nothing further developed, so I returned to my book. Then, luckily, I changed my mind, tossed the volume aside, and set myself determinedly to worry out exactly what it was that I had momentarily associated with the sentence read. In a little while it came back. I had dreamed, during the previous night, of precisely such a combination lock.

The chances of coincidence, where two such vague, commonplace events were concerned, needed no pointing out. But I could not remember having seen, heard, or thought of such a lock for a year or more. And, knowing from past happenings that my dreams did, sometimes, contain images of future experience, it seemed to me that the appearance of the lock image in the previous night's dream might have been another instance of my particular abnormality. Such a supposition might prove, at any rate, worth considering.

A few days later the great Silvertown explosion occurred, shaking the whole building, breaking windows, and causing the nurses to extinguish the lights, on the supposition that Zeppelins were overhead. Such an experience was calculated to make one dream; and dream I did, but, as usual, on the wrong night—the night before the associated event. After the disaster I told a fellow-convalescent of this experience. He interrupted me, saying, 'Wait!' and then: 'Curious, that. Now that I come to think of it, I also dreamed of an explosion last night.'

He could no longer, by then, recall any of the details of his dream, and, since big bangs of all sorts were fairly common during the war, coincidence might well have been responsible for the facts. But—supposing this were not the case, and that the dream had been in the same class as mine? What followed?

There were thus two new suppositions to be examined. Viewed separately, each of these appeared wild in the extreme; but considered together they were sufficiently suggestive to justify a little closer attention.

The validity of the first of these would mean that my dream pre-images were connected, not only with highly exciting and dramatic events, but also with the veriest trivialities, such as this little matter of reading about a combination lock. Exactly, in fact, as dream images of past events are connected just as often with unimportant happenings as with experiences more striking. Again, it had been by the merest accident of fortune that I had set myself to recall that dream; and had I not done so I should never have been aware of the incident. According to this, then, I might, for all I could tell, have had these dreams with considerable frequency, and have either forgotten them at once, or else have failed to notice their connection with the subsequent related events.

But, if the supposition about my friend's dream were correct, this failure to observe a connection was precisely what had happened in his case. He had not completely forgotten the dream, but the occurrence of the actual explosion had not served to recall it.

I had got no further than this in my speculations when the friend in question came up in a state of some excitement. 'You remember what we were saying about dreams?' he asked. 'Well, I have been talking to So-and-so' (one of the hospital surgeons), 'and he told me of a curious thing which had happened to him the other night. He had just got into bed and gone to sleep when he dreamed that he was aroused and compelled to go out to attend to a fractured leg. Almost immediately after his dream he was aroused, owing to the arrival of an urgent message which necessitated his going out to attend to just such a case. And in telling me the story he pointed out that he had not had to deal with a fractured leg for over six weeks.'

So here, possibly, was a third incident, involving a third person. What, I wondered, would become of the record of that event? The surgeon would tell it to a few friends, who would attribute the whole thing to coincidence (it might have been that), and in course of time he would forget all about it himself. But——

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 recalls 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 dream?

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?^[1]

That the universe was, after all, really stretched out in Time, and that the lop-sided view we had of it—a view with the 'future' part unaccountably missing, cut off from the growing 'past' part by a travelling 'present moment'—was due to a purely mentally imposed barrier which existed only when we were awake? So that, in reality, the associational network stretched, not merely this way and that way in Space, but also backwards and forwards in Time; and the dreamer's attention, following in natural, unhindered fashion the easiest pathway among the ramifications, would be continually crossing and recrossing that properly non-existent equator which we, waking, ruled quite arbitrarily athwart the whole.

The foregoing supposition was not, be it noted, perceived as a possible explanation. The mixture in the order of actual experience—viz., dream, memory of dream, corresponding waking impression, and memory thereof—would still have to be accounted for. But it would put the problem on an entirely different footing. There would be no longer any question as to why a man should be able to observe his own future mental states; that would be normal and habitual. On the contrary, the initial puzzle would be: What was the barrier which, in certain circumstances, debarred him from that proper and comprehensive view?

All this was seen in, so to say, a single flash of thought, almost too rapid for analysis.

It was rejected with even greater swiftness. For it was absolutely inconceivable that a thing of this sort, if true, could have managed to escape, through all these centuries, universal perception and recognition.

[1]

The present reader, doubtless, has grasped the fact that this section of the book is purely historical. On that day in 1917, I was trying to formulate for myself some statement of the possible facts which would serve as a basis for an experimental investigation, and I am describing here the sequence of the ideas which flashed through my mind. The suspicion of an equal distribution of precognitive and retrospective elements came first, and was followed immediately by the more rational theory set forth in the next paragraph, a theory which made the distribution depend upon associational factors which would vary with each individual and in each dream. As will be seen in the next three pages, even this first approximation to the truth was set aside as 'obviously incomplete'. The theory finally accepted was not developed until 1926, and is described in the last section of the book.