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An Experiment with Time
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."
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."
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1927
208 people are currently reading
2455 people want to read
About the author
J.W. Dunne
10 books29 followersJohn William Dunne was an Irish aeronautical engineer and author. In the field of parapsychology, he achieved a preeminence through his theories on dreams and authoring books preoccupied with the question of the nature of time. As a pioneering aeronautical engineer in the early years of the 20th century, Dunne worked on many early military aircraft, concentrating on tailless designs, producing inherently stable aircraft.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
February 13, 2016
Agatha Christie's comment after reading this book: "...something happened to me...somehow I saw things more in proportion...I did feel from that moment onwards a great sensation of comfort and a truer knowledge of serenity than I had ever obtained before."
August 20, 2010
I am puzzled that GoodReads has this book as first published in 1939 because I hold in my hand the much revised 1935 Third Edition of a book first published in 1927.
This confusion over date is apposite since the book is essentially a scientific and philosophical (and the author would like to think psychological) treatise on time in the context of his and others' experience of precognition in dreams.
It is a serious and difficult book which has achieved cult status because it represented a sincere scientific attempt to deal with the problem at that point in history when spiritualism was already a memory amongst serious thinkers and the new physics had not yet fully established itself in the public's consciousness.
However, it is a very difficult book indeed. The writer is at pains to be clear and he does a good job of this but you have to be of a mathematical or analytical bent to get anything out of this book and I am afraid that I am not.
Although I probably read every word, I did not study every word and so it must sit in my library where my copy of Hawkins' 'A Brief History of Time' sits - as read but not truly comprehended.
Still, the thesis remains interesting - that there is, logically, a perceiving soul seated above the person who is taking in sense impressions from the 'real' world, one that can see into past and future and whose indistinct impressions can form a dream or altered state awareness of events that are yet to take place as much it can make use of its remembrance of things past.
I cannot evaluate this in the slightest but the work - from someone who has an engineers' determination that his analysis should be logical - does have the virtue of ensuring that this ignorant reader is not automatically dismissive of any thesis that does not accord with obvious sensory impressions of the material world.
As for the experience of precognition itself (as opposed to the theory), the material is persuasive without allowing a fixed view. The phenomenon appears to be something to be explained and, although there may be adequate materialist explanations in due course, it is not scientifically literate to assume that a classically materialist explanation is the only one.
Dunne refers to the beginnings of quantum theory and we now know that the nature of matter is far more complex than anything he or (say) Eddington might have expected in the interwar period so contemporary scientists are just a little less certain of their ground in rejecting unusual possibilities than previous generations might have been.
The book clearly poses questions that still require a definitive answer over eighty years later.
This confusion over date is apposite since the book is essentially a scientific and philosophical (and the author would like to think psychological) treatise on time in the context of his and others' experience of precognition in dreams.
It is a serious and difficult book which has achieved cult status because it represented a sincere scientific attempt to deal with the problem at that point in history when spiritualism was already a memory amongst serious thinkers and the new physics had not yet fully established itself in the public's consciousness.
However, it is a very difficult book indeed. The writer is at pains to be clear and he does a good job of this but you have to be of a mathematical or analytical bent to get anything out of this book and I am afraid that I am not.
Although I probably read every word, I did not study every word and so it must sit in my library where my copy of Hawkins' 'A Brief History of Time' sits - as read but not truly comprehended.
Still, the thesis remains interesting - that there is, logically, a perceiving soul seated above the person who is taking in sense impressions from the 'real' world, one that can see into past and future and whose indistinct impressions can form a dream or altered state awareness of events that are yet to take place as much it can make use of its remembrance of things past.
I cannot evaluate this in the slightest but the work - from someone who has an engineers' determination that his analysis should be logical - does have the virtue of ensuring that this ignorant reader is not automatically dismissive of any thesis that does not accord with obvious sensory impressions of the material world.
As for the experience of precognition itself (as opposed to the theory), the material is persuasive without allowing a fixed view. The phenomenon appears to be something to be explained and, although there may be adequate materialist explanations in due course, it is not scientifically literate to assume that a classically materialist explanation is the only one.
Dunne refers to the beginnings of quantum theory and we now know that the nature of matter is far more complex than anything he or (say) Eddington might have expected in the interwar period so contemporary scientists are just a little less certain of their ground in rejecting unusual possibilities than previous generations might have been.
The book clearly poses questions that still require a definitive answer over eighty years later.
October 1, 2009
Excellent. Strange. Controversial. Underestimated. Exceptional. Unique. From the time of Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustinus, Boethius, Michael Psellus, Saint Thomas and in modern times, Einstein and Henri Bergson, one of the best theories of time. Each philosopher often has a theory of time, but there isn't any other which intrigues so much the imagination, as the obscure and, at the same time proved in mathematical diagrams, theory of this forgotten aeuronautical engineer. The mathematics of dreams, time and eternity. But I don't believe that a demonstrated proof of dreem prediction is included in the book. The problem is the mixing of the dreaming subjec with the human history as a whole. If a singular person can dream the future, he will not predict only his own future, but of whole humanity. This is what this text explicitly says.
As for his famous contribution to the theory of the simultaneous experience of time, subjective and universall, is very well known, by so many examples in history.
As for his famous contribution to the theory of the simultaneous experience of time, subjective and universall, is very well known, by so many examples in history.
September 24, 2023
Idea, premonition, basic geometry. Practical experiment; thought experiment. And what an experiment.
You can tell this was written by a man with science backing, but also a man with a sense for the first-class metaphor. The writing is clear; the style pure. (e.g. Referring to the state of science at the time: ’And it must be remembered that Planck’s voice has only just been raised, and that Einstein had not yet spoken.’)
In the first part Dunne sets up some elementary terminology (presentations, field of presentation, attention, impression, image, reality tone, memory train, train of ideas, brain-trace). In the second part, he recounts a series of his dreams and how they turned out to be ‘true’. He hypothesise that his dreams are mixtures of memories from the past and memories that he will form in the future (essentially he’s arguing for an ‘equal distribution of precognitive and retrospective elements’). What’s more, he posits that he isn’t special, but rather that this holds for all of us.
We fail to notice these future events, as blended in our dreams, because our brains are used to interpreting backwards and because we tend to forget most of the details of our dreams.
In the third part, Dunne proposes a curious experiment. That we take a book that we are about to read and spend some time imagining its contents. The ideas is to reject any associations that are a direct result of memories and experience. What remains will appear random, but will be part of our associative network that spreads into the future, thereby possibly predicting what we will read (according to him, our associative network spreads both ways through time).
In the next two parts he goes on to develop his theory of serial time. He starts from the then popular viewpoint that people are represented as having a world line or track, spreading through space-time. However, the problem with this perspective was where are you, you as observer, on that track? Dunne’s conclusion is that there is another perpendicular dimension which he calls T2 (if T1 is the usual time, as part of the four-dimensional model). Dunne essentially has the observer step out of the four dimensions of the world line, into the fifth dimension (T2 measures the passage of time on the T1 axes, if you will).
