There are no boundaries between past, present, future
At the beginning of the 20th century, the philosopher from England John William Dunn became very interested in the theory of time. His interest did not appear at all by chance: John was tormented by one question: what is happening in our dreams, that they can come true? Could this be in some way related to the special properties of time? And what is our time in essence? How does our consciousness react to it? To be honest, John was the first dreamer-enlonaut who decided to understand the mechanism that governs what we are used to dividing into the past, present and future.
Unlike most philosophers, who preferred theory, John William Dunn was a practitioner, that is, he so wanted to find out the essence of what was happening that he began to experiment with time. More precisely, not with the concept of time as such, but with the personal sensations of the time of each living person - his own, his relatives, friends and acquaintances. What for? "A description in physical terms is not able to convey the information that is drawn from experience," the philosopher believed. It is impossible to explain to the blind what a red leaf is, because a blind person cannot see and is unable to understand what red is based on his experience. The problem is the same with the concept of time. People who can see through time exist, but they are unable to explain what it is and how it happens, because we do not have the skill or talent for this,to follow their path. However, when we detach from our governing consciousness, a certain door opens in us that connects the times.
And then our past, present, future occur simultaneously, but due to the interference of consciousness, even in a dream, the images of prognostics acquire bizarre, "mixed" forms. In fact, we know perfectly well about the future, because for us it occurs simultaneously with the present, but since the very periodicity, the chronological order of events is important for people, reason excludes our knowledge of the future from use. And we live in ignorance, wondering how the chosen people can penetrate into the depths of time - backward or further downstream.
Because Dunn immediately set himself the task of focusing only on his experience and his feelings for the sake of the purity of the experiment, then he conducted the first experiments on himself. He noted with surprise that he often had dreams that show the very near future, while not prophetic dreams, but dreams … associated with upcoming publications in newspapers. In some incomprehensible way, his predictions were related to what would be printed in the newspapers he read. As if he was dreaming after reading the newspaper.
“In the spring of 1902,” Dunn described one such dream in Experiment With Time, “the sixth motorized company that I was part of camped near the ruins of Lindley in the (former) Orange Free State. We had just done the "track" then; newspapers and postal correspondence were rarely delivered to us.
Once I had an unusually vivid, but very unpleasant dream. I was standing on a hill - the upper ledge of a hill or mountain. The ground underfoot was white and oddly textured; here and there it was dotted with small cracks, from which streams of steam rose upward. In a dream, I recognized in this hill an island that I had already dreamed of before.
He was threatened by the beginning of a volcanic eruption. Seeing the strings of steam beating out of the ground, I whispered in a choked voice: “Island! God, soon everything will blow up! I read and remembered well the description of the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, when the sea element, rushing through an underwater crevice in the rocks to the very heart of the volcano, suddenly boiled and tore an entire mountain to pieces. Immediately I was seized with a mad desire to save 4,000 (I knew the population) of the unsuspecting inhabitants of the island. But there was only one way to do this - to take them out on ships.
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Then something terrible began to happen: I rushed about the neighboring island, trying to persuade the mistrustful French authorities to send all available ships to help the inhabitants of the island in danger. I was sent from one boss to another, until, in the end, I woke up because in my sleep I was clinging with all my might to the manes of horses dragging the carriage of a certain Monsieur Le Maire, who was going to dinner and wanted me to go to him on the next the day his office will open. Throughout my dream, I was haunted by the thought of the number of people in danger. I repeated this number to everyone I met and at the moment of awakening I shouted: “Mayor, listen! 4,000 people will die if …”Now I don’t remember when the next batch of newspapers was delivered to us, but the Daily Telegraph was absolutely among them. I expanded it and saw the following message:
Tragedy in Martinique - volcanic eruption
The city has been swept off the face of the earth! Fire avalanche! About 40 thousand victims! British steamer on fire!
One of the worst tragedies in human history took place in the once flourishing city of Saint Pierre, the trading capital of the French island of Martinique in the West Indies. On Thursday, at eight o'clock in the morning, the volcano Mont Pele, which had been silent for a century … and so on.
However, there is no need to repeat the story of the most tragic volcanic eruption in the modern era.
