NEW LIGHT ON MENTAL LIFE:
MR. J. W. DUNNE’S EXPERIMENTS WITH DREAMING
An old friend, Mr. J. W. Dunne, has recently sent me a new book he
has written, “An Experiment with Time.” I find it a fantastically
interesting book. It has stirred my imagination vividly and I think
most imaginative people will be stirred by the queer things he has
advanced in it. I do not think it has yet been given nearly enough
attention.
Years ago, in the last century, Mr. Dunne came to see me for the first
time. He was then a young captain in the army, and he had to go out to
the South African war. He wanted to tell me something, an idea, that he
didn’t want to have lost if, too abruptly for explanations, some Boer
marksman chanced to wipe him out of existence. It was the idea of an
aeroplane with V-shaped wings based on a number of experiments he had
made with paper models--a perfectly sound idea, which has since been
realized in a very stable but not very swift or agile machine. If Dunne
had had money and opportunity for experiment, I am sure that about
A.D. 1902–3 he would have constructed a practicable heavier-than-air
machine, but he had to go off to his blockhouse work in the Orange
River Colony, and he never got a free hand to build until other
investigators had passed him by.
In those days it was extraordinarily hard to get people to show a
practical interest in the air. He came to me because I had written
what was considered very wild stuff about flight. I had said that we
should fly before 1950! Not a dazzling hit, but better than the mighty
majority opinion that we should never fly at all. This magnificent
encouragement won Dunne’s gratitude and confidence; he put all he had
done so far in my hands and I was to lock it up and keep it secret for
him until he was either killed or could go on with his experiments
again. He had to come to me, a perfect stranger, before he could find
any one who would take him seriously enough to harbour what he had to
deposit.
I still remember very cheerfully a funny afternoon we spent in my
garden at Sandgate, while Dunne rushed about, climbing up walls and
jumping on garden seats, to release little fluttering paper models
which illustrated this or that aspect of his idea.
He struck me then as having one of the most patient and persistent
minds I had ever encountered. None of the magnesium flare about his
mind, the sort of thing that goes fizz and lights up everything--as
much as it is ever going to light up everything--but wary, observing,
and, when at last it gets on a trail, indefatigable. He worried on with
aviation for a long time, bad health and the Great War used him up and
partly veiled him from me, and it is only now that I learn of another
scent that he has been following to the most remarkable conclusions.
What set him going was a very common experience, the fact that dreams
in an odd, erratic way seem to foreshadow events. Many of us have had
the experience of an anticipatory dream, and usually we have been so
vague about it that the story was hardly worth the telling. Mr. Townley
Searle, the London bookseller, told the other day of an unusually
lucid one. He dreamt he was among the stalls in the Caledonian Market,
and found and bought a first edition of Thomas Hardy’s “Desperate
Remedies,” which is worth £100 nowadays. So vivid was the impression
that he got up the next morning and went straight to the market, bought
an umbrella for sixpence because it was coming on to rain, and then,
recognizing the stall of his dream, went straight to it and got the
three volumes for a shilling, a clear profit of £99, 18_s._ 6_d._
That was a rarely simple case. The ordinary dream with foreshadowing
elements is more mixed than that. One of my own has stuck in my mind
for years and is much more typical. In my dream I was riding a bicycle
on the Neva, which was frozen over; the bicycle skidded on the ice,
went faster and faster, and got more and more out of control; ahead
of me appeared a great sledge with a gaunt horse driven by a woman
in white furs; I swept towards it helplessly and collided with the
horse, clung to its head, and pulled it down as I awoke. The moment of
clinging to the head of the horse was prolonged, and it haunted me. I
had a vivid sense of the feel of the animal’s ears and long cheek. I
was then actually learning to ride the bicycle and, a day or so after,
I came round a corner on a little chariot-like milk-cart on the wrong
side of the road. I lacked the skill to avoid this and found myself
clinging to the head of the pony, which came down in exactly the mood
of suspense, and with exactly the same feel as the sledge horse did in
my dream. But as I am not of Dunne’s curious and persistent quality
I never followed up that very striking experience. I had not told it
to any one before the accident and I accepted very uncritically the
current explanation of these apparently foreshadowing dreams.
Probably the reader knows that “explanation.” It is that there is
lack of simultaneousness in the action of the two hemispheres of the
brain so that one lags a little behind the other; there is a double
impression and the second one has the effect of being a memory of some
previous event. The theory is that there was no real dream at all,
but only the delusion of a memory of a dream produced by the flagging
impression. That accounts for the resemblances of the event to the
pseudo-dream but manifestly it does not account for the differences;
the lady in white furs and the Neva for example have still to be
accounted for. If I never really had that dream, as a dream how did
they get into my memory? Why wasn’t the dream exactly like the event?