For those familiar with phenomenology: To me this difference between existing in T1 and existing in T2 sounds like the difference between existing in the natural attitude and in the phenomenological attitude. Dunne, via the others he quotes, seems to refer to the phenomenological attitude as belonging to a psychical observer, and later this mutates into Observer 2—a higher dimensional observer. In terms of the metaphors used to describe the phenomenological attitude, this works, because it is often said that you have to get out of the box of the natural attitude, or literally climb to a higher altitude to see yourself ‘from above’.
Returning to Dunne’s model. He calls you, the you in this world, Observer 1 or O1. Then the observer in T2 is O2. But using the same argument, he can argue that we need T3 to measure the passage of time on T2, and therefore there also exists another even higher-dimensional observer O3. And so on, and so forth. He concludes there is a serial observer, or compound observer consisting of all of these observers put together, where each the attention of O2 is trained on O1, and the attention of O3 is trained on O2, and so on. He obtains a telescopic stacking of attention, which then allows him to explain precognition.
Indeed, the dream state (or any other type of unconscious state) involves the loss of focus of O1, and thus O2 is free to roam as it pleases, and see things in the future and the past, smudged, in four dimensions. Upon waking, O1 tries to interpret the dream in three dimensions and fails. What O1 sees is a flattened image that integrated both future and past events.
Dunne also addresses the problem of freewill vs determinism. Firstly, he says that most people’s interventions (to change the future) would be too minor to make a difference (‘We live too much in ruts for that.’). Secondly, he explains that O2 sees a little bit into the future, as it stands during the dream, but upon waking O1 can change its actions according to information gained by the dream-precognition (I saw I will be hit by car tomorrow, so I don’t leave the house). Dunne claims that this does change the future somewhat, though it doesn’t preclude me dying in some other way, or indeed, me surviving the day intact.
The next question is how fields of different observers interact. Dunne posits the existence of a giant tree connecting the world lines of all people, where the nodes are the births or deaths, and the existence of a ‘superlative general observer’ who is ‘the fount of all self-consciousness, intention, and intervention which underlies mere mechanical thinking’ and who is ‘incarnate in all mundane conscious life-forms, in every dimension and time’. Dunne calls him the Synthetic Observer and a ‘distinct personification’ of all genealogically connected conscious life.
What’s more, a direct consequence of Dunne’s setup is that when T1 ceases (when O1 dies), all the other observers continue on indefinitely. Therefore, not only do we achieve a higher plane of existence when we die, we can also look forward to immortality on this higher plane.
However inaccurate, or critically disdained from today’s viewpoint, Dunne’s explanations were quite an interesting take in 1927. And I think they still are. Read the book as fiction, if you must, but read it.
You can tell this was written by a man with science backing, but also a man with a sense for the first-class metaphor. The writing is clear; the style pure. (e.g. Referring to the state of science at the time: ’And it must be remembered that Planck’s voice has only just been raised, and that Einstein had not yet spoken.’)
In the first part Dunne sets up some elementary terminology (presentations, field of presentation, attention, impression, image, reality tone, memory train, train of ideas, brain-trace). In the second part, he recounts a series of his dreams and how they turned out to be ‘true’. He hypothesise that his dreams are mixtures of memories from the past and memories that he will form in the future (essentially he’s arguing for an ‘equal distribution of precognitive and retrospective elements’). What’s more, he posits that he isn’t special, but rather that this holds for all of us.
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?
We fail to notice these future events, as blended in our dreams, because our brains are used to interpreting backwards and because we tend to forget most of the details of our dreams.
In the third part, Dunne proposes a curious experiment. That we take a book that we are about to read and spend some time imagining its contents. The ideas is to reject any associations that are a direct result of memories and experience. What remains will appear random, but will be part of our associative network that spreads into the future, thereby possibly predicting what we will read (according to him, our associative network spreads both ways through time).
In the next two parts he goes on to develop his theory of serial time. He starts from the then popular viewpoint that people are represented as having a world line or track, spreading through space-time. However, the problem with this perspective was where are you, you as observer, on that track? Dunne’s conclusion is that there is another perpendicular dimension which he calls T2 (if T1 is the usual time, as part of the four-dimensional model). Dunne essentially has the observer step out of the four dimensions of the world line, into the fifth dimension (T2 measures the passage of time on the T1 axes, if you will).
For those familiar with phenomenology: To me this difference between existing in T1 and existing in T2 sounds like the difference between existing in the natural attitude and in the phenomenological attitude. Dunne, via the others he quotes, seems to refer to the phenomenological attitude as belonging to a psychical observer, and later this mutates into Observer 2—a higher dimensional observer. In terms of the metaphors used to describe the phenomenological attitude, this works, because it is often said that you have to get out of the box of the natural attitude, or literally climb to a higher altitude to see yourself ‘from above’.
Returning to Dunne’s model. He calls you, the you in this world, Observer 1 or O1. Then the observer in T2 is O2. But using the same argument, he can argue that we need T3 to measure the passage of time on T2, and therefore there also exists another even higher-dimensional observer O3. And so on, and so forth. He concludes there is a serial observer, or compound observer consisting of all of these observers put together, where each the attention of O2 is trained on O1, and the attention of O3 is trained on O2, and so on. He obtains a telescopic stacking of attention, which then allows him to explain precognition.
Indeed, the dream state (or any other type of unconscious state) involves the loss of focus of O1, and thus O2 is free to roam as it pleases, and see things in the future and the past, smudged, in four dimensions. Upon waking, O1 tries to interpret the dream in three dimensions and fails. What O1 sees is a flattened image that integrated both future and past events.
Dunne also addresses the problem of freewill vs determinism. Firstly, he says that most people’s interventions (to change the future) would be too minor to make a difference (‘We live too much in ruts for that.’). Secondly, he explains that O2 sees a little bit into the future, as it stands during the dream, but upon waking O1 can change its actions according to information gained by the dream-precognition (I saw I will be hit by car tomorrow, so I don’t leave the house). Dunne claims that this does change the future somewhat, though it doesn’t preclude me dying in some other way, or indeed, me surviving the day intact.
The next question is how fields of different observers interact. Dunne posits the existence of a giant tree connecting the world lines of all people, where the nodes are the births or deaths, and the existence of a ‘superlative general observer’ who is ‘the fount of all self-consciousness, intention, and intervention which underlies mere mechanical thinking’ and who is ‘incarnate in all mundane conscious life-forms, in every dimension and time’. Dunne calls him the Synthetic Observer and a ‘distinct personification’ of all genealogically connected conscious life.
What’s more, a direct consequence of Dunne’s setup is that when T1 ceases (when O1 dies), all the other observers continue on indefinitely. Therefore, not only do we achieve a higher plane of existence when we die, we can also look forward to immortality on this higher plane.
However inaccurate, or critically disdained from today’s viewpoint, Dunne’s explanations were quite an interesting take in 1927. And I think they still are. Read the book as fiction, if you must, but read it.
April 30, 2022
Этому экзерсису по спекулятивной философии ирландского рыболова, конструктора бесхвостых авиеток и сертифицированного чудака почти сто лет, а занимательной актуальности своей она не утратила до сих пор. Т.е. вот нам подлинный "интеллектуальный бестселлер" начала 20 века, а не вот этот шмурдяк, который впаривают нам издатели спустя сто лет.
По сути, западный ум Данна делает попытку постичь иллюзорное устройство сансары без привлечения (например) буддийского понятийного аппарата - зато на основе своеобразно понимаемого принципа "как внизу, так и наверху" (автор называет это "психоневрологическим параллелизмом" - всякое физическое явление так или иначе имеет свой аналог в наблюдателе) и с употреблением "души". Душа для него (вместе с осознанным сновидением) - явно инструмент постижения природы времени и сознания Будды. Ну а время - понятие явно психологическое и сугубо индивидуальное, оттого-то мы никогда не умрем. Сериализм не даст, хоть это и несколько механистичное (но вполне в духе времени) представление о том, как там у времени все устроено.
В общем и целом же это дополненная реальность Чарлза Форта и Джона Киля с выходами время от времени (гм...) во вселенную Пинчона, как, например, в истории со "сном о Фашоде" и с приветами "V.". Но в целом - занимательный отчет об играх человека с его умом, предваривший эксперименты Бёрроуза впоследствии.
По сути, западный ум Данна делает попытку постичь иллюзорное устройство сансары без привлечения (например) буддийского понятийного аппарата - зато на основе своеобразно понимаемого принципа "как внизу, так и наверху" (автор называет это "психоневрологическим параллелизмом" - всякое физическое явление так или иначе имеет свой аналог в наблюдателе) и с употреблением "души". Душа для него (вместе с осознанным сновидением) - явно инструмент постижения природы времени и сознания Будды. Ну а время - понятие явно психологическое и сугубо индивидуальное, оттого-то мы никогда не умрем. Сериализм не даст, хоть это и несколько механистичное (но вполне в духе времени) представление о том, как там у времени все устроено.
В общем и целом же это дополненная реальность Чарлза Форта и Джона Киля с выходами время от времени (гм...) во вселенную Пинчона, как, например, в истории со "сном о Фашоде" и с приветами "V.". Но в целом - занимательный отчет об играх человека с его умом, предваривший эксперименты Бёрроуза впоследствии.
July 24, 2017
I've been borrowing this book from the library for many many years. I'm ecstatic it's back in print!
I still don't know how I feel about Dunne's theory----basically, that our dreams are memories from the future. But it's something that makes sense (no matter how far fetched it sounds....) and it's something that I'd *like* to believe.
A regular person can easily understand the text; it's not all heavy-handed scientific terms. An enjoyable read.
I still don't know how I feel about Dunne's theory----basically, that our dreams are memories from the future. But it's something that makes sense (no matter how far fetched it sounds....) and it's something that I'd *like* to believe.
A regular person can easily understand the text; it's not all heavy-handed scientific terms. An enjoyable read.
February 28, 2015
freewill alchemy.
splendid theory but it lacks open ends.
time is an occupation for saints writes anne carson in one of her novels and here we have an engineer contemplating it.
as an engineer j.w. dunne was inspired by jules verne to built a plane with no tail.
it should be internaly in balance.
his theory on time is the same.
he creates a vision on mankind which ultimate purpose it is to have a freewill of it's own.
so stability from inside like the plains he invented.
well plains have tails and so have all things outer objects for balance.
even our planet earth has a moon for that purpose i think.
but maybe both can occur.
j.w. dunne was irish by birth and came from a place not so far from where w.b. yeats was born.
yeats' poems suffer sometimes by lack of inner balance.
maybe it was a geographical thing.
the book was highly regarded in it's time by writers and scholars.
but like the plain he invented history took an other course.
freewill is these days not anymore an issue as it once was.
splendid theory but it lacks open ends.
time is an occupation for saints writes anne carson in one of her novels and here we have an engineer contemplating it.
as an engineer j.w. dunne was inspired by jules verne to built a plane with no tail.
it should be internaly in balance.
his theory on time is the same.
he creates a vision on mankind which ultimate purpose it is to have a freewill of it's own.
so stability from inside like the plains he invented.
well plains have tails and so have all things outer objects for balance.
even our planet earth has a moon for that purpose i think.
but maybe both can occur.
j.w. dunne was irish by birth and came from a place not so far from where w.b. yeats was born.
yeats' poems suffer sometimes by lack of inner balance.
maybe it was a geographical thing.
the book was highly regarded in it's time by writers and scholars.
but like the plain he invented history took an other course.
freewill is these days not anymore an issue as it once was.
February 2, 2016
This is something of a mixed bag. The first half of the book is quite interesting and even compelling, wherein Dunne relates and discusses many of his apparently precognitive dream experiences and his notions of how such a phenomenon could even be possible. For anyone who has had a dream that in some aspect or manner appeared to “come true” in waking life, you may find Dunne’s theories to be quite fascinating and even to make a certain amount of sense.
The idea is that somehow our perception of time is not what we believe it to be, and that we can in fact “remember” future events just as we remember events from the past—but mostly only in the strange subconscious realm of sleep. For example, say you experience something in waking life, whether it is a memorable event or a perfectly ordinary occurrence. As you know, sometimes this will trigger a dream that echoes aspects of the original experience. So, what if the same thing happened for future events? What if you dreamed something, and then in a few days or a week—or sometimes even much farther along in the future, perhaps even years—you recognized those elements of your dream in a real life experience?
Dunne asserts—and quite rightly, I believe—that we have many dreams each and every night, but we rarely if ever remember them all, and if we do happen to recall a few fragments, they are very quickly forgotten. Thus he proposes that there is a mountain of data—the raw ore of dream experience—that occupies another reality of ours, almost a second life, but we are largely unaware of its existence. So the question becomes, what if we paid more attention to our dreams and were even able to remember them in minute detail? Well, if Dunne is correct, this data should in theory include shards of future memories and therefore prove that time is of a different nature than most of us believe. To quote Dunne: “If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys absolutely the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe.”
Dunne goes on to describe a method—which, incidentally, includes keeping a pencil and notebook under your pillow at night—for keeping track of and recording your dreams in an effort to perform “an experiment with time.” In other words, upon waking he wants you to try to recall and write down in detail all of your dreams, and then for the next few days compare notes—check your dreams against the daily occurrences of waking life and see for yourself if anything lines up and rings a bell. Through rigorous effort and attention to detail, can we ourselves prove that it is possible to dream the future?
Well, who can say for sure if Dunne is onto something. He seems to have been a highly intelligent man and he uses his sharp intellect to explore the many strange possibilities of the nature of Time in relation to dreams. Having experienced myself, from time to time, what I often took to be precognitive dreams, I very much enjoyed the author’s explorations of this subject. Where he lost me, however, was the second half of the book, in which he delves into the theoretical and scientific framework of the whole matter and his notion of what he calls “serialistic” time. Maybe I just don’t have a scientific enough mind, but I could hardly make heads or tails of it. To his credit, Dunne uses several diagrams to help illustrate his ideas—but unfortunately they only end up confusing matters even more.
To give an example, here is Dunne: “Now, we cannot separate that travelling field of presentation from an observer to whom its contents are being presented—contents provided by the cerebral elements in the substratum travelled over. Hence, CD (or CD’) must be regarded as the place where this observer (a Time-travelling observer) intersects with AA; (or BB’). The field in question is, of course, our original field, and the observer thereof is our original, conscious observer. And this observer must be a definite entity; for no mere abstraction can travel in, so to say, its own unsupported right.”
