Four-Dimensional Vistas

by Claude Fayette Bragdon

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.

VII THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

THE FIELD OF PSYCHIC RESEARCH

It is difficult to divest the words hypnotism and clairvoyance of certain sordid and sinister associations. We are apt to think of them only as urban flora of the dust and dark, cultivated for profit by itinerant professors and untidy sibyls. Larger knowledge of the night side of human nature, however, profoundly modifies this view. The invoked image is then of some hushed and studious chamber where a little group of people sit attentive to the voice of one entranced—listeners at the keyhole of the door to another world. This "news from nowhere," garnered under so-called test conditions and faithfully recorded, has grown by now to a considerable literature, accessible to all—one with which every well-informed person is assumed to have at least a passing acquaintance.

A marked and constant characteristic of trance phenomena consists of an apparent confusion between past, present and future. As in the game of three-card monte, it appears impossible to tell in what order the three will turn up—was, is and will be, lose their special significance. Clairvoyance, in its time aspect, whether spontaneous, hypnotically induced, or self-induced, is susceptible of classification as post-vision, present vision, and prevision. Post-vision is that in which past events are not recollected merely, but seen or experienced. It is the past become present. Present vision is clairvoyance of things transpiring elsewhere; the present, remote in space, but not in time. Prevision is the future in the present. These various orders of clear-seeing transcend the limits of the actual knowledge and experience of the seer. This classification and these definitions are important only to us, to whom past, present, and future stand sharply differentiated in thought and in experience; not to the clairvoyant, who, though bound in body to our space and time, is consciously free in a world where these discriminations vanish. Why do they vanish? This question can best be answered by means of a homely analogy.

For a symbol of the flow of time in waking consciousness, imagine yourself in a railway carriage which jogs along a main-travelled line at a rate predetermined by the time-table. You approach, reach and pass such stations as are intersected by that particular railway, and you get a view of the landscape which every other traveler shares. Having once left a station, you cannot go back to it, nor can you arrive at places further along the line before the train itself takes you there. Compare this with the freedom to do either of these things, and any number of others, if you suddenly change from the train to an automobile. Then, in effect, you have the freedom of a new dimension. In the one case, you must travel along a single line at a uniform rate; in the other, you are able to strike out in any direction and regulate your speed at will. You can go back to a place after the train has left it; you can go forward to some place ahead, before the train arrives, or you can strike out into, and traverse, new country. In short, your freedom, temporal and spatial, will be related to that of the train-bound traveler, somewhat as is trance consciousness to everyday waking life.

MODIFYING THE PAST

Modern psychology has demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental and emotional life, transcending the individual's conscious experience, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual's conscious participation. The clearest symbol by which this fact may be figured to the imagination is the one already presented: the comparison of the subjective field to a plane, in which the conscious experience of the individual is represented by a single line. In sleep and trance we have an augmented freedom of movement and so are able to travel here and there, backward and forward, not only among our own "disassociated memories" but in that greater and more mysterious demesne which comprehends what we call the future, as well as the present and the past.

The profound significance of the disassociation and sublimation of memory by hypnotism, or by whatever other means the train of personal experience and recollection can be thrown off the track, appears to have been ignored on its theoretical side—that is, as establishing the return of time. It has cleverly been turned to practical account, however, in the treatment of disease. By a series of painstaking and brilliant experiments, the demonstration of the role played by "disassociated memories" in causing certain functional nervous and mental troubles has been achieved. It has been shown that severe emotional shocks, frights, griefs, worries, may be—and frequently are—completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious. It has been shown that thence they may, and frequently do, exercise a baleful effect upon the whole organism, giving rise to disease symptoms, the particular type of which were determined by the victim's self-suggestion. As a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure to such disorders, it is necessary to get at these disassociated memories and drag them back into the full light of conscious recollection. To get at them, medical psychologists make use of hypnotism, automatic writing, crystal-gazing—in short, of any method which will force an entrance into that higher time-world, whereby the forgotten past may become the present. This accomplished, and the crucial moment recovered and transfixed, the victim of the aborted opportunity is led to deal with it as one may deal with the fluid, and may not deal with the fixed. Again his past is plastic to the operation of his intelligence and his will. Here is glad news for mortals: the past recoverable and in a manner revocable!