John William Dunne - Philosophical Work

Philosophical Work

Dunne believed that he experienced precognitive dreams. The first he records occurred in 1898, in which he dreamed of the time on his watch before waking up and checking it. Twenty such experiences, some quite dramatic, led him to undertake a scientific investigation into the phenomenon, and from this he developed a new theory of consciousness and time.

Through years of experimentation with precognitive dreams and hypnagogic states Dunne posited that our experience of time as linear was an illusion brought about by human consciousness. Dunne argued that past, present and future were in fact simultaneous and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception of them. It was his belief that in the dream state, the mind was not shackled in this way and was able to perceive events in the past and future with equal facility.

Dunne's landmark An Experiment with Time (1927) recounts his own experiments with dreaming, from which he concluded that precognitive elements frequently occur in dreams. The book has been frequently reprinted. In The Serial Universe (1934), The New Immortality (1938), Nothing Dies (1940) and other works, he further elaborated on the concept of "serialism," where he postulated that an infinite regress, or series of dimensions exist within time, giving any present moment extensions into the past and future.

Dunne's work provided a scientific explanation for ideas of consciousness being explored on a wide scale at the time. Such figures as Aldous Huxley and J. B. Priestley enthusiastically embraced his ideas. Priestley based his plays Time and the Conways, An Inspector Calls and Dangerous Corner, on them. There are also parallels between Dunne's theory of Time and that put forward in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets although whether Eliot was directly influenced by Dunne is not clear.