And so on. While some readers might actually enjoy this kind of Gordian masochism, for me, far more interesting was it to read Dunne’s own anecdotal experiences with dreams and precognition, and to explore the topic from a more philosophical angle. Still, that said, I personally find Time along with its many mysteries to be one of the most fascinating subjects to read about; if you agree, you will most likely enjoy this volume, or at least some parts of it. But feel free to skip anything that doesn’t make sense to you—or skip the book altogether if you happen to have a dream that you read An Experiment With Time by J.W. Dunne and found it wanting.
The idea is that somehow our perception of time is not what we believe it to be, and that we can in fact “remember” future events just as we remember events from the past—but mostly only in the strange subconscious realm of sleep. For example, say you experience something in waking life, whether it is a memorable event or a perfectly ordinary occurrence. As you know, sometimes this will trigger a dream that echoes aspects of the original experience. So, what if the same thing happened for future events? What if you dreamed something, and then in a few days or a week—or sometimes even much farther along in the future, perhaps even years—you recognized those elements of your dream in a real life experience?
Dunne asserts—and quite rightly, I believe—that we have many dreams each and every night, but we rarely if ever remember them all, and if we do happen to recall a few fragments, they are very quickly forgotten. Thus he proposes that there is a mountain of data—the raw ore of dream experience—that occupies another reality of ours, almost a second life, but we are largely unaware of its existence. So the question becomes, what if we paid more attention to our dreams and were even able to remember them in minute detail? Well, if Dunne is correct, this data should in theory include shards of future memories and therefore prove that time is of a different nature than most of us believe. To quote Dunne: “If prevision be a fact, it is a fact which destroys absolutely the entire basis of all our past opinions of the universe.”
Dunne goes on to describe a method—which, incidentally, includes keeping a pencil and notebook under your pillow at night—for keeping track of and recording your dreams in an effort to perform “an experiment with time.” In other words, upon waking he wants you to try to recall and write down in detail all of your dreams, and then for the next few days compare notes—check your dreams against the daily occurrences of waking life and see for yourself if anything lines up and rings a bell. Through rigorous effort and attention to detail, can we ourselves prove that it is possible to dream the future?
Well, who can say for sure if Dunne is onto something. He seems to have been a highly intelligent man and he uses his sharp intellect to explore the many strange possibilities of the nature of Time in relation to dreams. Having experienced myself, from time to time, what I often took to be precognitive dreams, I very much enjoyed the author’s explorations of this subject. Where he lost me, however, was the second half of the book, in which he delves into the theoretical and scientific framework of the whole matter and his notion of what he calls “serialistic” time. Maybe I just don’t have a scientific enough mind, but I could hardly make heads or tails of it. To his credit, Dunne uses several diagrams to help illustrate his ideas—but unfortunately they only end up confusing matters even more.
To give an example, here is Dunne: “Now, we cannot separate that travelling field of presentation from an observer to whom its contents are being presented—contents provided by the cerebral elements in the substratum travelled over. Hence, CD (or CD’) must be regarded as the place where this observer (a Time-travelling observer) intersects with AA; (or BB’). The field in question is, of course, our original field, and the observer thereof is our original, conscious observer. And this observer must be a definite entity; for no mere abstraction can travel in, so to say, its own unsupported right.”
And so on. While some readers might actually enjoy this kind of Gordian masochism, for me, far more interesting was it to read Dunne’s own anecdotal experiences with dreams and precognition, and to explore the topic from a more philosophical angle. Still, that said, I personally find Time along with its many mysteries to be one of the most fascinating subjects to read about; if you agree, you will most likely enjoy this volume, or at least some parts of it. But feel free to skip anything that doesn’t make sense to you—or skip the book altogether if you happen to have a dream that you read An Experiment With Time by J.W. Dunne and found it wanting.
September 3, 2011
This is an amazing book. It encourages you to record your dreams and look for predictions. Really challenges out everyday view of time! A classic.
Read
January 15, 2025Excellent controversial theory. 60% is an easily digestible examination of dreams and time and all the out-of-the-ordinary occurrences in life we dismiss as coincidences. 40% is descriptions to conduct your own experiments (you lost me), empirical data and formulas (lost me again), was monotonous at times to get thru I just don’t have the patience.
Overall tho. Life is so much more dynamic than we can ever comprehend and I love that. We, myself included, are so quick to try to discredit any ideas or experiences that challenge the simple laws we passively assume everything in our world abides by.. Why. Its a lot more interesting when we don’t do that.
Overall tho. Life is so much more dynamic than we can ever comprehend and I love that. We, myself included, are so quick to try to discredit any ideas or experiences that challenge the simple laws we passively assume everything in our world abides by.. Why. Its a lot more interesting when we don’t do that.
June 9, 2025
Worth at least an experiment.
March 28, 2016
This book is interesting not only in theory but in presentation. Although Dunne seems excited about his discoveries, his enthusiasm does not muddle the preciseness of his observations. It is an exposition of wonders, geared to explain away phenomena like clairvoyance, déjà vu, telepathy, etc., but he is confident and professional all throughout, at times playing his own skeptic, chicanery-free. Given the burden of empirical proof, the scientific validity of the book will always be called into question. A previous reviewer believes that "the main problem arises with the writer's assumption of time having an unlimited number of dimensions. This is a statement that Dunne does not even try to prove at any point of his otherwise rather meticulous analysis." In other words, Dunne conceives of time as being another dimension of space. He has no recourse but to assume that time has dimensions like space because humanity has rather limited tools of perception for the purpose of such a study. If time has dimensions, then it will take time to measure any unit of time, and one will need another unit to measure the measuring time, and so on, until infinity. In such a model, real time would be the unattainable border of this infinite series.
What this reviewer regarded as "mind-boggling philosophical statements" I found to be charming intuitive gems:
"Evolution has worked for possibly eight hundred million years towards the development of the brain. Today, as Professor McKendrick points out, nearly all the functions of our bodies are operating towards the end of the adequate nutrition of the grey matter. And it now appears that, apart from its self-sustaining and self-developing activities, the brain serves as a machine for teaching the embryonic soul to think."
My opinion of the book is best summed up in a preface written for the second Spanish edition by Jorge Luis Borges. It can be found in BIBLIOTECA PERSONAL (Emecé;, 1998). Borges later wrote an essay incorporating elements of the preface called "Time and J.W. Dunne" (1940), which is included in his SELECTED NON-FICTIONS (Penguin, 1999).
Since the essay can be found easily enough, here is my translation of the preface, written in 1934:
"A literary historian may one day write the history of a most recent genre in literature: the title. I recall none more admirable than the one on this volume. It is not merely for show; it ignites our interest in the text and sure enough the text does not disappoint. It is conversational in character and opens up marvelous possibilities for our conception of the world.
J.W. Dunne was an engineer, not a man of letters. Aeronautics is indebted to him for an invention which proved its efficiency in the First World War. His logical and mathematical mind was opposed to all things mystical. He arrived at his strange theory via a statistical study of his nightly dreams. He explained and defended the theory in three volumes that provoked a clamor of polemic. H.G. Wells accused of him of taking the first chapter of his "The Time Machine" (pub. 1895) much too seriously; Dunne responded in a note to his second edition, which is now in print. Likewise, Malcolm Grant refuted him in A NEW ARGUMENT FOR GOD AND SURVIVAL (1934).
