Years ago, I bought a little old book with the mysterious title “An Experiment with Time” (1927) written by a certain J.W. Dunne. I found it by chance in a second hand bookshop. At that time, I scanned its content quickly with the intent of reading it more carefully later. Now I’m halfway through (it’s no easy read) and its contents baffles me. Could this book, obviously written by an intelligent man, have been overlooked? Could the author’s Theory of Time, make any sense? J.W. Dunne was, as I soon found out, a true Homo Universalis, a very versatile man who has been an inventor, a writer, a soldier and an accomplished aeronautical engineer. Why did we never hear about the man?
So, I decided to scan the Internet for information about Dunne and his book “An Experiment with Time”. Below a structured compilation of various facts I found.
Biography of J.W. Dunne
John William Dunne (1875-1949) was born into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, in County Kildare, and was the third son of General Sir John Hart Dunne KCB (1835-1924) and Julia Elizabeth Dunne. They had two children, a girl and a boy. His father was an accomplished Victorian soldier who fought in the Crimean War of 1854, and in North China in 1860. He retired as the colonel of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire Regiment, the same one his son would enter in 1902.
As a young man Dunne fought in the South African (aka Second Boer) War (1900). As a sub-lieutenant with the Imperial Yeomanry (a volunteer mounted-infantry outfit) he participated in the advance on Pretoria under General Roberts and was invalided home with typhoid fever. He returned in 1902 for a second tour of duty with the Wiltshire Regiment.
Dunne was a friend of literary notables like H.G. Wells and J.B. Priestley, and was involved in the very early days of British military aviation, making several important technical contributions thereto. In 1904 he invented the stable tailless type of aerofoil, the Dunne plane, and built and flew both monoplanes and biplanes of this type. For that date, when nearly all flying machines were designed “by guess and by God”, it was outstandingly different. It was a tailless craft with swept-back wings. Dunne had developed his basic plan for this plane from a study of the flight characteristics of the seed of the Zanonia macroparpa plant.
Dunne also designed and built (1906-7) the first British military aeroplane, which was tested secretly by H.M. War Office at Blair Atholl in 1907-8. Later, the American boat and aircraft builder Burgess, who had the necessary skills and manufacturing facilities to build and modify Dunne’s design, bought the rights to build the aircraft under license. This Burgess-Dunne airplane was the first military aircraft (16 September, 1914) for the military aviation service in Canada.
J.W. Dunne was apparently able to retire relatively young and live comfortably on the income from various patents. He was an avid and accomplished fly-fisherman, about which he wrote a book, and was also the author of several successful books for children. He also wrote a political tract called The League of North-West Europe (1938), proposing something like NATO to supplant the failed League of Nations and provide political stability in Europe against the fascist and Communist regimes.
Summary of An Experiment with Time
An Experiment with Time reports on the studies J.W. Dunne conducted on the content of dreams. He got interested in dreams and time because he would occasionally have prescient dreams about major disasters. A few days later he would open the paper, and there would be a report about the disaster he had dreamed. As a good pragmatist, he set out to use the scientific method he had been trained in to try to figure out what was going on.
His first subject of study was himself. Later, he involved a few family members and acquaintances. He began keeping a dream diary. After overcoming the common difficulties encountered when trying to remember dreams, he learned to maintain a highly detailed summary of each night’s dream experiences.
Next, he began to examine the recorded dreams for evidence of future events, not just disasters or other major occurrences, but of any magnitude. And he went a step further. He at the same time compiled a list of past events in the same dreams. After several months, he made a startling discovery, which was confirmed as time passed and the observation and analysis of his dreams stretched into years. He found that his dreams contained approximately the same number of past and future events. From this, he began to think about time, and our experience of time.
He speculates that when we sleep our consciousness is freed from the usual (waking) unidirectional flow of time, and we are as apt to dream about future events as about past ones. He reckoned that a person in their middle years would dream fairly equal proportions of past, present and future, the mix varying according to position on their personal time line. Of course, much of life is getting up, going to work, going to bed and so much of the future is indistinguishable from so much of the past that only by going back and comparing waking dream notes with newspapers and diaries might you discover a correlation.
Dunne compared time to a piano keyboard. When we’re awake, we’re sitting at the keyboard striking one note at a time, in sequence, from left to right. We cannot normally strike keys to the left (”the past”) of the one in front of us, nor keys to the right (”the future”). But when we sleep, we are freed from the rigorous linearity. He concluded that in dreams we are in effect banging around on the keyboard, hence the haphazard combination of elements and time events.
J.W. Dunne devised an elaborate mathematical theory to support his speculations about the true nature of time and space, which he called Serialism. Basically Dunne tested and more or less proved that dreams can include reverse historical perception (prophecy).
Other books by J.W. Dunne
After An Experiment with Time (1927), Dunne published a number of books based on his attempt to prove immortality by geometry, these books elaborating and extending his theory were:
- The Serial Universe (1934)
- The New Immortality (1938)
- Nothing Dies (1940)
- Intrusions? (1955)
The last book is an unfinished memoir written with a sense of urgency, just before his death on August 24th 1949. It was published posthumously by Dunne’s widow.
J.W. Dunne also wrote books about other subjects:
- Sunshine and the Dry-Fly (1924) (about fly-fishing)
- The Jumping Lions of Borneo (1937) (children’s book)
- An Experiment with St. George (1939) (children’s book)
Trivia
Dunne was a significant influence on the SF writer Robert A. Heinlein, in particular the story “Elsewhen” (1941), collected in “Assignment in Eternity”, in which Heinlein uses a Dunne-like notion about multi-dimensional time-streams accessible via hypnosis. “An Experiment with Time” is mentioned specifically in Heinlein’s “Lost Legacy” (1941) (same collection).
Dunne’s “An Experiment With Time” is featured in Gaspar Noe’s controversial film “Irreversible”. Actress Monica Bellucci (Alexandra) is shown lounging on the grass and reading the book near the end/beginning of the movie. Later/earlier she recounts a dream that proves to be a precognition of a later/earlier event in the film. On another occasion she provides a brief account of Dunne’s theory while riding in an elevator.
Related Links
http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/dunne.html
http://www.flyfishinghistory.com/sunshine_and_the_dry_fly.htm
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