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Dunne, J. W. - An Experiment with Time – The method to be used to prophecy or obtain past perceptions whilst awake
Identifier
025896
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME BY J. W. DUNNE [SECOND EDITION]
These experiments showed me that, provided one were able to steady one's attention to the task, one could observe the "effect" just as readily when awake as when sleeping. But that steadying of attention is no easy matter. It is true that it makes no call upon any special faculty, but it does demand a great deal of practice in controlling the imagination. Hence, to anyone who is desirous merely of satisfying himself as to the existence of the "effect," I should recommend the dream-recording experiment in preference to the waking attempt.
But, for studying the problem, the waking experiment is of distinct value, because one can follow a great deal of what one's mind is doing. Also, there is no dream-story to complicate matters.
In my own case, I employed this experiment mainly in order to seek for the barrier, if any, which divides our knowledge of the past from our knowledge of the future. And the odd thing was that there did not seem to be any such barrier at all.
One had merely to arrest all obvious thinking of the past, and the future would become apparent in disconnected flashes. (For, however difficult and troublesome the process, that was what, ultimately, it resolved itself into.) Yet, if one tried to follow up the "memory train” from past to future, one came, not so much to a resisting barrier, but to an absolute blank. Moreover (and this I discovered by separate experiment), if one allowed the attention to pass from the image under consideration to another which was manifestly associated therewith, one remained, so to say, in the " past " part of the network. There, attention was completely at home.
The associated images followed one another in swift, easy succession ; attention ran on and on without noticeable effort or fatigue.
It was only by rejecting manifest associations with the last image, and waiting till something apparently disconnected took its place, that attention was enabled to slip over the dividing line.