Of the three volumes that constitute his completed work, THE SERIAL UNIVERSE is the most technical. The last, NOTHING DIES (1940), is downright popular science, meant for radio dispersal.
Dunne proposes an infinite series of times that flow in and out and because of one another. He assures us that upon our death we shall be handed the happy reins of eternity. We shall recover all of the instants of our lives and compose them in whatever manner is most pleasant to us. God and our friends and Shakespeare shall collaborate in this."
And the closing line of the essay:
"So splendid a thesis makes any fallacy committed by the author insignificant."
What this reviewer regarded as "mind-boggling philosophical statements" I found to be charming intuitive gems:
"Evolution has worked for possibly eight hundred million years towards the development of the brain. Today, as Professor McKendrick points out, nearly all the functions of our bodies are operating towards the end of the adequate nutrition of the grey matter. And it now appears that, apart from its self-sustaining and self-developing activities, the brain serves as a machine for teaching the embryonic soul to think."
My opinion of the book is best summed up in a preface written for the second Spanish edition by Jorge Luis Borges. It can be found in BIBLIOTECA PERSONAL (Emecé;, 1998). Borges later wrote an essay incorporating elements of the preface called "Time and J.W. Dunne" (1940), which is included in his SELECTED NON-FICTIONS (Penguin, 1999).
Since the essay can be found easily enough, here is my translation of the preface, written in 1934:
"A literary historian may one day write the history of a most recent genre in literature: the title. I recall none more admirable than the one on this volume. It is not merely for show; it ignites our interest in the text and sure enough the text does not disappoint. It is conversational in character and opens up marvelous possibilities for our conception of the world.
J.W. Dunne was an engineer, not a man of letters. Aeronautics is indebted to him for an invention which proved its efficiency in the First World War. His logical and mathematical mind was opposed to all things mystical. He arrived at his strange theory via a statistical study of his nightly dreams. He explained and defended the theory in three volumes that provoked a clamor of polemic. H.G. Wells accused of him of taking the first chapter of his "The Time Machine" (pub. 1895) much too seriously; Dunne responded in a note to his second edition, which is now in print. Likewise, Malcolm Grant refuted him in A NEW ARGUMENT FOR GOD AND SURVIVAL (1934).
Of the three volumes that constitute his completed work, THE SERIAL UNIVERSE is the most technical. The last, NOTHING DIES (1940), is downright popular science, meant for radio dispersal.
Dunne proposes an infinite series of times that flow in and out and because of one another. He assures us that upon our death we shall be handed the happy reins of eternity. We shall recover all of the instants of our lives and compose them in whatever manner is most pleasant to us. God and our friends and Shakespeare shall collaborate in this."
And the closing line of the essay:
"So splendid a thesis makes any fallacy committed by the author insignificant."
Read
July 17, 2014This 1927 book is somewhere between science and pseudo-science, written for general readers in the wake of relativity theory. Dunne’s experiments began with an interest in apparently prescient dreams, in which a peculiar incident in a dream would be reproduced in later experience, and the parts of the book narrating those incidents is more interesting than the highly technical sections (with diagrams) attempting to explain the phenomenon. His idea that dreams blend images of both past and future experiences leads to the conclusion that we ought to be able to see “disconnected flashes” of the future as well as remember images of the past. Though attempting to be scientific in his method throughout, he ends asserting “the existence of a reasonable kind of ‘soul’” that outlasts “the obvious ending of the individual in the physiologist’s Time dimension.” Writers including J. B. Priestley and Rumer Godden acknowledge Dunne’s influence on their own narrative experiments, making it an interesting read.
January 17, 2022
Imagine, if you will, that in certain circumstances your dreams seem to suggest that in some instances you have experiences that match future events. I believe many of us have or know someone who has experienced a dream vision that matches future events with some high improbability. These can be just simple coincidences of meeting friends or seeing objects that later in waking appear suddenly and unexpectedly. Or, just some event that wasn't planned in the waking state but happens later. Now, take the leap of faith that in some form, these dreams are actually penetrating future events in some way. This is where An Experiment with Time begins.
Dunne, a brilliant engineer with a famous background in early aviation design, starts with the premise above because he had a number of dreams that seemed to envision future waking states. Being the methodical engineer, Dunne starts with the assumption that, indeed, there is not only a timeline that falls into the past, but also a timeline that stretches into the future - and, the dream state is some form of consciousness that can see that future. He believes that human brains are conditioned to see everything in terms of the present and past timelines. He also assumes this is a property of time and space and not just some form of precognition without basis.
Based on his assumption, Dunne then dives into the scientific means to try and explain how this could manifest (it's good to call out here that the book was originally written in the 1920s and modern physics was in a state of turmoil with relativity and quantum phenomena just maturing). He begins by focusing the first half of the book attempting to measure semi-quantitatively dream experiences with future events using his friends and family (keeping dream journals and attempting to match dream visions with each of their future coincidences and then quantifying the similarities). Frankly, this was a fairly interesting part of the book. There seemed to be a number of matches between the journals and events.
Dunne then moves on into the second half by attempting to explain technically just what is going on with diagrammatic timelines, experience world-lines and how the waking state travels along a first time dimension. This gets expanded into a subsequent secondary timeline that can be observed by a higher level thinker/consciousness (namely, the dream state). Here is where it gets very murky. Dunne's theory becomes more convoluted and confusing without clear explanations (time and space line diagrams attempting to show time flow and the waking physical world). Basically, he attempts to create a scientific theory of time along with consciousness that extends into the nature of the soul.
Interesting read overall but the second half really bogs down into a theory that just doesn't seem to have much additional empirical support other than the dream experiences. I guess it might be worth asking in closing, if you do have dreams or precognition of future events, just what are you viewing exactly - just random consciousness of sleep that just happens to be pure coincidence or is there something physical in some dimension that our consciousness can touch now and then? If anything, this book does make one ponder that.
Dunne, a brilliant engineer with a famous background in early aviation design, starts with the premise above because he had a number of dreams that seemed to envision future waking states. Being the methodical engineer, Dunne starts with the assumption that, indeed, there is not only a timeline that falls into the past, but also a timeline that stretches into the future - and, the dream state is some form of consciousness that can see that future. He believes that human brains are conditioned to see everything in terms of the present and past timelines. He also assumes this is a property of time and space and not just some form of precognition without basis.
Based on his assumption, Dunne then dives into the scientific means to try and explain how this could manifest (it's good to call out here that the book was originally written in the 1920s and modern physics was in a state of turmoil with relativity and quantum phenomena just maturing). He begins by focusing the first half of the book attempting to measure semi-quantitatively dream experiences with future events using his friends and family (keeping dream journals and attempting to match dream visions with each of their future coincidences and then quantifying the similarities). Frankly, this was a fairly interesting part of the book. There seemed to be a number of matches between the journals and events.
Dunne then moves on into the second half by attempting to explain technically just what is going on with diagrammatic timelines, experience world-lines and how the waking state travels along a first time dimension. This gets expanded into a subsequent secondary timeline that can be observed by a higher level thinker/consciousness (namely, the dream state). Here is where it gets very murky. Dunne's theory becomes more convoluted and confusing without clear explanations (time and space line diagrams attempting to show time flow and the waking physical world). Basically, he attempts to create a scientific theory of time along with consciousness that extends into the nature of the soul.
Interesting read overall but the second half really bogs down into a theory that just doesn't seem to have much additional empirical support other than the dream experiences. I guess it might be worth asking in closing, if you do have dreams or precognition of future events, just what are you viewing exactly - just random consciousness of sleep that just happens to be pure coincidence or is there something physical in some dimension that our consciousness can touch now and then? If anything, this book does make one ponder that.
October 20, 2014
Author theorizes how he is able to have uncannily prescient moments in dreams. He proposes that there is more to time than a separate dimension wrt the three dimensions of space, he contends that to conceptualize durations in time, one must observe it from another timely dimension... and to measure in that dimension requires another dimension in time, and so on ad infinitum. Serial time. He first presents episodes he experienced that he believes show how his dreams predicted what would happen in his life, then he explained in mathematical terms his theory, and then (I was reading the third edition of the book) he responded to common criticisms of his theory.
I definitely empathize with his theory that dreams can be predictive, but I don't think he's found the explanation, and I don't see any reason to necessarily invoke any further/deeper dimensions in time. I don't know why he doesn't consider more of a parallel treatment of time--isn't memory a mental reoccurrence of a past event? A thing that happened, as mediated mentally, happening mentally again? How would a 'memory' of a future event be any different? He considers that measuring a duration of time requires a mathematically out-of-time perspective, but it doesn't.
Dunne's theory is that our waking conscience notices now and a little then, but our sleeping subconscious--or perhaps even distracted/unfocused consciousness--sees a wider perspective in experiential time--blurring events over a few days past and a few days coming. I think a lot of the coincidences he sees in dreams are general enough to be inadmissible--nonscientific. Language is too non-specific to relate exact experience, so it's very difficult to compare a dream-event faithfully to an awake experience. Plus human memory is malleable--perhaps after an experience, he re-remembers common elements from the dream, but doesn't notice the differences.
Mathematically Dunne describes time as flowing along the (dimensionally relevant) projection of the time vector (i.e. [0s 0s 0s [1]t])... and I think he intends a countable infinity of serial time dimensions in addition to the three apparent spatial dimensions, though he defers the need of any infinite nature in his responses to critics. I don't think he clearly necessitates any further time dimensions than 2... and again he's basing this on the idea that a duration of time must be viewed from another timeline (even as time continues to flow along now both timelines).
I like the idea that dreams allow a fourth(+) dimensional look at experiences. Perhaps our subconscious can guess further in the future than we consciously admit. Perhaps we selectively remember the times when we're right (though he describes experiments where this can be accounted for). I see no reason to claim that dreams 'are' in any sense of the future--just thinking of a likely event doesn't mean its necessarily going to happen. I don't think this theory adequately describes deja vu or predetermination--more or less a scientific dead end--and I'm not going to read others of Dunne's books on serial time.
I definitely empathize with his theory that dreams can be predictive, but I don't think he's found the explanation, and I don't see any reason to necessarily invoke any further/deeper dimensions in time. I don't know why he doesn't consider more of a parallel treatment of time--isn't memory a mental reoccurrence of a past event? A thing that happened, as mediated mentally, happening mentally again? How would a 'memory' of a future event be any different? He considers that measuring a duration of time requires a mathematically out-of-time perspective, but it doesn't.
Dunne's theory is that our waking conscience notices now and a little then, but our sleeping subconscious--or perhaps even distracted/unfocused consciousness--sees a wider perspective in experiential time--blurring events over a few days past and a few days coming. I think a lot of the coincidences he sees in dreams are general enough to be inadmissible--nonscientific. Language is too non-specific to relate exact experience, so it's very difficult to compare a dream-event faithfully to an awake experience. Plus human memory is malleable--perhaps after an experience, he re-remembers common elements from the dream, but doesn't notice the differences.
Mathematically Dunne describes time as flowing along the (dimensionally relevant) projection of the time vector (i.e. [0s 0s 0s [1]t])... and I think he intends a countable infinity of serial time dimensions in addition to the three apparent spatial dimensions, though he defers the need of any infinite nature in his responses to critics. I don't think he clearly necessitates any further time dimensions than 2... and again he's basing this on the idea that a duration of time must be viewed from another timeline (even as time continues to flow along now both timelines).
I like the idea that dreams allow a fourth(+) dimensional look at experiences. Perhaps our subconscious can guess further in the future than we consciously admit. Perhaps we selectively remember the times when we're right (though he describes experiments where this can be accounted for). I see no reason to claim that dreams 'are' in any sense of the future--just thinking of a likely event doesn't mean its necessarily going to happen. I don't think this theory adequately describes deja vu or predetermination--more or less a scientific dead end--and I'm not going to read others of Dunne's books on serial time.
February 10, 2008
What a fascinating book, one that is now mostly forgotten but that inspired a generation of early- and mid-twentieth-century writers, including Flann O'Brien, J.R.R. Tolkien, Verlyn Flieger, and, indirectly, the writers of the TV series Lost. Dunne observed that he had precognitive dreams, but with a twist. The inferences that he makes from that about the nature of time are well worth examining, even though I personally think that his arguments are flawed. But the ideas themselves and his analysis and development represent a brilliant creation that deserves to be re-examined and enjoyed on its own terms.
September 6, 2016
An extremely interesting read which appears to me to have a very human story behind it. The science behind the book is no doubt dated, but I found it thrilling as a philosophical experiment that can actually be put into practice. Applied philosophy from an aeronautical engineer.
It is also very much a book of its period, a febrile time of war, spiritualism, the 20th century scientific revolution and the exploration of the human mind. I am surprised it did not have more of an impact in the 1960s as it was very forward-looking.
It is also very much a book of its period, a febrile time of war, spiritualism, the 20th century scientific revolution and the exploration of the human mind. I am surprised it did not have more of an impact in the 1960s as it was very forward-looking.
July 28, 2011
Interesting argument that is sloppily written. Logic clear if you can get an engineer's undisciplined prose.
September 10, 2012
Absolutely loved this book, gives a brand new perspective on dreams and reality.
September 30, 2024
In An Experiment with Time, J. W. Dunne makes a scientific (mathematical? logical? philosophical? emphatically not occult, if we're to take him at his word) argument for a many-dimensional self (which he balks at calling 'soul' but that's very clearly what it is) and everything that it implies -- human immortality, for instance, and God.
In the first half of the book, Dunne begins by talking about his experiences with precognitive dreams (he firmly believed that he was able to see confused glimpses of the future in certain kinds of dreams), and a series of experiments he conducted on himself and others in relation to this, which led him to believe that this was a perfectly normal and widespread ability, and that most people simply weren't aware (due to habitual ways of thinking and the general difficulty of recalling dreams once awake, which to him are related phenomena) that they dreamt of the future (in a confused, inaccurate, dreamlike way) just as much as they dreamt of the past (in an equally confused, inaccurate, dreamlike way) -- because in dreams the distinction doesn't exist. This was a very fun part of the book, whatever you make of Dunne's claims, and I had a Very Good Time with it.
