Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (4 page)

Dunne
then
went
on,
with
some
success,
to
try
to
foretell
the
future while
he
was
awake.
He
said
of
these
attempts:
"I
employed
this experiment
mainly
in
order
to
seek
for
the
barrier,
if
any,
which divides
our
knowledge
of
the
past
from
our
knowledge
of
the
future. And
the
odd
thing
was
that
there
did
not
seem
to
be
any
such
barrier at
all.
One
had
merely
to
arrest
all
obvious
thinking
of
the
past,
and the
future
would
become
apparent
in
disconnected
flashes."

Dunne's
experiments
with
future
time
are,
of
course,
less
spectacular
than
two
Englishwomen
being
physically
transported
into
the
past. One
may
believe
or
disbelieve
both
accounts;
there
is
no
way
of
convincing
the
bitter
skeptic.
Dunne,
who
is
a
trained
scientist,
said
in his
book
that
he
did
not
offer
his
experiments
as
scientific
evidence; he
urged
his
readers
to
try
such
experiments
on
themselves.

We
are
so
used
to
our
bondage
to
time
that
if
the
fetters
are loosened
even
momentarily,
the
experience
is
likely
to
be
a
shock.
The present
editor
will
never
forget
the
one
occasion
on
which
he
apparently
foresaw
a
future
event.
He
had
a
nightmare
in
which
the
salient and
most
memorable
point
was
that
he
had
identified
his
dream antagonist
as
Lucifer.
The
next
morning
he
told
his
dream
to
two people,
emphasizing
the
importance
of
the
Lucifer
character.
He then
went
to
his
office,
where
he
found
awaiting
him
the
galley
proofs of
an
unpublished,
unheralded
book
entitled
Lucifer, Son
of
Morning.

Coincidence?
Perhaps.
Your
determined
skeptic,
who
will
bend
the laws
of
probability
until
they
crack,
before
he
will
admit
that
there might
be
an
explanation
not
in
his
little
bag
of
odds
and
ends
of scientific
learning,
will
naturally
scoff.
Yet
he
is
willing
to
accept
the astonishing
theories
of
time
and
space
that
are
part
of
the
new
physics. But
he
insists
on
thinking
that
such
theories
apply
only
to
"out
there" —"out
there"
meaning
some
vague
faraway
place
where
light
from a
distant
star
streams
through
the
otherwise
empty
ether
at
the always
constant
rate
of
186,000
miles
per
second—without
ever
realizing
that
the
earth
he
so
smugly
inhabits
is
passing
at
high
speed through
a
part
of
that
same
"out
there,"
making
a
bit
of
it
temporarily into
the
more
comforting
here
and
now.

Our
world
is
not
the
fixed
place
we
like
to
think
it
is.
It
is,
in
fact, a
giant
ball
of
whirling
electrons
moving
around
an
atomically
exploding
sun
at
the
rate
of
eighteen
miles
per
second,
while
the
whole
solar system
is
itself
moving
rapidly
through
space.
Einstein
has
showed
us that
time
and
space
are
interconnected,
and
that
time
runs
more slowly
when
a
moving
system
speeds
up.
Once
the
idea
of
the
immutability
of
time
is
discarded,
anything
can
happen.
Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
show
that
man
can
change
the
structure
of
the
atom;
perhaps
the
scientists
working
in
our
laboratories
will
someday
be
able to
alter
time.