Four-Dimensional Vistas Part 4

A similar condition holds with regard to s.p.a.ce-distortion. The Theory of Relativity enforces the conclusion that from the standpoint of our conventions in regard to these matters, all bodies involved in transportation undergo a contraction in the direction of that transportation, while their dimensions perpendicular to the transportation remain invariable. This contraction is the same for all bodies. For bodies of low velocity, like the earth, this distortion would be almost immeasurably slight; but great or little, no measuring instruments on the body transporting would ever disclose it, for a measure would undergo the same contraction as the thing measured.

THE SPOON-MAN

These concepts that s.p.a.ce and time are not as immutable as they appear: that our universe may suffer distortion, that time may lag or hasten without our being in the least aware, may be made interestingly clear by an ill.u.s.tration first suggested by Helmholtz, of which the following is in the nature of a paraphrase.

If you look at your own image in the s.h.i.+ning surface of a teapot, or the back of a silver spoon, all things therein appear grotesquely distorted, and all distances strangely altered. But if you choose to make the bizarre supposition that this spoon-world is real, and your image--the spoon-man--a thinking and speaking being, certain interesting facts could be developed by a discussion between yourself and him.

You say, "Your world is a distorted transcript of the one in which I live."

"Prove it to me," says the spoon-man.

With a foot-rule you proceed to make measurements to show the rectangularity of the room in which you are standing. Simultaneously he makes measurements giving the same numerical results; for his foot-rule shrinks and curves in the exact proportion to give the true number of feet when he measures his shrunken and distorted rear wall. No measurement you can apply will prove you in the right, nor him in the wrong. Indeed he is likely to retort upon you that it is your room which is distorted, for he can show that in spite of all its nightmare aspects his world is governed by the same orderly geometry that governs yours.

The above ill.u.s.tration deals purely with s.p.a.ce relations, for such relations are easily grasped; but certain distortions in time relations are no less absolutely imperceptible and unprovable. So far from having any advantage over the spoon-man, our plight is his.

The Principle of Relativity discovers us in the predicament of the Mikado's "prisoner pent," condemned to play with crooked cues and elliptical billiard b.a.l.l.s, and of the opium victim, for whom "s.p.a.ce swells" and time moves sometimes swift and sometimes slow.

THE ORBITAL MOVEMENT OF TIME

Now if our s.p.a.ce is curved in higher s.p.a.ce, since such curvature is at present undetectable by us, we must a.s.sume, as Hinton chose to a.s.sume, that it curves in the minute, or, as some astronomers a.s.sume, that its curve is vast. These a.s.sumptions are not mutually exclusive: they are quite in a.n.a.logy with the general curvature of the earth's surface which is in no wise interfered with by the lesser curvatures represented by mountains and valleys. It is easiest to think of our s.p.a.ce as completely curved in higher s.p.a.ce in a.n.a.logy with the surface of a sphere.

Similarly, if time is curved, the idea of the cyclic return of time naturally (though not inevitably) follows, and the division of the greater cycles into lesser loops; for it is easier to a.s.sign this elliptical movement to time than any other, by reason of the orbital movements of the planets and their satellites. What results from conceptions of this order? Amazing things! If our s.p.a.ce is curved in higher s.p.a.ce, you may be looking toward the back of your own head.

If time flows in cycles, in travelling toward to-morrow you may be facing yesterday.

This "eternal return," so far from being a new idea, is so old that it has been forgotten. Its reappearance in novel guise, along with so many other recrudescences, itself beautifully ill.u.s.trates time curvature in consciousness. _Yugas_, time cycles, are an integral and inexpugnable part of Oriental metaphysics. "Since the soul perpetually runs," says Zoroaster, "in a certain s.p.a.ce of time it pa.s.ses through all things, which circulation being accomplished, it is compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the world." Time curvature is implicit in the Greek idea of the iron, bronze, silver, and golden ages, succeeding each other in the same order: the winter, seed-time, summer and harvest of the larger year. Astrology, seers.h.i.+p, prophecy, become plausible on the higher-time hypothesis. From this point of view history becomes less puzzling and paradoxical. What were the Middle Ages but a forgetting of Greek and Roman civilization, and what was the Renaissance but a remembering of them--a striving to re-create the ruined stage-settings and to re-enact the urbane play of Pagan life. The spirit of the Crusades is now again animate throughout Europe. Nations are uniting in a Holy War against the Infidel _de nos jours_.

But it is in the individual consciousness that time curvature receives its most striking confirmation--those lesser returns and rhythms to which we give the name of periodicity. Before considering these, however, a fundamental fallacy of the modern mind must be exposed.

