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."
IT might, perhaps, be advisable to say here,—since the reader may have been glancing ahead,—that this is not a book about “occultism,” and not a book about what is called “psycho-analysis.” It is merely the account of an extremely cautious reconnaissance in a rather novel direction,—an account presented in the customary form of a narrative of the actual proceedings concerned, coupled with a statement of the theoretical considerations believed to be involved,—and the dramatic, seemingly bizarre character of the early part of the story need occasion the reader no misgivings. He will readily understand that the task which had to be accomplished at that stage was the “isolating” (to borrow a term from the chemists) of a single, basic fact from an accumulation of misleading material. Any account of any such process of separation must contain, of course, some description of the stuff from which the separation was effected. And such stuff very often is, and in this case very largely was—rubbish. The fact which has emerged in the present instance is precisely what, on theoretical grounds, we should have expected to find. It fits very nicely into its little niche in the system of knowledge ; and it seems, moreover, to possess the attribute against which nothing can ever permanently contend—the attribute of being clearly and directly observable by everyone interested. It is hoped that the present reader will take steps to satisfy himself upon this point.
