Among other gifted and original friends who, at all too rare intervals, honour me by coming along for a gossip, is Mr. J. W. Dunne, who years ago invented one of the earliest and most “different” of aeroplanes, and who has since done a very considerable amount of subtle thinking upon the relationship of time and space to consciousness. Dunne clings to the idea that in certain ways we may anticipate the future, and he has adduced a series of very remarkable observations indeed to support that in his well-known Experiment with Time. That book was published in 1927, and I found it so attractive and stimulating that I wrote about it in one or two articles that were syndicated very extensively throughout the world. It was so excitingly fresh.
And among others who saw my account of this Experiment with Time, and who got the book and read it and then wrote to me about it, was Raven. Usually his communications to me were the briefest of notes, saying he would be in London, telling me of a change of address, asking about my movements, and so forth; but this was quite a long letter. Experiences such as Dunne’s, he said, were no novelty to him. He could add a lot to what was told in the book, and indeed he could EXTEND the experience. The thing anticipated between sleeping and waking — Dunne’s experiments dealt chiefly with the premonitions in the dozing moment between wakefulness and oblivion — need not be just small affairs of tomorrow or next week; they could have a longer range. If, that is, you had the habit of long-range thinking. But these were days when scepticism had to present a hard face to greedy superstition, and it was one’s public duty to refrain from rash statements about these flimsy intimations, difficult as they were to distinguish from fantasies — except in one’s own mind. One might sacrifice a lot of influence if one betrayed too lively an interest in this sort of thing.
He wandered off into such sage generalizations and concluded abruptly. The letter had an effect of starting out to tell much more than he did.
Then he turned up in London, dropped into my study unexpectedly and made a clean breast of it.
“This Dunne business,” he began.
“Well?” said I.
“He has a way of snatching the fleeting dream between unconscious sleep and waking.”
“Yes.”
“He keeps a notebook by his bedside and writes down his dream the very instant he is awake.”
“That’s the procedure.”
“And he finds that a certain percentage of his dream items are — sometimes quite plainly — anticipations of things that will come into his mind out of reality, days, weeks, and even years ahead.”
“That’s Dunne.”
“It’s nothing.”
“But how — nothing?”
“Nothing to what I have been doing for a long time.”
“And that is —?”
He stared at the backs of my books. It was amusing to find Raven for once at a loss for words.
“Well?” I said.
He turned and looked at me with a reluctant expression that broke into a smile. Then he seemed to rally his candour.
“How shall I put it? I wouldn’t tell anyone but you. For some years, off and on — between sleeping and waking — I’ve been — in effect — reading a book. A non-existent book. A dream book if you like. It’s always the same book. Always. And it’s a history.”
“Of the past?”
“There’s a lot about the past. With all sorts of things I didn’t know and all sorts of gaps filled in. Extraordinary things about North India and Central Asia, for instance. And also — it goes on. It’s going on. It keeps on going on.”
“Going on?”
“Right past the present time.”
“Sailing away into the future?”
“Yes.”
“Is it — is it a PAPER book?”
“Not quite paper. Rather like that newspaper of your friend Brownlow. Not quite print as we know it. Vivid maps. And quite easy to read, in spite of the queer letters and spelling.”
He paused. “I know it’s nonsense.”
He added. “It’s frightfully real.”
“Do you turn the pages?”
He thought for a moment. “No, I don’t turn the pages. That would wake me up.”
“It just goes on?”
“Yes.”
“Until you realize you are doing it?”
“I suppose — yes, it is like that.”
“And then you wake up?”
“Exactly. And it isn’t there!”
“And you are always READING?”
“Generally — very definitely.”
“But at times?”
“Oh — just the same as reading a book when one is awake. If the matter is vivid one SEES the events. As if one was looking at a moving picture on the page.”
“But the book is still there?”
“Yes — always. I think it’s there always.”
“Do you by any chance make notes?”
“I didn’t at first. Now I do.”
“At once?”
“I write a kind of shorthand. . . . Do you know — I’ve piles of notes THAT high.”
He straddled my fireplace and stared at me.
“Now you’ve told me,” I said.
“Now I’ve told you.”
“Illegible, my dear sir — except to me. You don’t know my shorthand. I can hardly read it myself after a week or so. But lately I’ve been writing it out — some I’ve dictated.
“You see,” he went on, standing up and walking about my room, “if it’s — a reality, it’s the most important thing in the world. And I haven’t an atom of proof. Not an atom. Do you —? Do you believe this sort of thing is possible?”
“POSSIBLE?” I considered. “I’m inclined to think I do. Though what exactly this kind of thing may be, I don’t know.”
“I can’t tell anyone but you. How could I? Naturally they would say I had gone cranky — or that I was an impostor. You know the sort of row. Look at Oliver Lodge. Look at Charles Richet. It would smash my work, my position. And yet, you know, it’s such credible stuff. . . . I tell you I believe in it.”
“If you wrote some of it out. If I could see some of it.”
“You shall.”
He seemed to be consulting my opinion. “The worst thing against it is that I always believe in what the fellow says. That’s rather as though it was ME, eh?”
He did not send me any of his notes, but when next I met him, it was at Berne, he gave me a spring-backed folder filled with papers. Afterwards he gave me two others. Pencilled sheets they were mostly, but some were evidently written at his desk in ink and perhaps fifty pages had been typed, probably from his dictation. He asked me to take great care of them, to read them carefully, have typed copies made and return a set to him. The whole thing was to be kept as a secret between us. We were both to think over the advisability of a possibly anonymous publication. And meanwhile events might either confirm or explode various statements made in this history