An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne

One of the most fascinating books I have is a present (as with many of the most thought-provoking books in my collection) from my brother. A 1934 third edition of J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time, a book which strikes me as being so amazing as to possess otherworldly properties...

Firstly, a word about the author. A British aeronautical pioneer, Dunne designed aircraft with a swept-wing, tailless configuration. Today aircraft with identical configuration fly as the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit and B-21 Raider stealth bombers. [This article from a US Air Force website name-checks Dunne as the designer of the first practical flying-wing.] So in the world of science, engineering and technology, Dunne is acknowledged as a Serious Man, not some proto-New Age purveyor of woo-woo flakiness. 

Below: digitally enhanced photograph of J. W. Dunne at the controls of his D.6 tailless monoplane in 1911, and a Northrop Grumman B-21 stealth bomber, due to enter service with the USAF next year. The similarity in configuration, despite being separated by a century of aerospace evolution, is remarkable.

Dunne catalogues his most noteworthy  precognitive dreams. One that we can easily check today referred to the Burntisland railway accident that happened on 14 April 1914, the fatal derailment of the Flying Scotsman train (contemporary newspaper photo of aftermath, below).

Dunne writes: "The dream occurred in the autumn of 1913... the place was just north of the Firth of Forth Bridge in Scotland. The terrain was open grassland, with people walking in groups thereon. A train going north had just fallen over the embankment. I saw several carriages lying towards the bottom of the slope..." Indeed, just 12 miles north of the bridge. 

The author mentions many other precognitive dreams sufficiently memorable and shocking as to merit inclusion, including one about the naval bombardment of Lowestoft, which went on to happen during World War I – a war which not yet broken out when he had the dream. Spookily, Dunne refers to the 1914-1918 conflict in the book as 'the first world war' 12 years before outbreak of the second one.

The rationally minded reductionist-materialist would dismiss all this as the random firings of random neurons in the random brain of a random human. Given billions of humans each with brains containing billions of possible neuronal connections, yeah, I can see the attractiveness of this argument. Yet reading the book, I sense a consciousness that was unusually open to information from the future, a man who determined to use the scientific method to attempt to explain how this could happen.

An Experiment with Time was written as the final mathematical touches were being applied to the theoretical underpinnings of quantum mechanics were being agreed. Dunne is clearly up to speed with the work of Schrodinger and Heisenberg and the significance of the observer effect. The language he uses is groping towards that used by today's philosophers of mind, but lacking much of their vocabulary.

Dunne was convinced he could see (if only briefly and imperfectly) into the future. I am convinced that indeed he could. But as to how this process works – I have not the slightest clue. Is it something that one day rational science will be able to explain? Or is this phenomenon entirely spiritual in nature?

Dunne considered himself to be a rational man, steeped in the scientific paradigm and its explanatory powers. As such, he sought a scientific explanation to something he clearly felt to be real. His book is an attempt to couch in scientific language results of an experiment framed in the scientific method.

He calls for large cohorts of volunteers to log their dreams as soon as they wake up, with the highest degree of fidelity and detail, and then to see whether any events in the dreams correlate with actual events that happen in future days, weeks, months and years. He presents the results; nothing here that any scientifically trained mind would remotely accept as proof.

Ultimately, I believe that some people, Dunne included, did have the gift of precognition. Other rare cases have other gifts that our materialist-physicalist paradigm is unable to explain. Attempts to use scientific method to quantify such phenomena (the PEAR Lab's Global Consciousness Study) end up proving that there is indeed a statistically significant 'something' going on – but this is roundly ignored by science because there is no scientific framework to suggest why this may be. And so such efforts are sneered at as 'pseudoscience' with efforts made to dismiss the methodology.

Quantum mechanics and consciousness studies may take us further down a road towards an explanation that conforms with the scientific paradigm; on the other hand, it may open the door to an entirely new paradigm. Or it may just turn out that some things are simply meant to remain a mystery.

Precognition – being able to glimpse into the future –

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