Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (3 page)

for
all things would change alike and preserve exactly the same relationship to one
another. And so it is with time. Slow down our universe, so that we take what
used to be a century to walk across a room, or speed it up, so that we live out
a full life span in what used to be a few seconds, and it would not matter in
the least to us! Time would seem to be just what it seemed before. There is no
absolute space, no absolute time. We are all of us made out of nothingness,
mere composites of whirling ether, the figments of an electronic dream.

The ancient Hindus sensed this. They
conceived of the universe as a dream of Vishnu, a dream in which the giant
figure of the god lies sleeping, half submerged in an endless ocean.
"There is no one to behold him, no one to comprehend him; there is no
knowledge of him, except within himself.
...
It is on a serpent ocean of his own immortal substance that the Cosmic Man
passes the universal night. Inside the god is the cosmos. . . . Though without
him there exists only darkness, within the divine dreamer an ideal vision
thrives of what the universe should be."
¹

Most of us lead our little lives in a rut of
our own making, dug so deep that we do not even try to see over its walls from
one year to another. Yet the most unthinking of men are sometimes seized with
the desire to escape from the trap of time, to turn back the clock to some
happier moment, or to peer through its inscrutable dial in the hope of catching
a glimpse of what the future holds in store for him. To conquer time is the
dearest of men's wishes. Fortunetellers and historians alike make their living
out of that irrepressible desire. To foresee the future
...
to revisit the past
...
to escape from the here and now into the there and then. . . . Can it be done?

Perhaps it has been done; perhaps it is being
done every day. It may even be that you yourself have done so—and yet did not
know that you had. . . .

In
1911
there was published a remarkable little book entitled An Adventure.
²
It was written by two Englishwomen as a factual

'Heinrich
Zimmer.
Myths
and
Symbols in
Indian
Art
and
Civilization.
New York:
Pantheon
Books,
1946.

"Elizabeth
Morison
and
Frances
Lamont
(pseudonyms
for
C.
Anne
E.
Moberly
and
Eleanor
F.
Jourdain).
An
Adventure.
London:
Macmillan,
1911.

account
of something odd that had taken place during their visit to the Petit Trianon
at Versailles ten years earlier. Neither of them knew much about French
history, and they were looking forward to their expedition as a rather dull
affair which they were undertaking as part of their duty as teachers embarked
on an instructive journey. It was a warm, overcast day in August,
1901,
when they strolled through the famous gardens, searching rather
halfheartedly for the miniature palace that will always be associated with
Marie Antoinette's name. They noticed a strange atmosphere about the park, an
atmosphere so disturbing that one of them, writing about their joint experience
afterward, said: "An extraordinary depression had come over me, which, in
spite of every effort to shake it off, steadily deepened. . . . Everything
suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees . . . seemed to
have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no
effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely
still."

That
was the beginning of what was perhaps the most astonishing adventure that has
ever befallen any two members of the human race, for without knowing it, they
had wandered back through time and were in Versailles as it had been in
1789!

They
had no idea of what had happened to them as they wandered on through the
gardens. They encountered several people who seemed oddly dressed, but they
thought that perhaps the masquerade-like costumes they saw were ordinarily worn
by twentieth-century attendants attached to the historic gardens. A young man
whose style of hairdress made him "look like an old picture" came
running up to them, speaking excitedly in French. They had difficulty
understanding what he was trying to tell them, but, finally comprehending, they
followed his directions meekly, changed their course, and crossed a little
bridge over a ravine. Then one of them (and, oddly enough, only one) noticed a
rather attractive woman sitting on a low stool, sketching the landscape. After
that they walked along a terrace, where a young man came out of the door of a
chapel and directed them to the cour d'honneur. They went on by themselves;
when they reached the entrance to the palace itself, they found themselves back
in the twentieth century.

It
was a simple tale they had to tell—convincingly simple, for they had witnessed
no sensational events, nor had they seen anything that
might not have been observed by a casual
visitor to Versailles during the summer of 1789, when the public was admitted
to the royal gardens for the first time in history. Several points confirm
their story. The bridge over the ravine and the ravine itself were not in
existence in 1901, nor did La Motte's map of the royal gardens, engraved in
1783, give any indication of them. But in 1903 a manuscript map, the original
from which La Motte's plan had been rather carelessly reproduced, was found in
the chimney of an old house in Montmorency.
It
showed the ravine and the bridge. The terrace on which the young man had
appeared was no longer there in 1901, and the door from the chapel had been
sealed up for years. But research proved that there had been such a terrace in
1789 and that the door had then been in use. In 1902 the time-traveling teacher
who had seen the woman sketching on the lawn was shown Wertmuller's portrait of
Marie Antoinette. The face seemed familiar; then, in 1908, she read the Journal
of the Queen's modiste, which described the summer costume made for Marie
Antoinette during the fateful year 1789. It was the costume the sketching woman
had been wearing.

