LIFE ONE LONG DREAM

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 January 1935, Page 10

LIFE ONE LONG DREAM

IMMORTALITY IN A FORMULA, A quiet-voiced man, speaking in a precise, matter-of-fact way, talked to me yesterday of a stupendous possibility. He claims to have found irrefutable proof of human immortality (writes a London “Daily Telegraph.” contributor). In 1927, Mr J. W. Dunne wrote an astonishing book, “An Experiment With Time.” In it he advanced a theory that future events are regularly foreseen in dreams. There was no suggestion of occultism. The theory was backed up by an elaborate mathematical argument. Seven years have elapsed. In that time Mr Dunne has busied himself with carrying his arguments further. His theory of “serialisin’’ has been worked out. A strange world of successive time-dimensions, of “regressive time” has been investigated. And now the explorer presents his trophies —in the form of mathematical formulae and the symbols of the physics expert. (“The Serial Universe,” by J. W. Dunne). Mr Dunne is a scientific man with a first-class brain. A close friend of Mr H. G. Wells (“Years ago,’’ he told me, “Wells and I experimented with model aeroplanes in my back garden”), he was the first man in Britain to design and fly a military aero-

plane. ’thus the book is no pleasant fantasy of some gifted hut negligible crank. It seeks to be a cold and proven statement of hard, scientific lact. The theory of “serialism,” outlined in the earlier work, is here extended to the spheres of physics, philosophy and psychology. That is what makes it for the layman at the same time so exciting and yet so baffling. Here is perhaps the proof of immortality—of all things—lassooed by a rope woven out of x and y. , But although .Mr Dunne thinks that “the book' is well within the comprehension of the ordinary intelligent reader,” one fears that this estimate cf the ordinary reader’s grasp of even elementary science is over-optimistic. Dlr Dunne told me yesterday: “in cur future existence we shall be icm-dimensional beings in lifthdimcnsicnal time, living the kind of lite we glimpse now in dreams. “Al the start it will be perfectly incomprehensible ;o us, just as though we were newly-born children. This will be because our habit has been to see lite as a scries of three-dimen-sional events, one after the other.! Events arc attuned to us in this lite in a succession of chords, so to say. '1 he lA'auty of the ‘time’ depends on the mVning we give to the chords gone qefore.

j “But rn the next life we will see the tune as it x composer might see it—the past, present and future simultaneously. Or I might explain it thus: Suppose there hangs on a wall a large picture. The picture is concea'led entirely by a curtain with a narrow slit in it. In this lite we look at the picture through. the narrow slit, seeing only a fragment of it as we move across its face.; In the next life the cut tain will uo.t be there. The whole picture will stand revealed to our gaze. ; “But a person used to peering through the slip would he confused at suddenly seein-g the whole picture -.imultaneouslw That is the reason ■shy we have pal feeling of contusion and fantasy fn pur dream.;.” Until and mathematical

experts have had the opportunity of commenting on his book, Mr Dunne is naturally reluctant to discuss the wider inferences —religious, sociological, and so forth—which might be drawn. He admits, however, to a belief that if his theories gain acceptance we should do well to “plan for the future.” “TERROR” OF FUTURE LIFE. In his book, Mr Dunne writes: “AU talk about ‘death’ or ‘immortality’ has reference to time, and is meaningless jn any other connection. But a time-system is a regressive system, and it is only in the lopsided first term of that regress that death makes its appearance. “It will become clear . . . that . . . we individuals have curious—very curious—beginnings but. no ends. Is that a horrible thought? Perhaps. But I do not think so. The presentday terror of immortality is based upon an imperfect appreciation of what that immortality means. "We plague ourselves with a lugubrious picture of bored individuals dragging memory’s ever-lengthening chains, desperately sick of themselves and of the world. . . craving extinction. . . . But fortunately our immortality is •in multi-dimensional time, and is of a very different kind. “Do we desire this immortality, now that we may feel reasonably sure that we possess it? Some of us dread it. . . But all of us hate the notion ol the whole of Nature, being, to Life, no more than ‘an indifferently gilded execution chamber replenished continually with new victims.’ “But, for me, the question resolves itself very simply. There is adventure in eternal life. There is none in eternal death, and 1 am all for adventure.”

As for the proof, “It is impossible,” says Mr Dunne, “to imagine a. proof more overwhelming—if my arguments are sound.”

But are they? The lay reader, whether he is able to follow the arguments tor himself or not, must await the considered judgment of the experts.