But then the second half is where Dunne makes his actual 'scientific' argument. What that argument is I have very little idea, and I definitely can't recount it. Dunne spends over a hundred pages developing his theory of many-dimensional 'serial' time in which the individual is also serial, an infinite regression of the same individual in different dimensions of time, all the way to an 'ultimate observer', all observing the three-dimensional life at the first term of the series. Dunne believes that this many-dimensional soul is just learning to use its faculties, and it's this ineptitude coupled with habit that explains the scarcity of 'higher dimensional' experiences in most people's waking lives. Dreams, he says, are different; when the brain is asleep and there's nothing/little to observe through it, the higher observers' attention wanders in their impossible (to us) directions over time.
There's a lot more to it than that, but here I was having a Very Bad Time trying to follow what on earth Dunne is trying to say. This is about the limit of what I've been able to grasp. There's a ton of mathematics there (bad mathematics, according to some reviews), and while I understand the overall points he's making, I really couldn't tell you how he comes to any of his conclusions.
Ultimately, I think, this is an absolutely fascinating book about mysticism from someone you wouldn't expect to be very mystical at all (Dunne was an aeronautical engineer from a military family/background, very much of the establishment and stereotypically 'respectable' by the standards of the time) -- and maybe that's part of why it was taken so seriously at the time? It also helps that he didn't really sensationalise his dream-related claims but rather embraced and emphasised the messiness and inaccuracies/inconsistencies in his precognition, and ultimately made that a fundamental part of his theory.
But either way, the influence of Dunne's ideas seems to have been immense, especially in literary circles (I read this book for class and we talked about how philosophers were intrigued but not entirely convinced by his claims, and scientists of course could pick apart the flaws of his reasoning -- but overall the appreciation seems to have been more for the human resonance of his ideas than the 'hard science', which is what Dunne thought he was writing). I mean, looking over it now, everyone read it: Christie, Borges, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Nabokov, H. G. Wells, probably many other names I'm forgetting now. And they were influenced by it, too, some more than others. Three editions were published and then reissued several times over the 20th century by major publishers, and there were lots of people following Dunne's method of dream journaling (Nabokov included).
Which is all to say, it's wild how something like this can fade away so completely. Would you call it a fad? I don't know. Either way, reading and studying this was a fascinating experience, and I'm almost tempted to read more Dunne (and also simultaneously afraid to do so...).
In the first half of the book, Dunne begins by talking about his experiences with precognitive dreams (he firmly believed that he was able to see confused glimpses of the future in certain kinds of dreams), and a series of experiments he conducted on himself and others in relation to this, which led him to believe that this was a perfectly normal and widespread ability, and that most people simply weren't aware (due to habitual ways of thinking and the general difficulty of recalling dreams once awake, which to him are related phenomena) that they dreamt of the future (in a confused, inaccurate, dreamlike way) just as much as they dreamt of the past (in an equally confused, inaccurate, dreamlike way) -- because in dreams the distinction doesn't exist. This was a very fun part of the book, whatever you make of Dunne's claims, and I had a Very Good Time with it.
But then the second half is where Dunne makes his actual 'scientific' argument. What that argument is I have very little idea, and I definitely can't recount it. Dunne spends over a hundred pages developing his theory of many-dimensional 'serial' time in which the individual is also serial, an infinite regression of the same individual in different dimensions of time, all the way to an 'ultimate observer', all observing the three-dimensional life at the first term of the series. Dunne believes that this many-dimensional soul is just learning to use its faculties, and it's this ineptitude coupled with habit that explains the scarcity of 'higher dimensional' experiences in most people's waking lives. Dreams, he says, are different; when the brain is asleep and there's nothing/little to observe through it, the higher observers' attention wanders in their impossible (to us) directions over time.
There's a lot more to it than that, but here I was having a Very Bad Time trying to follow what on earth Dunne is trying to say. This is about the limit of what I've been able to grasp. There's a ton of mathematics there (bad mathematics, according to some reviews), and while I understand the overall points he's making, I really couldn't tell you how he comes to any of his conclusions.
Ultimately, I think, this is an absolutely fascinating book about mysticism from someone you wouldn't expect to be very mystical at all (Dunne was an aeronautical engineer from a military family/background, very much of the establishment and stereotypically 'respectable' by the standards of the time) -- and maybe that's part of why it was taken so seriously at the time? It also helps that he didn't really sensationalise his dream-related claims but rather embraced and emphasised the messiness and inaccuracies/inconsistencies in his precognition, and ultimately made that a fundamental part of his theory.
But either way, the influence of Dunne's ideas seems to have been immense, especially in literary circles (I read this book for class and we talked about how philosophers were intrigued but not entirely convinced by his claims, and scientists of course could pick apart the flaws of his reasoning -- but overall the appreciation seems to have been more for the human resonance of his ideas than the 'hard science', which is what Dunne thought he was writing). I mean, looking over it now, everyone read it: Christie, Borges, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Nabokov, H. G. Wells, probably many other names I'm forgetting now. And they were influenced by it, too, some more than others. Three editions were published and then reissued several times over the 20th century by major publishers, and there were lots of people following Dunne's method of dream journaling (Nabokov included).
Which is all to say, it's wild how something like this can fade away so completely. Would you call it a fad? I don't know. Either way, reading and studying this was a fascinating experience, and I'm almost tempted to read more Dunne (and also simultaneously afraid to do so...).
February 8, 2024
Did you ever experience a feeling that something that you see in your waking life had been previously seen in the dream? How that's even possible or makes any sense?
J.W. Dunne had an idea to asks a wonderful extra question: what if it was not an aberration, but a normal experience?
In this book, a theory of "series universe" is proposed, and "series" here is used as a mathematical term. While exploring a suspension of the present moment during the dream that allows the observer to perceive both future and the past, the way how time is perceived by a human body is explored. Even though he wants to keep any metaphysics outside the scope, it is inevitably creeping in once nature of time perception is involved, showing the honesty and open mindedness of the author.
This book provides a very rich food for thought, even though it is not the most accessible book ever.
Recommending for everyone interested in the problem of Time!
J.W. Dunne had an idea to asks a wonderful extra question: what if it was not an aberration, but a normal experience?
In this book, a theory of "series universe" is proposed, and "series" here is used as a mathematical term. While exploring a suspension of the present moment during the dream that allows the observer to perceive both future and the past, the way how time is perceived by a human body is explored. Even though he wants to keep any metaphysics outside the scope, it is inevitably creeping in once nature of time perception is involved, showing the honesty and open mindedness of the author.
This book provides a very rich food for thought, even though it is not the most accessible book ever.
Recommending for everyone interested in the problem of Time!
December 1, 2023
The most brilliant, innovative work of all time? Or complete trash. The exposition was so verbose and circuitous that I lost patience quickly and had to skip to the end. His final points (4 of them, on the last two pages) summarizes his ideas, which I still couldn't understand. Or, maybe I did, but my sense was 'ok, so what?' Indeed, I've forgotten them already - merely a few hours later. Likely his thesis is 'tin foil hat' wearers' material. Found his style to be that of a highly educated windbag. (Downloaded it from Google/Books only because it was on Jorge Luis Borges' 'library of 80 best books.' But Borges, genius that he was, was sort of 'out there' - which no doubt attracted him to Dunne, who is also 'out there.'