MATERIALITY THE MIRROR OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Our vicious habit of seeking the explanation of everything--even thought and emotion--in materiality, has betrayed us into the error of attributing to organic and environic changes the very power by which they are produced. We are wont to think of feeling, the form in which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead of as a cause. When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly and mysteriously interesting to the growing boy, it is not because s.e.x has awakened in his body, but because the dread time has come for him to contemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it is not because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, but because your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back the Idea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing that clutches it. If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises: it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness is turning toward the Idea of Pain.

Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seek in materiality for that which is not there. The soul determines circ.u.mstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. The organic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotations in higher s.p.a.ce are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as an object draws near and then recedes from its plane. This is only a figure of speech, but it is susceptible of almost literal application.

Ideas, emerging from the subconscious, appproach, intersect, recede from, and re-approach the stream of conscious experience; taking the forms of aversions and desires, they register themselves in action, and by reason of time curvature, everything that occurs, recurs.

PERIODICITY

We recognize and accept this cyclic return of time in such familiar manifestations of it as Nature affords in _periodicity_. We recognize it also in our mental and emotional life, when the periods can be co-ordinated with known physical phenomena, as in the case of the wanderl.u.s.t which comes in the mild melancholy of autumn, the moods that go with waning day, and winter night. It is only when these recurrences do not submit themselves to our puny powers of a.n.a.lysis and measurement that we are incredulous of a larger aspect of the law of time-return.

Sleep for example, is not less mysterious than death which, too, may be but "a sleep and a forgetting." The reason that sleep fails to terrify us as death does is because experience has taught that _memory leafs the chasm_. Why should death bedreaded any more than bedtime? Because we fear that we shall forget. But do we really forget?

As Pierre Janet so tersely puts it, "Whatever has gone into the mind may come out of the mind," and in a subsequent chapter this aphorism will be shown to have extension in a direction of which the author of it appears not to have been aware. Memory links night to night and winter to winter, but such things as "the night-time of the spirit"

and "the winter of our discontent" are not recognized as having either cause or consequence. Now though the well-springs of these states of consciousness remain obscure, there is nothing unreasonable in believing that they are recrudescences of far-off, forgotten moods and moments; neither is it absurd to suppose that they may be related to the movements and positions of the planets, as night and winter are related to the axial and orbital movements of the earth.

But there are other, and even more interesting, evidences of time curvature in consciousness. These lead away into new regions which it is our pleasure now to explore.

VI SLEEP AND DREAMS

SLEEP

Our s.p.a.ce is called three-dimensional because it takes three numbers--measurement in three mutually perpendicular directions--to determine and mark out any particular point from the totality of points. Time, as the individual experiences it, is called one-dimensional for an a.n.a.logous reason: one number is all that is required to determine and mark out any particular event of a series from all the rest. Now in order to establish a position in a s.p.a.ce of four dimensions it would be necessary to measure in _four_ mutually perpendicular directions. Time curvature opens up the possibility of a corresponding higher development in time: one whereby time would be more fittingly symbolized by a plane than by a linear figure.

Indeed, the familiar mystery of memory calls for such a conception.

Memory is a carrying forward of the past into the present, and the fact that we can recall a past event without mentally rehearsing all the intermediate happenings in inverse order, shows that in the time aspect of memory there is simultaneity as well as sequence--time ceases to be linear and becomes _plane_. More remarkable ill.u.s.trations of the sublimation of the time-sense are to be found in the phenomena of sleep and dreams.

"Oh, thou that sleepest, what is sleep?" asks the curious Leonardo.

Modern psychological science has little to offer of a positive nature in answer to this world-old question, but it has at least effectively disposed of the absurd theories of the materialists who would have us believe that sleep is a mere matter of blood circulation or of intoxication by acc.u.mulation of waste products in the system. Sleep states are not abnormal, but part and parcel of the life existence of the individual. When a person is asleep he has only become unresponsive to the ma.s.s of stimuli of the external world which const.i.tutes his environment. As Sidis says, "When our interest in external existence f.a.gs and fades away, we go to sleep.

When our interests in the external world cease, we draw up the bridges, so to say, interrupt all external communication as far as possible, and become isolated in our own fortress and repair to our own world of organic activity and inner dream life. Sleep is the interruption of our intercourse with the external world: it is the laying down of our arms in the struggle of life. Sleep is a truce with the world."

The twin concepts of higher s.p.a.ce and curved time sanction a view of sleep even bolder. Sleep is more than a longing of the body to be free of the flame which consumes it: the flame itself aspires to be free--that is to say, consciousness, tiring of its tool, the brain, and of the world, its workshop, takes a turn into the plaisance of the fourth dimension, where time and s.p.a.ce are less rigid to resist the fulfillment of desire.

DREAMS

We find a confirmation of this view in dream phenomena. But however good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality and irrationality--it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearly to the omniscience of true being than the rational mind of waking experience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams are sufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as the meeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam and flotsam "of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn," whose vast.i.tude, whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only be inferred from the fret of the tide on their nether sh.o.r.e--the tired brain in sleep.

