An Experiment With Time

John William Dunne (1875-1949) was a former soldier and aeronautical engineer who, in 1927, published an influential book about the nature of reality. An Experiment with Time laid out the author’s experiments with dream recall, his interpretation of correlations between those dreams and subsequent events, and his analysis of an inferred nature of time and space. Writing in the context of new theories of relativity and quantum physics, and using technical language and dense arguments, Dunne’s argued that time existed in a series of planes, each of which could be observed by those lying outside them, and could be navigated in dreams. His book convinced many, although it contains a number of logical flaws. Here we take a look at the legacy of Dunne’s An Experiment with Time in science fiction, and how it relates to contemporary and current understanding of the nature of time.

Early Adopters

Dunne’s An Experiment with Time attracted attention almost immediately. H G Wells arguably initiated the modern science fiction of time travel with his 1895 novel The Time Machine. This portrayed time as a direction through which a suitably equipped individual might travel backwards and forwards. Wells was also a futurist who predicted the potential of air travel and aerial warfare in his novels. According to his July 1927 essay “New Light on Mental Life: Mr. J. W. Dunne's Experiments with Dreaming”, which appeared in New Yorker magazine (and subsequently in his 1929 essay collection The Way the World is Going), it was in this latter context that Dunne approached Wells to share his insights into possible monoplane designs. The two remained friends and Wells was amongst those to receive a copy of the book from Dunne personally.

Wells was not entirely uncritical of the details of Dunne’s theory in his essay, but he certainly appears to have been convinced of the basic premise that dreams can traverse time:

“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”

However he was clearly more sceptical about its utility for widespread precognition:

“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.
…
Dream states, like drug states, are a dangerous field of exploration for any but very specially endowed and guarded minds.”

Having such a prominent science fiction author, and public personality, as H G Wells publicise the book meant it was unlikely to be overlooked, particularly in the science fiction community. A contemporary review of An Experiment with Time by H Levy in the science journal Nature, was politely and deeply sceptical, but recognised Dunne’s careful and methodical approach, informed by his expertise in engineering (if not philosophy or cosmology):

“Whatever preconceived prejudices we may possess against what Mr. Dunne proposes to establish - and the present writer has them strongly - it must be at once admitted that the author appears to be a careful, sane experimenter quite alive to the dangers and pitfalls that may beset an observer in a strange field”

J. W. Dunne was also acquainted with author and playwright J B Priestley. From the late 1920s onwards, Priestley became known for his novels, but in the 1930s he began writing a series of plays exploring concepts of time and time-shifts, skirting the boundary between drama, fantasy and science fiction, of which the best known is An Inspector Calls (1945). An earlier play, Time and the Conways (1937), explored Dunne’s theories in more detail with its acts alternating between time periods in the life of a family, and with one character expounding a serenity that comes from seeing each stage of life - pleasurable or otherwise - as part of a simultaneous whole. In a chapter on “Dunne and Serialism” in his 1964 non-fiction book Man and Time [1], Priestley described his interest in different conceptions on time, and the influence Dunne had on it. As he notes:

 “As I had been one of the earliest and most enthusiastic reviewers of An Experiment with Time, | came to know him, though never intimately; at his own suggestion, he explained his ideas to the cast of my play Time and the Conways, a cast that always played well but never better than when they were pretending to understand what he was telling them.”

While that play was rooted in contemporary and near-contemporary times, stories of individuals becoming displaced into the future, usually by falling asleep and waking in their new world, have a long history. They include examples such as News from Nowhere (novel, 1890) by William Morris and Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nolan (novel 1928, which introduced Buck Rogers). Another example of this genre, Gay Hunter, was published in 1934 by Lewis Gibbon, writing as J Leslie Mitchell. This novel describes an American woman, the eponymous Miss Hunter, who experiments with Dunne’s dream theories, and wakes to find herself in a tribe of savages in post-apocalyptic, distant-future England. Dunne is name-checked throughout, although Hunter’s group consider themselves to go beyond his theories into a “neo-Dunne” regime:

"It’s just that we aren’t in the twentieth century at all. In the neo-Dunne test we all three went beyond it by some accident. We're far in the future. Stars don’t alter their appearance and grouping from the surface of the earth until the passing of long ages."

