by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
I had a dream that I was assaulted by three men. One of them granted that “I had had enough”. I didn’t seem to care whether they continued or not. In fact, their blows were ineffectual. The men then vanished. As I was lying there, on the concrete of the street, some figure snuck up on me and stole my shoes. I saw as from above my body that he was holding up my shoes and inspecting them, almost admiring them. They were shoes that I wore when I was an adolescent. Two days later, in my waking life, I was having dinner outside of a friend’s flat. Since the weather was warm, I had left my shoes inside and was sitting on the concrete ground barefoot, enjoying the meal. Suddenly a draught blew the front door shut and who has a key? Not one of us three. I had been given a spare key to their flat in case of emergency but that was in my desk, in my room, about a 15-20 minute walk away. Obviously, I had to get it. My friend and I set off, both barefoot, and walked the streets of London. Many people looked at our feet; someone shouted from a passing bicycle: “nice shoes!”. Another person passing us asked how it was and said he goes barefoot in the park, on the grass, but never on the street.
Ancient thought distinguished between two kinds of dreams, or rather told that dreams came to the dreamer through two gates: the Horned and the Ivory. If a dream comes through the Horned gate, it is a real instance of precognition, if Ivory then it is mere fantasy and confusion. It doesn’t seem the dreamer could tell which gate their dreams came from or went through to reach their consciousness; in 1966, A Psychiatrist named John Barker set up the British Premonitions Bureau. He believed that disasters could be avoided by analysing dreams, that a precognitive ability exhibited itself in dreams and was not a brand of spiritualism, or a device of science-fiction. It was, in fact, a normal attribute of the psyche. No information collected at the Bureau successfully intervened in fate. The whole thing was a failure. However, before the British Premonitions Bureau, in the early 20th century, J.W. Dunne wrote An Experiment with Time which posed a similar question about precognition. Dunne, however, wasn’t trying to alter fate, he was coaxed into pondering the nature of time and consciousness by noticing a number of his dreams that appeared to come true; not true in the sense that what he dreamed was the true event, the exact scene, but that certain qualities of the dream came true. And it wasn’t mere resemblances, like my shoes, although he may have found something in the details of my dream. But what kind of precognition is this?
Dunne’s eventual conclusion, after some mathematics, is that we have already experienced the future so it is not precognition in the sense where you can alter fate. It is similar to memory. When Dunne dreamed about an accident before it happened, he was fore-minding his experience of reading the newspaper two days in the future. He went about proving this with graphs relating to time passing over brain-states. Dunne thinks there must be another time to measure the time in which the perceiver perceives. This leads to there being an infinite number of times, each to measure the previous time. He calls this Serial Time. A serial observer (you) also perceives in all these times. Each time and each observer (yourself) is displaced by a dimension. We perceive in the third-dimension; the second observer perceives in the fourth; the third in the fifth, and so on. Since when you dream you are not perceiving, the second perceiver (or all of them? – whatever that would mean) has access to the future of the first time; he explains the latter statement with a graph, or a series of graphs. You’ll notice I am not conversant in any of that. For me, the pleasure was the form of the idea and the fact that whilst reading it, I remembered my dreams very vividly.
We can’t possibly make sense of things seen in dreams. Psychologists, and Dunne mentions it too, describe a dream process called integration. This is the meshing of many different ideas, objects, and perceptions, into one symbolic representation. If Dunne would have his way, then both the future and the past could be bound together in the dream images that flash by the dreamer. Dunne’s response is something like: the dream images are your brain trying to make sense of the observers who see in different dimensions. The brain thinks it best to integrate the information in order to process it. We are receiving ‘shadows’ of our fourth-dimensional counterpart which is what three-dimensions amount to, i.e. the shadow of a three-dimensional object is in two dimensions. His experiment with time was gratifying for many people during that period, beaten for pervasiveness only by the psychoanalytical ‘dreams are the royal road to the unconscious’.
Here is an excerpt of what D.H. Lawrence wrote to Katherine Mansfield in 1919: ‘I dreamed such a vivid little dream of you last night. […] Then suddenly we saw one planet, so beautiful, a large, fearful, strong star, that we were both pierced by it, possessed, for a second. Then I said, ‘That’s Jupiter’ – but I felt that it wasn’t Jupiter – at least not the everyday Jupiter. Ask Jung or Freud about it? Never! It was a star that blazed for a second on one’s soul. I wish it was spring for us all’.
It doesn’t matter if you make another kind of logic to try and ravish the dream world (Integration, and the numerous Freudian terms), it will only be a plundering of objects whose intended meaning has slipped away. Time and dreams seem both unreal and yet we move through them, with them, inescapably. Saying time is an illusion can be fashionable but it doesn’t say much. The experience of time has nothing to do with the clock, although it is measured by it; time dilation swells the day; what about an event makes you say: “that took thirty minutes? – but it felt like nothing”. But we live in what they call the arrow of time; it is all inexorable change. However, the dream-world always has you there with your past and some other unspeakable things. Perhaps because your dreaming self isn’t as confident in something called the present within which you move about every day. It is true, for those instances of dream, in whatever time it takes place, sleep, you are granted perception beyond yourself. At once acting and watching. It is only in the dream that, acting and watching, the overall dreamer says to you (you say to yourself): ‘pay attention, you are alive’ – your senses cannot go elsewhere.
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This carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include Borges and I, and Oliver Sacks
The blog’s last post was a conversation with artist Yury Kharchenko.
Two older Carl Kruse Blogs are here and over here.