ARE OUR DREAMS REALLY FRAGMENTS OF THE FUTURE?

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18961, 7 January 1930, Page 8

ARE OUR DREAMS REALLY FRAGMENTS OF THE FUTURE?

TO-DAY'S SIGNED ARTICLE.

By

Maurice Maeterlinck.

Dreams help man to remove this veil which separates him from a knowledge of his destiny. I have experimented with my own dreams, cataloguing them and writing them down. I have had myself waked out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night in order to be able to reproduce my dream exactly. I have satisfied myself that dreams are fragments of our future. Unbelievers may smile if they wish, but science, during the last thirty years, has made a good many dreams come true Astronomers and chemists have both helped to throw light upon the mystery of the great beyond. There are so many things of which we still know nothing! Little by little, however, science is changing our idea of the Universe. Everything that happens in the infinitely great is iden tical with what happens in the infinitely small. Astronomers have become chemists and physicists. Chemists and physicists are to-day the astronomers of the molecule. It is they who are proving that there is an eternal, omniscient being in the cosmos, that there is a God. What difference does it make what we call Him? The important thing is that God is the Universe—space and time without limit—ettrnity. There is Nothing Mortal. Are there other worlds more perfect than our own? Possibly, but they should not frighten us. We should seek to improve our own world until it is the equal -of the others. lam almost certain that we are being observed from the other planets and perhaps they are listening to us, too. We transmit ideas and feelings to each other by wireless through the ether, since the ether is exactly the same in any part of the cosmos, why can’t there be communication between different worlds ? Every time we think or feel, we set molecules in motion, and these molecules give off waves and electrons which travel for great distances through the ether The study of light has taught us that space is no obstacle to its waves. And as far as death is concerned, there is no such thing! No! Nothingness does not follow after death. Science affirms that nothing dies. There is nothing mortal in the Universe. Nearer the Solution. What do we know about where or what we shall be in future time? The last thirty years—thanks to the discoveries of chemists and astronomers —

have brought us much nearer a solution of the secret of the Universe than the preceding ten centuries. To-day, we know that in that part of the heavens which we can reach with our telescopes there are as many dark stars as there are bright ones. The earth and all the planets of our solar system are dark stars, corpus of stars. Then there are the other heavenly bodies which. whirl through space without receiving from neighbouring bodies the light and heat which permit our own earth to survive in th* midst of what I call “the immeasurable cemetery of dead worlds.” Dead Worlds May Be Alive. It seems to me a mistake, however, to call stars which are merely dark, dead worlds. There are no dead and no cemeteries in the Universe. It is A proven fact that cosmic energy merely expresses itself differently in these dark stars, ; an expression different from light, invisible to the human eye, like electricity, centrifugal force, inertia, gravitation, and all the great forces of nature. There are "dark radiations’* in space and “light radiations.” It follows that very possibly these apparently dead worlds are just at alive as our own and are filled witk people, whose forms we cannot comprehend. The new telescopes at tht Mount Wilson Observatory have already shown us that what had been called an infinite vacuum is really full of stars. The extent of that vacuum is limited only by the strength of our telescopes. A house may be filled with furniture, but if we enter it in the dark it will seem empty. The Present or the Past. But we still know almost nothing. In my book, “Life in Space,” I ask! “Are we living in the present, the past, or the future?” Imagine an astronomer or some distant star looking at us through a giant telescope. Suppose, for instance, that we choose the star Mira. It takes sixty or seventy odd years for its light to reach the earth. In order to see us the astronomer on Mira must necessarily depend upon light, so that the image which he gets comes to him sixty or seventy years late. Thus, he will see us in about the year two thousand, and what appears to him as the present will be to us the past. (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright).