Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

VI SLEEP AND DREAMS

SLEEP

Our space is called three-dimensional because it takes three numbers—measurement in three mutually perpendicular directions—to determine and mark out any particular point from the totality of points. Time, as the individual experiences it, is called one-dimensional for an analogous reason: one number is all that is required to determine and mark out any particular event of a series from all the rest. Now in order to establish a position in a space of four dimensions it would be necessary to measure in four mutually perpendicular directions. Time curvature opens up the possibility of a corresponding higher development in time: one whereby time would be more fittingly symbolized by a plane than by a linear figure. Indeed, the familiar mystery of memory calls for such a conception. Memory is a carrying forward of the past into the present, and the fact that we can recall a past event without mentally rehearsing all the intermediate happenings in inverse order, shows that in the time aspect of memory there is simultaneity as well as sequence—time ceases to be linear and becomes plane. More remarkable illustrations of the sublimation of the time-sense are to be found in the phenomena of sleep and dreams.

"Oh, thou that sleepest, what is sleep?" asks the curious Leonardo. Modern psychological science has little to offer of a positive nature in answer to this world-old question, but it has at least effectively disposed of the absurd theories of the materialists who would have us believe that sleep is a mere matter of blood circulation or of intoxication by accumulation of waste products in the system. Sleep states are not abnormal, but part and parcel of the life existence of the individual. When a person is asleep he has only become unresponsive to the mass of stimuli of the external world which constitutes his environment. As Sidis says, "When our interest in external existence fags and fades away, we go to sleep. When our interests in the external world cease, we draw up the bridges, so to say, interrupt all external communication as far as possible, and become isolated in our own fortress and repair to our own world of organic activity and inner dream life. Sleep is the interruption of our intercourse with the external world: it is the laying down of our arms in the struggle of life. Sleep is a truce with the world."

The twin concepts of higher space and curved time sanction a view of sleep even bolder. Sleep is more than a longing of the body to be free of the flame which consumes it: the flame itself aspires to be free—that is to say, consciousness, tiring of its tool, the brain, and of the world, its workshop, takes a turn into the plaisance of the fourth dimension, where time and space are less rigid to resist the fulfillment of desire.

DREAMS

We find a confirmation of this view in dream phenomena. But however good the evidence, we shall fail to make out a case unless dream experiences are conceded to be as real as any other. The reluctance we may have to make this concession comes first from the purely subjective character of dreams, and secondly from their triviality and irrationality—it is as though the muddy sediment of daytime thought and feeling and that alone were there cast forth. In answer to the first objection, advanced psychology affirms that the subconscious mind, from which dreams arise, approaches more nearly to the omniscience of true being than the rational mind of waking experience. The triviality and irrationality of dreams are sufficiently accounted for if the dream state is thought of as the meeting place of two conditions of consciousness: the foam and flotsam "of perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn," whose vastitude, whose hidden life, and rich argosies of experience, can only be inferred from the fret of the tide on their nether shore—the tired brain in sleep.

For it is the remembered dream alone that is incoherent—the dream that comes clothed in the rags and trappings of this work-a-day world, and so leaves some recoverable record on the brain. We all feel that the dreams we cannot remember are the most wonderful. Who has not wakened with the sense of some incommunicable experience of terror or felicity, too strange and poignant to submit itself to concrete symbolization, and so is groped for by the memory in vain? We know that dreams grow more ordered and significant as they recede from the surface of consciousness to its depths. Deep sleep dreams are in the true sense clairvoyant, though for the most part irrecoverable— "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?" DuPrel and others have shown that the difference between ordinary dreaming, somnambulance, trance and ecstasy, is only a matter of redistribution of thresholds—that they are all related states and merge into one another. We have, therefore, every right to believe that for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils and seers, however little most of us are able to profit by it. Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil is lifted, but the art of dreaming true remains for the most part unmastered—one of the precious gifts which the future holds in store for the sons and daughters of men.

