Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seek in materiality for that which is not there. The soul determines circumstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. The organic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotations in higher space are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as an object draws near and then recedes from its plane. This is only a figure of speech, but it is susceptible of almost literal application. Ideas, emerging from the subconscious, appproach, intersect, recede from, and re-approach the stream of conscious experience; taking the forms of aversions and desires, they register themselves in action, and by reason of time curvature, everything that occurs, recurs.
PERIODICITY
We recognize and accept this cyclic return of time in such familiar manifestations of it as Nature affords in periodicity. We recognize it also in our mental and emotional life, when the periods can be co-ordinated with known physical phenomena, as in the case of the wanderlust which comes in the mild melancholy of autumn, the moods that go with waning day, and winter night. It is only when these recurrences do not submit themselves to our puny powers of analysis and measurement that we are incredulous of a larger aspect of the law of time-return. Sleep for example, is not less mysterious than death which, too, may be but "a sleep and a forgetting." The reason that sleep fails to terrify us as death does is because experience has taught that memory leafs the chasm. Why should death bedreaded any more than bedtime? Because we fear that we shall forget. But do we really forget? As Pierre Janet so tersely puts it, "Whatever has gone into the mind may come out of the mind," and in a subsequent chapter this aphorism will be shown to have extension in a direction of which the author of it appears not to have been aware. Memory links night to night and winter to winter, but such things as "the night-time of the spirit" and "the winter of our discontent" are not recognized as having either cause or consequence. Now though the well-springs of these states of consciousness remain obscure, there is nothing unreasonable in believing that they are recrudescences of far-off, forgotten moods and moments; neither is it absurd to suppose that they may be related to the movements and positions of the planets, as night and winter are related to the axial and orbital movements of the earth.
But there are other, and even more interesting, evidences of time curvature in consciousness. These lead away into new regions which it is our pleasure now to explore.
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.