In the same newspaper, but in a different column, the heading, in smaller type, read:
The mountain blows up into the air
And below it was said that the release of sand from the crater of the volcano on St. Vincent forced the schooner called "Oceanic Wanderer" to leave the island; but she failed to land on the island of Saint Lucia due to unfavorable currents heading in the direction opposite to Saint Pierre. It said:
When she sailed about a mile, the volcano Mont Pele erupted
Further, it was described how the mountain seemed to split from foot to top. Needless to say, ships soon began to take out the surviving residents to neighboring islands.
Now one comment needs to be made.
According to assumptions, the death toll was not 4,000, as I continually repeated in my dreams, but 40,000. I was wrong by one zero. Nonetheless, as I hurried through the newspaper, I read the number given there as 4,000; and afterwards, when I told this story, I always said that exactly 4,000 were printed. It was only 15 years later, when I finally made a copy of the above paragraph, that I learned that in fact 40,000 were reported.
Soon we received another batch of newspapers; it provided updated data on the actual death toll. But the actual numbers had nothing to do with the numbers that I dreamed and imagined in the first message. So my wonderful "clairvoyance" failed me in the most essential detail!
However, even a mistake proved something very important, because how could I have the idea of 4,000 in my dream? Probably, it should have come to my mind as a result of reading a newspaper paragraph, which led to the extremely unpleasant assumption that the whole episode is a consequence of the so-called identification paramnesia and that I did not see any dream: just after reading the newspaper message, it seemed to me that I previously saw in a dream all the details given in the above paragraph."
Surprised, but realizing at the same time that his dreams were in no way connected with astral travel, direct vision or messages from an alien mind, Dunn sighed with relief. All three of the above reasons for the "revelation" he would immediately consider the beginning of madness and, of his own free will, would go to the nearest insane asylum.
A couple of years later, while traveling in Austria, he noted another strange dream that did not come from his memory. He dreamed that he was walking through a field surrounded by a high iron fence, and suddenly a horse appeared to his left, which, as if mad, began to kick and tried to jump over the fence. In the dream, Dunn noted that the fence is too high, and there are no loopholes in it, but the horse somehow miraculously breaks free and begins to chase him. Dani runs and suddenly sees before him wooden steps going up. He rushes to the steps … and wakes up.
The very next day, John and his brother went fishing. They were walking along the river when the brother turned around and invited him to look at the horse on the other side. Dunn looked … and immediately recognized the scene from his dream: “The similarity of the main details was absolute, but the small details were completely different. There was a fenced path between two fields. There was a horse that behaved like a horse in a dream. There were wooden steps at the end of the path (they led to the bridge over the river). But the fence turned out to be wooden and low - no more than 4-5 feet in height, the fields were very ordinary, small, whereas I dreamed of fields the size of a park; and the animal was not at all a violent monster, but a small horse, although its behavior inspired alarm. In the end, if you imagine that I, as in a dream, walk along the path down to the bridge, then the horse was in the field to my right, not to my left.
As soon as I began to tell my brother about my dream, I stopped short: the horse began to behave so strangely that I wanted to make sure that it would not break out of the fence. As in the dream, I critically examined the hedge. Satisfied with the inspection, I said: “In any case, this horse will not break free,” - and again began to fish. But the brother's cry "Look!" interrupted me. Looking up, I saw that there was no escape from fate. As in a dream, the animal somehow inexplicably escaped (probably, jumping over the fence) and, beating with its hooves, rushed along the path down to the wooden steps.
Rushing past the stairs, the horse rushed into the river and headed straight for us. We, grabbing the stones, ran 30 yards from the shore and turned around. The end, however, was not interesting: coming out of the water on our side, the horse just looked at us, snorted and galloped down the road."
Reflecting on the strangeness of dreams, Dani concluded: the dreams were absolutely ordinary, only they dreamed on the wrong night, when it was appropriate for them, the dreams were ahead of the events. Sometimes the gaps in time between sleep and reality were very small (day or week), and sometimes significant (year). If such a shift in time occurs in our consciousness, then information must come from somewhere. Where can this information come from? Only from our own consciousness, which in a dream loses the boundaries between "yesterday", "today" and "tomorrow."