Time Travel Pulps

While time and space travel were features of science fiction from its very beginnings, stories of using dreams or mental ability to traverse time, and those questioning its nature, became relatively common in the pulp science fiction magazines of the 1930s and 40s. Many of these were explicitly influenced by Dunne - and indeed directly reference his work. Examples include Horror Out of Carthage (Edmund Hamilton, Fantastic Adventures, September 1939), Twilight of the Tenth World (Thornton Ayre, Planet Stories, Winter 1940), Blank? (Randall Garrett, Infinity, June 1957), Alter Ego (A Bertram Chandler, Astounding, March 1945), The Singing Spheres (Deegan, Authentic SF, July 1952), Extempore (Damon Knight, 1961) and the Paratime series of H Beam Piper (various stories, 1948-1964).

Evidence of its lasting influence can be found amidst the work of some key authors of the mid twentieth century.

The compendious 2010 biography of Robert A Heinlein by William H Patterson describes Heinlein as being influenced by Wells, Dunne and Ouspensky (who proposed a similar form of cyclic time). The influence of Dunne appears by name in Heinlein’s novella Elsewhen (initially published as Elsewhere, as by Caleb Saunders, in Astounding, September 1941). This describes a professor of speculative metaphysics and the students in his class going missing. One of those students, an engineering major, proves less susceptible to suggestion - and so less open to mental travel - than the others. As the professor complains:

“But you engineers are as bad as the metaphysicians—you ignore any fact that you can’t weigh in scales. If you can’t bite it, it’s not real. You believe in a mechanistic, deterministic universe, and ignore the real facts of human consciousness, human will, and human freedom of choice—facts that you have directly experienced!”

Amidst descriptions of two-dimensional time being akin to a landscape with clear paths, and off-road areas to climb and explore, the professor and his students end up in parallel realities and influenced by the alternate personalities of the other selves natural to them [2].

Another of the science fiction greats Arthur C Clarke also referenced Dunne directly in his short story Inheritance (appearing first as by Charles Willis in New Worlds, Oct 1947, and then as by Clarke in Astounding, Sept 1948). This describes a young space test pilot so convinced by Dunne’s theory of precognitive dreams that he is confident in his own survival until a later event, and who convinces those around of him of that effective immortality. As with many of Clarke’s stories, it comes with a twist at the end, making it clear that Clarke did not himself give credence to An Experiment with Time.

By contrast, Jack of Eagles (novel, 1952) by James Blish, gave the book more credit. This novel focuses on a normal individual, Danny Caidin, who discovers that his predictions come true, and is drawn into a mysterious secret orgnisation of those with psi-abilities. In his search for an understanding of his own precognitive abilities, he comes across Dunne’s work:

“It was An Experiment With Time which finally put him on the track. He stood up with a shock of alarm when he hit the crucial chapter, remembering how close he had come to missing the Dunne book altogether, then had to sit down again for sheer dizziness. Then came the two Ouspenskii works, both massive, both loaded with incredibly naive occultism, both—especially the later one, which he had had in his own small library for over a year without touching—paying off. Anyone watching Danny turn pages now would have concluded that he was living at some time-rate from which humans would have seemed virtually immobile, like an insect or a sparrow.”

As with other writers, Blish’s representation of Dunne’s book is not entirely uncritical, but it nonetheless forms the foundation for his character’s conception of the nature of time.

Dunne’s conception of a preexisting time which can be observed and moved around was credited by Philippa Pearce in an interview with inspiring her children’s classic novel Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958). While other well-known authors writing novels about the nature of time such as Isaac Asimov (e.g. The End of Eternity, 1959) and Poul Anderson (e.g. The Corridors of Time, 1966) did not directly reference Dunne, and were likely to have been unimpressed with his arguments, given their scientific backgrounds, they were nonetheless writing in a genre already heavily influenced by his work.

Psychedelic Dreams

Dunne’s work on conceptions of time appears to have undergone something of a renaissance of popularity during the 1960s and 70s, an era known for its fascination with altered states of consciousness and experimentation with mind-expansion.