August 28, 2023
Without the benefit of contemporary thinking in the areas of neuroscience and quantum physics, Dunne builds a bravura scaffold of logic (which he calls Serialism) to explain his (and others) perceived precognition during dreaming. First published 100 years ago, this laborious logical construct reminds one of Ancient Greek philosophical treatises, admirable in their lively aspiration, but ultimately fatally naive. Of Dunne’s precognitive experiences, only one seems genuinely unexplainable by mere coincidence, the airplane crash described in Chapter 7. I do believe that some precognition exists, but do not believe Dunne’s explanation for it.
May 25, 2025
Dunne wants to explain how precognition in dreams is possible through a new understand of how people interact with time. Loosely put, Dunne views time as a Fourth Dimension that is both "forward" and "behind" us. During moments of sleep the barrier between "now" and the other dimensions is the lowest, and parts of our dreams are observations of events going in that fourth dimension.
In the process, Dunne recycles old arguments for second-level or meta-time, and onto that he grafts second -level or meta-observers. He believes these phenomena to be demonstrable and lays out a series of tests one can apply to oneself to see it in real life.
Me? Not convinced.
In the process, Dunne recycles old arguments for second-level or meta-time, and onto that he grafts second -level or meta-observers. He believes these phenomena to be demonstrable and lays out a series of tests one can apply to oneself to see it in real life.
Me? Not convinced.
July 2, 2023
This is an unusual book with a fascinating subject. The first part of the book describes the experiment with time, and the second part attempts to derive a theory explaining the results.
The "experiment" tests the thesis on whether our dreams contain precognitive incidents. The author describes his own experiences of encountering incidents in his life and realizing that he had dreamed of them in the past. What gives the book credibility is the author's own reluctance to accept this thesis we experience and his subsequent careful experimentation. He and some of his friends carefully record their dreams and subsequently scrutinize them to identify past or future events that coincide with the dream description. The result of the experiment, in the author's estimate, is that dream preconception is conclusively proven. The author further claims of experiments where he can obtain precognitive experiences also by concentrating while awake. Such incidents are fewer and not corroborated by any other individuals.
The second part of the book uses a combination of science, psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics to create a theory of time the author coins as "serialism." I was not able to follow the arguments made in this part. The author asserts that there is an infinite series of time dimensions, all somehow "orthogonal" to one another. A single individual consists of several "observers" experiencing events in these different dimensions. The founding arguments of this theory do not actually rely on the experimental results of the first part, and the author claims that one can arrive at serialism using pure logical analysis, and the interpretation of precognition comes as an additional bonus.
Long story short, as I can see that this review is getting lengthy, the argument drifts into metaphysics and appears to mirror the author's preconceptions rather than establishing any scientific facts. It appears that his book drew significant attention at the time, and the appendixes to this 3rd edition are devoted to responding to his various critics.
Overall I was disappointed because although the book has a fascinating, well-written beginning, the second part drifts into dry and incomprehensible arguments. Needless to say, the "experiment" has to this day not been verified by a reliable 3rd party, and we still do not have a satisfactory theory for the "arrow of time."
The "experiment" tests the thesis on whether our dreams contain precognitive incidents. The author describes his own experiences of encountering incidents in his life and realizing that he had dreamed of them in the past. What gives the book credibility is the author's own reluctance to accept this thesis we experience and his subsequent careful experimentation. He and some of his friends carefully record their dreams and subsequently scrutinize them to identify past or future events that coincide with the dream description. The result of the experiment, in the author's estimate, is that dream preconception is conclusively proven. The author further claims of experiments where he can obtain precognitive experiences also by concentrating while awake. Such incidents are fewer and not corroborated by any other individuals.
The second part of the book uses a combination of science, psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics to create a theory of time the author coins as "serialism." I was not able to follow the arguments made in this part. The author asserts that there is an infinite series of time dimensions, all somehow "orthogonal" to one another. A single individual consists of several "observers" experiencing events in these different dimensions. The founding arguments of this theory do not actually rely on the experimental results of the first part, and the author claims that one can arrive at serialism using pure logical analysis, and the interpretation of precognition comes as an additional bonus.
Long story short, as I can see that this review is getting lengthy, the argument drifts into metaphysics and appears to mirror the author's preconceptions rather than establishing any scientific facts. It appears that his book drew significant attention at the time, and the appendixes to this 3rd edition are devoted to responding to his various critics.
Overall I was disappointed because although the book has a fascinating, well-written beginning, the second part drifts into dry and incomprehensible arguments. Needless to say, the "experiment" has to this day not been verified by a reliable 3rd party, and we still do not have a satisfactory theory for the "arrow of time."
January 1, 2024
While reading first half of this book, 10th issue of Alan Moore's "Providence" keep popping and popping in my mind
March 4, 2024
First half is excellent. 2nd half is very technical and dull - which I honestly skimmed at best
to-finish-reading
August 19, 2024Look for the Cambridge 3rd edition.
September 27, 2016
First published in 1927, this edition has a preface by Russell Targ, one of the researchers from the American Remote Viewing project. Throughout his life Dunne experienced prophetic visions and dreams, often accompanied by insistent voices. As a child of nine he had formulated a fundamental issue in the nature of Time - is it the map of yesterday, today and to morrow, or the way that our eternal moment of "now" travels between them? These two issues drove him to investigate his dreams scientifically and to come up with a rational theory. His study of dreams and precognition, the first part of the book, set the gold standard for others to follow and stands up well even today. The tale of his own dreams and investigations is well-written, readable and enticing. He left out the visions and voices as he felt, quite rightly, that they would put off the average sceptical scientist (These were described in his later book, "Intrusions?"). His theory of infinite levels of time and consciousness grapples too with the role of the observer in modern science, paying especial homage to Einstein's theory of relativity. He struggles to express himself and seeks refuge in the pedantry of the academic philosopher - he was no mathematician, despite myths to the contrary - hiding even fairly simple ideas under a tangle of unnecessary verbiage. If you get lost, take it easy, as long as you are following the general theme, you will be fine. He had thought that his rational analysis was burying any "universal mind" and was astonished to discover it arising as a necessary consequence.
The evidence is strong, the tale enticing, the motifs (perhaps ironically) timeless. The book has remained in print more or less ever since and its attraction to every new generation never seems to dull. His ideas, and the questions they raise, remain for the most part as fresh as ever, as do the criticisms raised against him.
Targ's modest preface sets the book's context in the ideas current at the millennium, notably the now somewhat dated ideas of David Bohm. Frankly, it adds little.
The evidence is strong, the tale enticing, the motifs (perhaps ironically) timeless. The book has remained in print more or less ever since and its attraction to every new generation never seems to dull. His ideas, and the questions they raise, remain for the most part as fresh as ever, as do the criticisms raised against him.
Targ's modest preface sets the book's context in the ideas current at the millennium, notably the now somewhat dated ideas of David Bohm. Frankly, it adds little.
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