There
are many other corroborating points, all indicating that their experience in
revisiting the past was authentic. If it was, it stands as a true example of
involuntary time travel. If such a thing could happen once,
³
it
conceivably might happen again. It may indeed have happened to others. Suppose,
for instance, that a child walking along a country road in New England caught
sight of a troop of painted Indians moving through the forest. . . . No one
would believe him. It would be put down to childish imagination. Or suppose
that a wandering cowhand in the Southwest saw a body of men in Spanish armor
marching through the hills
...
or
that a guard sleeping in Mount Vernon woke up and beheld the house aglow with
candlelight and peopled with men and women in silks and satins. . . . It would
be said that these adult observers had been drunk or dreaming. No one would
believe them. Still, if two otherwise very ordinary English schoolteachers can
wander back through time and find themselves in the court of Versailles as it
was in 1789—anything can happen. Perhaps the past can be revisited, perhaps
even the future can be foreseen.

'Miss
"Lamont"
made
a
subsequent
visit
to
Versailles,
where
she
had
another
experience
in
time
travel,
but
it
was
less
interesting
than
the
first
occasion.

Nearly fifty years ago, J. W. Dunne, English
scientist and aeronautical engineer, first began to notice that several of his
dreams were followed by actual events which had been more or less clearly
foreseen in the dream state. During the spring of 1902, for instance, he dreamt
of the imminence of a volcanic eruption on a French island where 4,000
inhabitants were in danger of losing their lives. Dunne was then in South
Africa; some weeks after his vivid dream he received the London newspapers
announcing a volcanic disaster on the French West Indian island of Martinique,
where the eruption of Mt. Pelee had killed 40,000 people.

After
several such "coincidental" dreams, Dunne decided to keep careful
records of his dream experiences, noting down, immediately upon waking, as much
as he could recall of them. Some of the results were striking. One is of
particular interest, for it shows how easy it is to forget what we have
dreamed, even after making a 'written record. Dunne says:

I
was
out
shooting
over some
rough
country
.
.
.
and
presently
found
myself
on
land
where,
I
realized,
I
might
have
no
right to be.
...
I heard two
men shouting at me. . . . They seemed, moreover,
to
be
urging
on a furiously barking dog. I made tracks for
the
nearest gate
.
.
.
and
managed to slip through before the pursuers
came into view. On reading over my [dream] records that evening, I, at first,
noticed nothing; and was just going
to
close
the
book,
when
my
eye caught,
written
rather
more
faintly,
right
at
the
end:
"Hunted by two men and a dog." And
the
amazing thing about it was that I had completely forgotten having had
any such dream. I could not even recall having written
it
down.

From these premonitory dreams, Dunne began to
evolve his theory of a serial universe, a philosophical and scientific concept
which, interesting as it is, need not concern us here.
⁴
But as a
first step he asked himself these questions:

Was it possible that these
phenomena were not abnormal, but normal? That dreams—dreams in general, all
dreams, everybody's

'See
J.
W.
Dunne,
An
Experiment
with
Time,
New
York:
Macmillan,
1927,
from
which
the
quotations
used
here
are
taken.
Also
the
same
author's
The
Serial Universe,
New
York:
Macmillan,
1938.

dreams—were
composed
of
images
of
past
experience
and
images
of future
experience
blended
together
in
approximately
equal
proportions?
That
the
universe
was,
after
all,
really
stretched
out
in
Time, and
that
the
lop-sided
view we had
of
it—a
view
with
the
"future"
part
unaccountably
missing,
cut
off
from
the
growing
"past"
part
by
a travelling
"present
moment"
—was
due
to
a
purely
mentally
imposed barrier
which existed only when we were
awake?
So
that,
in
reality, the
associational
network
stretched,
not
merely
this and that way in Space,
but
also
backwards
and
forwards
in
Time:
and
the
dreamer's
attention, following in natural,
unhindered
fashion
the
easiest
pathway
among
the ramifications, would be continually
crossing
and
re-crossing
that
properly
non-existent
equator
which
we,
waking,
ruled quite
arbitrarily
athwart
the
whole.