Perhaps amongst the fiction most strongly influenced by An Experiment With Time is Collision with Chronos (novel, 1973) by Barrington J Bayley. This imagined time as dimension through which an ever-moving “now” sweeps like a train travelling through a pre-existing tunnel. Unfortunately for the people of Bayley’s world, the train is not alone in its tunnel: another “now” is sweeping backwards through the same space, and a collision is imminent. The story focuses on a group of time travellers who use a technological solution (rather than Dunne’s dreams) to move outside the “now” but are helpless to prevent the upcoming collision, and are resisted by occupants of the other “now”. A third group, escapees from an earlier “now” on Earth, occupy a space station and have developed time manipulation to a high degree, but their involvement is complicated by racial prejudice and politics.

In his Author’s Note on the novel, Bayley explicitly cited Dunne’s work as his inspiration:

“The picture of time used as a background to this novel can be said to owe something to the discussions by J.W. Dunne, of An Experiment With Time fame, particularly from his book The Serial Universe where he sets forth the regression problem I describe in Chapter Nine. The account of time I have chosen to derive from these arguments is, of course, a crude, fictionalised one.”

While the influence on science fiction in film and television has been less direct (most time travel series like The Time Tunnel show no clear connection to Dunne, although they were undoubtedly influenced by writers who had read him), an interesting example of a television series inspired by Dunne can be found in Timeslip, a children’s television series produced by ATV in 1970-1971. The series was co-created by Ruth Boswell and Bruce Stewart. Interviewed in Behind the Barrier, a feature-length interview-based documentary released in 2009, Ruth Boswell described the creative process:

“I was going away for the weekend to the Isle of Wight and I thought, I must be able to think of a children’s programme. And Timeslip just arrived in my head. I think partly because I had been very interested in Dunne’s theory of time. I’d always been fascinated by this whole concept.”

Boswell contacted science fiction author and cosmologist Fred Hoyle, and later contracted his writer son Geoffrey Hoyle to act as scientific advisor on the series. Indeed, Timeslip leaned into the scientific plausibility of its work, beginning the first episodes with an introduction by ITV science correspondent Peter Fairley who stated that, “it’s fiction, of course, but it’s very close to a new theory scientists are working on”.

It is not clear what he means - except possibly the long-standing many-worlds interpretation of quantum uncertainty - and it’s possible that the production team took the Hoyle’s science-fiction-inspired plot suggestions for more current scientific research. In any case, the series focussed on a couple of adolescents, Simon Randall and Liz Skinner. Across four serialised stories, this pair find themselves projected backwards and forwards in time when they cross what they describe as a ‘time barrier’. Because they exist in a state of mental projection, injuries in the past cannot seriously harm them, and they are able to explore two different possible future versions of their adult selves, before returning to their own time to unravel a mystery concerning how this all came about.

The connection between Dunne’s work and their discoveries in the first serial is clear - particularly when it initially appears that Liz is injured - but it isn’t really explained how much their actions can influence the periods they visit, for example in whether Liz’s father would have suffered a serious injury in the past, even without their involvement in causing it.

Soon after Timeslip, Ruth Boswell was to act as producer on another children's science fiction series, The Tomorrow People (Thames TV series, 1973-1979), which was written by Roger Price. Boswell's influence on the script development was less direct than in the case of Timeslip, although it's interesting to note that one of the early stories, A Rift in Time (1974), involved characters dreaming across time zones, academic psychical research and travel between different time planes - all themes developing from Dunne's work.

Boswell’s later young-adult novel Out of Time was published in 2004 (at a time when both Timeslip and The Tomorrow People, were first being released on DVD). It too told a story of a young man displaced in time, and into a parallel world. As its back cover note regarding the author said: “She remains fascinated by the relationship between development, personal time and the time of cosmologists and science.”

An interesting bridge to another Dunne reader can be made through The Tomorrow People to its series scientific advisor, Christopher Evans.