If our consciousness already knows, then why is it silent during the day? Dunn realized that in the night to forget it does not really want to show its awareness, more precisely, our consciousness retains in memory only vivid dreams, often associated with tragic events, and for this reason they pass into the category of prophetic ones. And all other dreams, showing no less information about the future, are simply forgotten because of their insignificance, although we dream. That is, in dreams, time is presented in all its diversity, it is not divided into was, is and will be. Time in a dream is a single stream. And only our consciousness isolates from this stream the parts that it distributes in chronological order.
Dunn did another experiment trying to get images of tomorrow. He began to write down his dreams, and then, after registering the fact of a dream, he opened some book at random … and found “his” images in metaphors or their plot, as if his consciousness knew which of the books Dunn would open that day. Convinced that in his own mind, time is somewhat more uniform than one might expect, Dani offered work with dreams to all his relatives and friends. And having collected records of dreams and reports on the manifestation of dream images and real life, I came to the conclusion: there is no border between "now", "before" and "after that".
And not only the chosen people, but all people in general can feel it, simply as unnecessary a person has lost his ability, given to him by nature. “We should not forget,” he wrote, “that material evidence (insofar as it captures what has happened) serve as signs of the past - and only the past. Looking at the target at any given moment and seeing a round punched hole in the corner, you will probably think that a bullet has passed in this place. However, nowhere on the surface of the target will you find a sign that another hole will soon appear, say, half an inch from the center of the bullseye. Of course, on the basis of a complete knowledge of all the mechanical movements that occur on this piece of the universe at the time of your inspection of the target, you could determine that soon in the indicated place a bullet would penetrate the target if you,certainly possessed the highest intelligence.
But this assumption is only confusing, because it involves the introduction of many signs external to the object we are investigating, that is, the target. Her condition: and this particular moment does not allow us to notice any signs that hint at a future hole. And in this sense, the target is so uninformative that you will not even begin to understand whether it is damaged or not; this question will not affect your conclusions in any way. The target contains no evidence of its own future, and you have to use signs anywhere but on its surface. Meanwhile, the shot through the corner of the target is evidence of its past history. And thanks to this very evidence, and not knowledge of what happened on this piece of the universe at some previous moment in time, you will draw a conclusion about the bullet that pierced the target.
The holes in the target serve as signs of the future in the sense that they indicate the possible directions of movement of the bullets and events that may occur at speed behind the target; but they are not signs of future holes.
Our brain is a material organ, and its state at any given moment does not more indicate what the outside world is going to present to the brain in the future than the state of the target - where the next bullet will hit, or whether it will hit at all …
Man, further explained Dunn, “imagined that the unfolding of events in time presupposes movement in the fourth dimension.
The term "fourth dimension", of course, was not invented by him - his vocabulary would hardly have allowed him to do it. But he was firmly convinced that:
1. Time has length and is divided into past and future.
2. In length, time does not extend in any of the spatial directions known to it: neither from north to south, nor from west to east, nor from top to bottom. It extends in a direction other than these three, in other words, in the fourth direction.
3. Neither the past nor the future is observable. All directions available to observation are in the field of observation, which lies in one and only moment of time length - the moment separating the past from the future. He called this moment "present."
4. This "present" field of observation moves along the length of time in such a strange way that events that were previously related to the future become present, and then past. The past is thus constantly growing. He called this movement the passage of time.
… He did not deliberately and deeply think about the length of time. He turned to the concept of length of time out of necessity for a very understandable reason. In our perception, phenomena are ordered in two ways. They are either simply separated from each other in space, or successively replace each other. This difference is a given: no matter what we do and no matter how we think, it still exists. And in trying to explain this sequence of phenomena, we inevitably had to assume that time has a length. Just as inevitably, we had to consider it as the length along which movement occurs, as a dimension in which we move from second to second, from hour to hour, from year to year, colliding along the way with successively replacing each other and separated in time events, - likehow we collide with different objects in our earthly journey. Thus, the original view should have been undivided."
In other words, time that exists outside the observer - man, is an undivided concept. This is exactly what can explain our predictions, actions by intuition and, quite possibly, moving in time. From this point of view, we don't move anywhere at all - we just change the point of view.
P. Odintsov