An Experiment With Time by J.W. Dunne

Author:J.W. Dunne [Dunne, J.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781571742346
Amazon: 1571742344
Goodreads: 352047
Publisher: SAGA Egmont
Published: 2022-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

We do one thing more. We place the numeral 1 after the T in the dimension-indicator. The reason for this will be apparent in a moment.

The first stage of our analysis is now complete, and it brings us to a merely revised edition of our starting-point. Our diagram is again a working model, and it no longer contradicts the statements we made regarding Fig. 4. The line CD is still, as we had originally stated, a field of presentation. Events are being presented in succession within that field. And the intersection points between that travelling field and the wavy lines are moving up and down within the field, providing for the observer effects of ordinary spatial motion.

As the field of presentation moves over the extended substratum, some of the phenomena presented in the field will appear as moving in relation to other phenomena in the field. For attention, focussed upon the apparently moving phenomenon, has a fringe which covers enough of the immediately adjacent, comparatively non-moving phenomena to enable the difference to be perceived.

The result of this first stage leaves us, however, still dissatisfied. Analysing what was involved in our premises, we have arrived at conclusions which, so far as they go, are logically unescapable. The trouble is that they do not go far enough.

To begin with, we find ourselves confronted with a new object for consideration: to wit, a Time-travelling field of presentation.

Now, we cannot separate, in the Time dimension, that travelling field of presentation from an observer to whom its contents are being presented—contents provided by the cerebral elements in the substratum travelled over. Also, we are bound to regard this observer as three-dimensional. And, to avoid any possible confusion, we had better set forth exactly what that statement implies.

A Time dimension, for any observer, is a dimension in which all the events which he experiences appear to him to follow one another in a definite sequence—a dimension in which he (or his attention) does not move backwards so as to upset that order of successive experience. Those dimensions in which his attention can move to and fro appear to him, therefore, to be at right angles to that Time dimension. Whatever dimension, then, in our diagrams, actually determines, for the observer moving therein, that order of successive experience, is that observer’s true Time dimension.

To the observer we are here considering, the dimension which thus determines the order of his successive experiences is the dimension moved over by the field. The to-and-fro movements of his attention are, therefore, confined to the three spatial dimensions at right angles to that Time. So he is an entity whose capacity for such observation is three-dimensional. And that is what we mean by calling him a three-dimensional observer.

Whether he has, or has not, in other capacities, extensions in other dimensions is immaterial to the arguments in this chapter. As an observer he is three-dimensional.

Clearly, then, the field CD must be regarded as the place where this observer, travelling in the fourth dimension, intersects with AA′.

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