Dr Christopher Evans was a psychologist and computer scientist who became a science populariser in the UK media in the 1960s and 70s, publishing non-fiction books such as Cults of Unreason (1973) and The Micro Millennium (1979), as well as fiction anthologies Mind at Bay (1969) and Mind in Chains (1970). For the latter, he himself contributed a work of narrative fiction developed by gradually feeding an early computer programs without clearing its RAM in between, thus leading it into an increasingly hallucinatory and confused state. He was also fascinated by dreams and influenced by Dunne. In July 1967, he published a factual article in New Worlds magazine on “Sleep, Dreams and Computers”. In it he noted that:

“The evidence for the existence of telepathic and premonitory dreams (aircraft crashing, uncles dying, etc.) seems to bolster this view, and J. W. Dunne’s hair-raising book, “An Experiment With Time”, seems to imply that temporal as well as spatial boundaries collapse during sleep.” 

However in his last non-fiction book Landscapes of the Night: How and Why We Dream (1983, finished posthumously by Peter Evans), Christopher Evans describes being convinced by Dunne as a teenager in the 1940s, but being far more sceptical on a second, more mature reading. As he pointed out, Dunne’s work inspired thousands (including Evans himself) to keep dream diaries, without any notable examples of unambiguous, let alone routine, predictions:

“All that happened was that most participants soon realised that their dream lives were full of all kind of incidents, sometimes mundane, occasionally dramatic, but which seemed to be more related to their personal lives, wishes, expectations, hopes and fears than to anything happening in the future” (pg 90)

Given Evan’s interest in concepts of computer consciousness, he may have been interested in a slightly earlier story by prolific science fiction writer E C Tubb. J for Jeanne (short story, New Worlds, December 1965) describes a woman who dreams of being confined in a white space, unable to move, with a machine sound in the background. She talks to psychologists, who raise the idea that her dreams may be predictive, calling upon Dunne by name. She finds no comfort in the idea - and at the end it’s revealed that her world isn’t what she thinks it is. In fact, her consciousness is no more than a computer programme, and her dreams represent her dim conception of her own reality.

Psychology, Statistics and Parapsychology

The reasons Dunne’s theories convinced so large an audience are varied but relatively easy to guess. The idea that dreams can foretell the future was not new, and stories of precognition have been around for centuries. Where Dunne went further was to consider the implications of an observable future for the nature of time. His solution to precognitive dreams, serial time, was to deduce that in order to observe different times, there must exist a larger conception of time into which they are embedded and through which an observer can continue to experience duration as they move between time phases:

“A Time dimension, for any observer, is a dimension in which all the events which he experiences appear to him to follow one another in a definite sequence - a dimension in which he (or his attention) does not move backwards so as to upset that order of successive experience.”

 Logically, this implies that a still larger time must exist, to encompass any movement or precognition within that dimension, and so on - in what is known as an infinite regression. In term, serial time implies a serial observer: one who is aware of themself being aware of themself being aware of the time passing. The infinite series of times and observers presented a problem for most philosophers of his time, for whom a theory involving infinity was seen as unacceptable.

Interestingly, while Dunne’s observer was one of dreams and insight, rather than a decision maker, later authors conflated him with elements of the new quantum paradigm (in which infinites are not themselves a problem). In Jack of Eagles, for example, James Blish has a character note that:

“Dunne, for instance, envisages an infinite series of overlapping event-levels, every one of them keyed to some sort of decision-point. Plenty of room for operation of free will there, you see, if you have to be comforted by such an essentially metaphysical conceit.”

In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics (first formally described in 1957), the probabilistic nature of quantum events is rationalised by the idea that every possible outcome occurs in a different universe. The role of a quantum observer is not to make a decision as such but instead to determine which of the possible outcomes correspond to the observer’s own universe. Dunne’s work is strongly informed by Einsteinian relativity, which made it clear that time was to be treated as a dimension akin to that of space and which is explicitly invoked in the text, but predates the heyday of quantum physics.

Part of Dunne’s apparent authority comes from his engineering background, and the way he used the terminology and methodology of science to support his theories. Dunne’s deduction of serial, and exploration of its consequences is described in painstakingly thorough geometric language and with numerous diagrams. It is thoroughly impenetrable to most readers, even those with mathematical and logic training.

