An Experiment with Time
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| Author | J. W. Dunne |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | A. & C. Black Faber & Faber |
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Publication date
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1927 |
| Pages | 208pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 46396413 |
| LC Class | MLCM 2004/02936 (B) |
An Experiment with Time is a book by the British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher J. W. Dunne (1875–1949) on the subjects of precognitive dreams and a theory of time which he later called Serialism. First published in March 1927, it was widely read and his ideas were explored by many other authors, especially by J. B. Priestley. He published three sequels; The Serial Universe, The New Immortality, and Nothing Dies.
Appendix to the third edition:
Index
An Experiment with Time divides into two main topics.
The first half of the book describes a number of precognitive dreams, most of which Dunne himself had experienced. His key conclusion was that such precognitive visions foresee future personal experiences by the dreamer and not more general events.
The second half develops a theory to try and explain them. Dunne's starting point is the observation that the moment of "now" is not described by science. Contemporary science described physical time as a fourth dimension and Dunne's argument led to an endless sequence of higher dimensions of time to measure our passage through the dimension below. Accompanying each level was a higher level of consciousness. At the end of the chain was a supreme ultimate observer.
According to Dunne, our wakeful attention prevents us from seeing beyond the present moment, whilst when dreaming that attention fades and we gain the ability to recall more of our timeline. This allows fragments of our future to appear in pre-cognitive dreams, mixed in with fragments or memories of our past. Other consequences include the phenomenon known as deja vu and the existence of life after death.
Following a discussion of brain function in which Dunne expounds mind-brain parallelism and highlights the problem of subjective experience, he gives anecdotal accounts of precognitive dreams which, for the most part, he himself had experienced.
The first he records occurred in 1898, in which he dreamed of his watch stopping at an exact time before waking up and finding that it had in fact done so. Later dreams appeared to foretell several major disasters; a volcanic eruption in Martinique, a factory fire in Paris, and the derailing of the Flying Scotsman express train from the embankment approaching the Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland.
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