Dunne seems to have had more than one such experience. He dreamt, for
example, of the great volcanic outbreak in Martinique while he was
soldiering in the Orange Free State. He saw it just about to happen,
fissures opening in the ground and steam jetting out. What he saw was
quite unlike what probably did happen. In his dream he made violent
attempts to warn the inhabitants; he was very clear about the number.
He woke up shouting, “Four thousand people will be killed.” Days later
came a newspaper. Headlines proclaimed the disaster and the probable
loss of forty thousand, not four thousand, lives. The reading of
these headlines was the event foreshadowed by the dream. He read them
hastily, misread the figures as four thousand, and the paper passed out
of his reach. Long afterwards he found that these figures, both four
thousand and forty thousand, were quite erroneous. His dream, it is
plain, was not of the actual event, but merely an anticipation of his
mental impression when he looked at the paper.
Several occurrences of this sort put Dunne on the alert. He decided to
write down all his dreams so soon as he was awake. He kept a bedside
notebook. He trained himself to watch for his dreams at the moment of
awakening and acquired considerable skill at recovering his dreams as
they slipped away into nothingness. He made a parallel daylight diary
of his more vivid waking impressions. And he induced several other
people to take up this business of dream watching. He has accumulated
records. All this he tells very interestingly in this book of his. And
the striking conclusion that emerges from these observations is this,
that the share of future mental impressions is almost as important or
quite as important in the making of dreams as mental impressions in the
past. To-morrow’s happenings are just as likely to appear, clipped and
disturbed, in the dream flow as yesterday’s.
We most of us have some idea of the making of dreams. Some sound,
some internal or external disturbance lifts the mental existence out
of the unconscious towards waking. The mind ceases to forget, memory
and attention dawn, and the drifting mental content groups itself
with an assumption of reasonable connectedness about the disturbing
sensation. Then we either wake and remember, or the whole stir subsides
back into forgetfulness and unconsciousness. Most of us realize how
the impressions of yesterday in particular, and of remote yesterdays
less patently, supply forms and colour to the stir, and how desires we
have thwarted and temptations we have resisted escape into this dream
of life and play havoc with our suppressions. What most of us do not
realize, says Dunne, is the share which little scraps of tomorrow’s
impressions also contribute. That is the essence of his discovery.
It is difficult at the time to sift the foreshadowings from the
recollections and the distorted, escaped suppressions, so unimportant
and elusive they seem to be. It is only when the premonitions are
exceptionally striking that they are remembered and recognized when
they turn up in actual fact, and so detected. They have to be very
vivid or very peculiar. But the more closely and skilfully you watch,
he insists, the more of the futurist element is evident in the dream.
Moreover, he had added to the observation of what I may call natural
dreaming the observation of states of mind when the attention is
deliberately relaxed so as to leave the mental existence at a level
hardly above the level of recording consciousness. He turns his back,
as it were, on the mental existence, and then suddenly snatches what is
there before it sails out of reach, and in these phases of mind also he
finds the images of future and past impressions mingling together.
Now I think it may be possible to put these facts into a
comprehensible relationship to quite a number of other facts which
do not enter into Dunne’s speculation. I won’t exactly follow him in
this statement that follows, which is necessarily in the space at my
disposal a very sketchy statement. Partly it derives from him and
partly I am adding something of my own. The point of interest is that
our mind can be considered as existing in the past and in the future,
as extending, so to speak, both ways beyond what we consider to be the
actual moment. I hope that does not strike the reader as too crazy a
proposition. Most of us have given very little thought to what we mean
by the actual moment. What do we mean by “now”? How much time is it?
Behind “now” stretches the past, ahead is the future, but is it itself
an infinitesimal instant? Do we merely exist as a flash, as a series
of flashes, so to speak, of no duration at all, between a past gone
by and a future still to come, or does “now” bulge into both past and
future? This will be a novel and amusing question to most people and a
profoundly irritating one to certain types. They will be so accustomed
to speak of past and future as though they were in actual contact at
the present, that the assertion will be astonishing and difficult,
and yet as they think it over it will acquire an insinuating and
troublesome plausibility, that “now” is perhaps always a measurable,
and may under certain circumstances be a quite considerable, piece of
time. It sounds paradoxical to say that portions of the past and future
both enter into “now,” but actual experience gives a feeling in favour
of that illogical view. To be illogical is not necessarily to be in
error. Mankind may have been thinking about past and future in the
wrong way.
