Name: An Experiment with Time
ISBN: 9781659996586

J W Dunne

An Experiment with Time is a book by the British soldier, aeronautical engineer and philosopher J. W. Dunne about his precognitive dreams and a theory of time which he later called "Serialism". First published in March 1927, the book was widely read.

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An Experiment with Time

J. W. Dunne

First published in 1927, this text explores the relationship between dreams, time, and reality. It shows how a scientific experiment probes the nature of time and the barrier dividing past and future, and offers a scientific argument for human immortality.

Tim Pendry

I am puzzled that GoodReads has this book as first published in 1939 because I hold in my hand the much revised 1935 Third Edition of a book first published in 1927. This confusion over date is apposite since the book is essentially a scientific and philosophical (and the author would like to think psychological) treatise on time in the context of his and others' experience of precognition in dreams. It is a serious and difficult book which has achieved cult status because it represented a sincere scientific attempt to deal with the problem at that point in history when spiritualism was already a memory amongst serious thinkers and the new physics had not yet fully established itself in the public's consciousness. However, it is a very difficult book indeed. The writer is at pains to be clear and he does a good job of this but you have to be of a mathematical or analytical bent to get anything out of this book and I am afraid that I am not. Although I probably read every word, I did not study every word and so it must sit in my library where my copy of Hawkins' 'A Brief History of Time' sits - as read but not truly comprehended. Still, the thesis remains interesting - that there is, logically, a perceiving soul seated above the person who is taking in sense impressions from the 'real' world, one that can see into past and future and whose indistinct impressions can form a dream or altered state awareness of events that are yet to take place as much it can make use of its remembrance of things past. I cannot evaluate this in the slightest but the work - from someone who has an engineers' determination that his analysis should be logical - does have the virtue of ensuring that this ignorant reader is not automatically dismissive of any thesis that does not accord with obvious sensory impressions of the material world. As for the experience of precognition itself (as opposed to the theory), the material is persuasive without allowing a fixed view. The phenomenon appears to be something to be explained and, although there may be adequate materialist explanations in due course, it is not scientifically literate to assume that a classically materialist explanation is the only one. Dunne refers to the beginnings of quantum theory and we now know that the nature of matter is far more complex than anything he or (say) Eddington might have expected in the interwar period so contemporary scientists are just a little less certain of their ground in rejecting unusual possibilities than previous generations might have been. The book clearly poses questions that still require a definitive answer over eighty years later.

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