For it is the _remembered_ dream alone that is incoherent--the dream that comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world, and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain. We all feel that the dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful. Who has not wakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror or felicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concrete symbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain? We know that dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede from the surface of consciousness to its depths. Deep sleep dreams are in the true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable-- "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?" DuPrel and others have shown that the difference between ordinary dreaming, somnambulance, trance and ecstasy, is only a matter of redistribution of thresholds--that they are all related states and merge into one another. We have, therefore, every right to believe that for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils and seers, however little most of us are able to profit by it.

Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil is lifted, but the art of _dreaming true_ remains for the most part unmastered--one of the precious gifts which the future holds in store for the sons and daughters of men.

The partial waking state is the soil in which remembered dreams develop most luxuriously. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are the product, not of our sleep, but of our waking. Such dreams belong to both worlds, partly to the three-dimensional and partly to the four-dimensional. While dreams are often only a hodge-podge of daytime experiences, their incredible rapidity, alien to that experience, gives us our first faint practicable intimation of a higher development of time.

TIME IN DREAMS

The unthinkable velocity of time in dreams may be inferred from the fact that between the moment of impact of an impression at the sense-periphery and its reception at the center of consciousness--moments so closely compacted that we think of them as simultaneous--a coherent series of representations may take place, involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment.

Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this character, in which the long-delayed denouement was suggested and prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression to travel from the skin to the brain.

Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentary lapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by its time scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping of time. Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in _The Hasheesh Eater_, the dreams that visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or more awakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with the drug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and various states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle.

Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimagined ecstasy."

Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake in order not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears to have imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the following curious effect. A lady asked him some question connected with a previous conversation. He says, "As mechanically as an automaton I began to reply. As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke, and in another world. I sat and listened: still the voice kept speaking. Now for the first time I experienced that vast change which hasheesh makes in all measurements of time. The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation might have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun."

This well-known fact, that we cannot measure dreams by our time scale, proves that subjective time does not correspond with objective, and that the "dream organ" of consciousness has a time scale of its own.

If in our waking state we experience one kind of time, and in dreams quite another, the solution of the mystery should be sought in the _vehicle_ of consciousness, for clearly the limit of impressionability or power of response of the vehicle establishes the time scale, just as the size of the body with relation to objects establishes the s.p.a.ce scale. Time must be different for the ant and the elephant, for example, as s.p.a.ce is different.

Our sense of time is wholly dependent upon the rapidity with which impressions succeed one another. Were we capable of receiving only one impression an hour, like a bell struck every hour with a hammer, the ordinary term of life would seem very short. On the other hand, if our time sense were always as acute as it is in dreams, uncounted aeons would seem to be lived through in the interval between childhood and old age.

Imagine a music machine so cunningly constructed and adjusted as not only to sound each note and chord in its proper sequence and relation, but to regulate also the duration of the sound vibration. If this machine were operated in such a manner as to play, in a single second of time, the entire overture of an opera which would normally occupy half an hour, we should hear only an unintelligible noise a second long. This would be due to no defect in the _sound-producing_ mechanism, but to the limitations of the _sound-receiving_ mechanism, our auditory apparatus. Could this be altered to conform to the unusual conditions--could it capture and convey to consciousness every note of the overture in a second of time--that second would seem to last half an hour, provided that every other criterion for the measurement of duration were denied for the time being.

Now dreams _seem_ long: we only discover afterwards and by accident their almost incredible brevity. May we not--must we not--infer from this that the body is an organ of many stops and more than one keyboard, and that in sleep it gives forth this richer music. The theory of a higher-dimensional existence during sleep accounts in part for the great longing for sleep. "What is it that is much desired by man, but which they know not while possessing?" again asks Leonardo. "It is sleep," is his answer. This longing for sleep is more than a physical longing, and the refreshment it brings is less of the flesh than of the spirit. It is possible to withstand the deprivation of food and water longer and better than the deprivation of sleep. Its recuperative power is correspondingly greater.

Experiments have been made with mature University students by which they have been kept awake ninety-six hours. When the experiments were finished, the young men were allowed to sleep themselves out, until they felt they were thoroughly rested. All awoke from a long sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his protracted vigil slept only one-third more time than was regular with him. And this has been the experience over and over again of men in active life who have been obliged to keep awake for long periods by the absolute necessities of the situation in which they have been placed.

In this fact there is surely another hint of the sublimation of the time sense during sleep. While it would be an unwarrantable a.s.sumption to suppose that the period of recuperation by sleep must be as long, or nearly as long, as the period of deprivation, the ratio between the two presents a discrepancy so great that it would seem as though this might be due to an acceleration of the time element of consciousness.