The partial waking state is the soil in which remembered dreams develop most luxuriously. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are the product, not of our sleep, but of our waking. Such dreams belong to both worlds, partly to the three-dimensional and partly to the four-dimensional. While dreams are often only a hodge-podge of daytime experiences, their incredible rapidity, alien to that experience, gives us our first faint practicable intimation of a higher development of time.

TIME IN DREAMS

The unthinkable velocity of time in dreams may be inferred from the fact that between the moment of impact of an impression at the sense-periphery and its reception at the center of consciousness—moments so closely compacted that we think of them as simultaneous—a coherent series of representations may take place, involving what seem to be protracted periods for their unfoldment. Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this character, in which the long-delayed dénouement was suggested and prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression to travel from the skin to the brain.

Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentary lapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by its time scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping of time. Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in The Hasheesh Eater, the dreams that visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or more awakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with the drug. He says, "I existed by turns in different places and various states of being. Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle. Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume. My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimagined ecstasy."

Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake in order not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears to have imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the following curious effect. A lady asked him some question connected with a previous conversation. He says, "As mechanically as an automaton I began to reply. As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke, and in another world. I sat and listened: still the voice kept speaking. Now for the first time I experienced that vast change which hasheesh makes in all measurements of time. The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence. Its enunciation might have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun."

This well-known fact, that we cannot measure dreams by our time scale, proves that subjective time does not correspond with objective, and that the "dream organ" of consciousness has a time scale of its own. If in our waking state we experience one kind of time, and in dreams quite another, the solution of the mystery should be sought in the vehicle of consciousness, for clearly the limit of impressionability or power of response of the vehicle establishes the time scale, just as the size of the body with relation to objects establishes the space scale. Time must be different for the ant and the elephant, for example, as space is different.

Our sense of time is wholly dependent upon the rapidity with which impressions succeed one another. Were we capable of receiving only one impression an hour, like a bell struck every hour with a hammer, the ordinary term of life would seem very short. On the other hand, if our time sense were always as acute as it is in dreams, uncounted aeons would seem to be lived through in the interval between childhood and old age.

Imagine a music machine so cunningly constructed and adjusted as not only to sound each note and chord in its proper sequence and relation, but to regulate also the duration of the sound vibration. If this machine were operated in such a manner as to play, in a single second of time, the entire overture of an opera which would normally occupy half an hour, we should hear only an unintelligible noise a second long. This would be due to no defect in the sound-producing mechanism, but to the limitations of the sound-receiving mechanism, our auditory apparatus. Could this be altered to conform to the unusual conditions—could it capture and convey to consciousness every note of the overture in a second of time—that second would seem to last half an hour, provided that every other criterion for the measurement of duration were denied for the time being.

Now dreams seem long: we only discover afterwards and by accident their almost incredible brevity. May we not—must we not—infer from this that the body is an organ of many stops and more than one keyboard, and that in sleep it gives forth this richer music. The theory of a higher-dimensional existence during sleep accounts in part for the great longing for sleep. "What is it that is much desired by man, but which they know not while possessing?" again asks Leonardo. "It is sleep," is his answer. This longing for sleep is more than a physical longing, and the refreshment it brings is less of the flesh than of the spirit. It is possible to withstand the deprivation of food and water longer and better than the deprivation of sleep. Its recuperative power is correspondingly greater.

Experiments have been made with mature University students by which they have been kept awake ninety-six hours. When the experiments were finished, the young men were allowed to sleep themselves out, until they felt they were thoroughly rested. All awoke from a long sleep completely refreshed, but the one who took longest to restore himself from his protracted vigil slept only one-third more time than was regular with him. And this has been the experience over and over again of men in active life who have been obliged to keep awake for long periods by the absolute necessities of the situation in which they have been placed.

In this fact there is surely another hint of the sublimation of the time sense during sleep. While it would be an unwarrantable assumption to suppose that the period of recuperation by sleep must be as long, or nearly as long, as the period of deprivation, the ratio between the two presents a discrepancy so great that it would seem as though this might be due to an acceleration of the time element of consciousness.