Next I would suggest that as we become attentive to anything and
excited by actual fact, “now” gathers itself together, and the more
excited and attentive we are, the more “now” gathers itself together
towards its central point. As we become increasingly active and “on
the spot,” the acuter and the narrower does the “now” under attention
become. In our crises we live, as we say, only for the moment. As we
relapse towards inattention, reverie, dreaminess, “now” becomes obtuse
and broader and broader. In the hypnotic condition, in dreaming, and
still more so in dreamless sleep, “now” may broaden down towards and
below the limit of consciousness, until it spreads, it may be, to large
parts, and even to all of our mental life from beginning to end. In
the sleeping mind or in the dead mind nothing is past or future. As we
rouse ourselves, as we become alert, as we wake up and pay attention
to things, that vague “now” is drawn together towards the moment of
action. But as the attention leaps to action, it trails with it faint
and rapidly fading impressions of the more diffused state of mind from
which it has arisen.
This queer idea that the “now” of the dreaming and inattentive
mind may extend to an undefined amount into both past and future is
compatible with all Dunne’s dreaming and quasi-dreaming phenomena. On
any other supposition they are inexplicable. And it is consistent with
the remarkable story of Mr. Townley Searle, and many other like tales
of premonition. Moreover, Professor Gilbert Murray recently published
some disconcerting facts, disconcerting, that is, for the sceptic, with
regard to what he considered to be telepathy. One would as soon doubt
his word as one would doubt that of Aristides. He is above suspicion
even of careless testimony. I have not the report of his experiments
by me, but they were very puzzling and perplexing indeed. They went
something in this way: he would, with various friends, read or be told
or agree upon some strange scene and event, and his daughter would
then come into the room and open her mind, as it were, to any floating
impression that offered itself, while he and his friends fixed their
minds on the chosen topic. On this theory it was unnecessary so to fix
the mind, but that, I believe, was what was done. Presently she would
describe what came to her. Many of her guesses were amazingly good.
She was then told the actual thing chosen, and no doubt she saw it
very vividly as it was described to her. She would be keen to know how
near she had got to the chosen subject. But that she should see the
thing before it was described to her and because it was presently to be
described to her, is all of a piece with Dunne seeing the Martinique
explosion before the newspaper headings evoked the picture in his
imagination. It would be extremely interesting if Professor Murray
would try to get scenes to his daughter which would not be revealed
to her later. If he failed to do that, it would be confirmatory of
this supposition, that what happened was merely the foreshadowing of a
strong impression, exactly on the lines of Dunne’s anticipatory dreams.
The idea that the mental “now” prolongs itself into the past and
future, as the attention flattens down from its waking acuteness into a
state of suspense, also brings many of the more remarkable and hitherto
abnormal phenomena of hypnotism into line with the general body of
interpreted fact. The feats of many of the more successful mediums in
producing the names and significant incidents in the lives of people
hitherto unknown to them, but whose names and circumstances they were
personally to know, cease to be isolated phenomena. They are no longer
in the least discordant with everyday reality so soon as we clear
our minds of the delusion that the practical, fleshly, substantial
“now” of ordinary experience is a mathematical instant, a locus, an
infinitesimal abstraction, and accept the view I am propounding here
that it has duration, and that its duration in both directions, past
and future, increases with the weakening of our attention and our lapse
from acute contact with outer reality.
By this reasoning people must often be dreaming ahead of the winners
of races, of winning numbers in lotteries, speculative opportunities
and the like. They are. But dreams draw their material not only from
the future but from the past, from our bodily desires and cravings,
our hopes, our mental preoccupations, and the interpretation and
misinterpretation of noises and other impressions. Very rarely have
they a convincing quality of reality. The dream artist in us is
essentially and incurably unsystematic and maundering. We all, as our
attention sinks down towards the threshold of consciousness, become
false and incoherent in our associations. Every sleeping, hypnotized,
anæsthetized, or dreaming man is, so to speak, insane. Sanity is a
waking state. Accordingly, I do not see any prospect of our keeping
so sufficiently alive to what we are doing as to direct our minds
to the next big race or the run of the numbers for the next hour at
roulette, and at the same time letting ourselves go sufficiently to tap
the mental states ahead. Things may and do happen as they happened to
Mr. Townley Searle, but such dreams are gifts and cannot be forced or
persuaded to come by any means now known to us. Practical life lies in
the present. Dream states, like drug states, are a dangerous field of
exploration for any but very specially endowed and guarded minds.
_10 July, 1927._