Dunne also repeatedly revised his text, including attempted rebuttals of critics and, at one point, an extract from a letter from noted astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington (which appears to me to be a polite but rather dismissive disagreement with Dunne’s premise but clearly is not interpreted that way).

However while many readers might have got the gist of serial time (if not its exhaustive details), what most appear to have remembered is the earlier chapters and their extensive discussion of Dunne’s own dreams. As well as describing specific events in his experience which echoed earlier dreams recorded on waking, he also reported many such incidents amongst friends and acquaintances, attempting to assign probabilities to each coincidence. As many critics have pointed out, many of his most successful predictions required flexibility in interpretation, many were potentially influenced by the recollection (conscious or otherwise) of the dream, and many required cherry-picking correct elements of the dream while ignoring incorrect ones. The treatment of probabilities themselves was also deeply flawed, in particular when viewed from the perspective of Bayesian statistics, which accounts not only for the probability of coincidence but also the number of samples and the known facts of a system [3]. An accurate statistical analysis must take into account failures as well as successes and the number of possible coincidences amidst the samples, given the relative frequencies of each possibility.

Despite these logical and methodological issues, Dunne’s work was widely adopted in parapsychology research and particularly by the Society for Psychical Research, who undertook larger scale experimentation with dream records, although without producing scientifically convincing results.

The scientific community as a whole appears to have been far less supportive of Dunne’s work, recognising it primarily as philosophy, with little relation to the testable physics of the real world, rather than as a scientific contribution. This is apparent in the handful of book reviews appearing in physics or astronomy journals, both to An Experiment with Time in 1927 and some of Dunne’s following publications. A particularly scathing example is Prof Herbert Dingle’s review of Dunne’s 1935 book The Serial Universe, which appeared in Nature:

“Mr. Dunne's theory - belonging, as we have said, to the world of thought - appeals to a wide public - to the philosopher, the physicist, the psychologist, the humanist and the man in the street. Our point of view is that of the man of science, and we have no intention of leaving it”
…
“History shows that no human power has been more diligently employed than that of asking meaningless questions.”

While Dingle ended with praise for Dunne’s attempt to grapple with relativity and quantum physics, his review was sufficiently harsh to attract a response from Dunne himself the following month. In general though, there was little for a physicist or mathematician to engage with in Dunne’s carefully-devised but untestable and intangible theories.

Despite the broad lack of scientific impact from Dunne’s work, and its obvious problems, An Experiment with Time still provides an insight into a key moment in scientific history. Building on decades of research in electromagnetism, Einstein redefined the nature of time in 1905. A number of scientific communicators including Arthur Eddington and others popularised Einsteinian concepts through the 1910s and 20s. At the same time, Einstein’s observations on the photo-electric effect, along with the work of Max Planck, double-slit experiments and other results, laid the foundations for a quantum physics, which in 1913 led to Bohr’s model of the atom and in 1926 to Schrodinger’s Equation for a quantum wavefunction. While quantum physics and relativity were devised for use in different physical regimes, both treat time as something that can be quantified, manipulated and understood mathematically, entwined with other quantities that defined space. This was a dramatic shift from preceding work which treated space and time as entirely distinct. The challenge of understanding the nature of time became part of physics rather than metaphysics or philosophy, and the possibility that psychic phenomena might yet be captured within the hard sciences seemed very real. Dunne’s work captures that period of uncertainty, and the bloom of philosophy and popular speculation that accompanied it.

The impact of Dunne’s speculations in An Experiment with Time resonated for decades after its publication, helping to shape the sub-genre of time-travel narratives, and - for a while at least - giving many hope that their dreams might yet be explained. Since the 1970s, Dunne’s work has been largely lost in the midst of time. Hard as it is to read, it nonetheless remains an interesting snapshot of a time of excitement and wonder that reshaped our understanding of the space-time in which we live.

Extra Reading:
Extra commentaries on Dunne from other sources taking different perspectives:

• From a researcher into contemporary literature
• Relationship with Lewis, Tolkein and the Inklings
• On the mathematics of serial time
• Article on time travel, with uncritical acceptance of 2D time and parapsychology