THE EASTERN TEACHING IN REGARD TO SLEEP AND DREAMS

In this matter of the wonder, the mystery, the enchantment, of sleep and dreams, the most modern psychology and the most ancient wisdom meet on common ground. Eastern wisdom casts such a light upon the problems of subjectivity that it should not be lightly dismissed. For uncounted centuries Hindu-Aryan spiritual science has recognized, not one plane or condition of consciousness, but three; waking, dreaming, and deep sleep—the gross, the subtle and the pure. In the waking state—that is, with the vehicle attuned to vibrate to materiality—the individual self is as a captive in a citadel of flesh, aware of only so much of the universal life as chances to enact itself before the windows of his prison. In the dream state, when the more violent vibrations of the body are stilled in sleep, consciousness becomes active in its subtle (four-dimensional) vehicle, and ranges free throughout the ampler spaces of this subtler world. In deep sleep, consciousness reverts to its pure condition—the individual self becomes the All-Self: the rainbow, no longer prismatic by reason of its refraction in materiality, becomes the pure white light; the melody of life resolves itself into the primordial harmony; sequence becomes simultaneity, and Time, no longer "besprent with seven-hued circumstance," is swallowed up in duration.

"There are two paths for him, within and without, and they both turn back in a day and a night…. After having subdued by sleep all that belongs to the body, he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping. Having assumed light, he goes again to his place, the golden person, the lonely bird" UPANISHADS.

SPACE IN DREAMS

However preposterous may appear to us this notion that the waking state, in which we feel ourselves most potent and alive, is really one of inhibition—that the world is only a "shoal of time"—it is curiously borne out by the baffling phenomena of dreams and is in perfect accord with the Higher Space Hypothesis. The possibility of shaking off the grip of sleep under appropriate circumstances, the fact that we can watch in our sleep, and awake at the right moment, that we can sleep and still watch and keep awake in regard to special objects and particular persons—these things form insuperable difficulties for all those plausible, and apparently scientific, theories of sleep current in the West; but they fit perfectly with the Eastern idea that "he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping." And to the questions, "How, and from whence?" in the light of our hypothesis we may answer, "By the curvature of time, consciousness escapes into the fourth dimension."

Myers shows that he was in need of just this clue in order to account for some of the dream experiences recorded in Human Personality, since he asks for "an intermediate conception of space—something between space as we know it in the material world and space as we imagine it to disappear in the ideal world." He suggests that in dreams and trance there may be a clearer and more complete perception of space than is at present possible to us. A corresponding sublimation of the time sense is no less necessary to account for time in dreams. Although we seem to triumph over space and time to such a tune as to eliminate them, dream experiences have both form and sequence. Now because form presupposes space, and time is implicit in sequence, there arises the necessity for that "intermediate conception" of both space and time provided by our hypothesis.

THE PHENOMENON OF PAUSE

Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to: think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, of arrested physical activity, universal throughout nature. The cell itself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep—"perchance to dream," Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology and psychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear, feel and do not feel, in successive instants. We are asleep, in other words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment—and perhaps age by age as well.

Where is consciousness during these intervals, long or short, when the senses fail to respond to the stimuli of the external world? It is somewhere else, awake to some other environment. Though we may not be able to verify this from our own experience, there are methods whereby it can be verified. Clairvoyance is one of these, hypnotism is another—that kind of hypnotism whereby an entranced person is made to give a report of his excursions and adventures in the mysterious House of Sleep. It is a well-known fact that these experiences increase in intensity, coherence and in a certain sort of omniscience, directly in proportion to the depth of the trance. The revelations obtained in this way are sometimes amazing. The inherent defect of this method of obtaining information is the possibility of deception, and for that reason science still looks askance at all evidence drawn from this source. But in essaying to write a book about the fourth dimension from any aspect but the mathematical, the author has put himself outside the pale of orthodox science, so he is under no compulsion to ignore a field so rich merely because it appears to be tainted by a certain amount of fallibility and is even under suspicion of fraud. Diseased oysters, though not edible, produce pearls, and a pearl of great price is the object of this quest. Let us glance, therefore, at the findings of hypnotism and kindred phenomena.