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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| An Experiment with Time | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_Time | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T11:14:02.376353+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Publishing history == An Experiment with Time was first published by A & C Black in March 1927. Dunne continued to update it and many new editions and impressions were published over his lifetime. Black brought out a 1929 second edition, prefaced with editorial notes and an extract from a 1928 letter from Arthur Eddington. Dunne then changed publisher to Faber & Faber, with whom he would remain. The third edition incorporated major new material and was published by Faber's in 1932; this and subsequent editions were published in the US by Macmillan. The final version which he had a hand in was published as a "reprint" in 1948. Faber continued printing paperback editions until at least 1973, and others have appeared since.
== Reception ==
=== Academic === Initial reactions from the scientific and scientifically-minded community were broadly positive. Nature carried a review by the philosopher and mathematician Hyman Levy. They accepted that Dunne was a sober and rational investigator who was doing his best to take a scientific approach. They acknowledged that if his ideas about time and consciousness were true then his book would be truly revolutionary. However opinions differed over the existence of dream precognition, while his infinite regress was almost universally judged to be logically flawed and incorrect. Philosophers who criticised An Experiment with Time on much the same basis included J. A. Gunn, C. D. Broad and M. F. Cleugh. The physicist and parapsychologist G. N. M. Tyrrell explained:
Mr. J. W. Dunne, in his book, An Experiment with Time, introduces a multidimensional scheme in an attempt to explain precognition and he has further developed this scheme in later publications. But, as Professor Broad has shown, these unlimited dimensions are unnecessary, ... and the true problem of time—the problem of becoming, or the passage of events from future through present to past, is not explained by them but is still left on the author's hands at the end. Later editions continued to receive attention. In 1981 a new impression of the 1934 (third) edition was published with an introduction by the writer and broadcaster Brian Inglis. The last (1948) edition was reprinted in 1981 with an introduction by the physicist and parapsychologist Russell Targ. A review of it in New Scientist described it as a "definitive classic". Mainstream scientific opinion remains that, while Dunne was an entertaining writer, there is no scientific evidence for either dream precognition or more than one time dimension and his arguments do not convince.
=== Popular === An Experiment with Time became well known and was widely discussed. Not to have read him became a "mark of singularity" in society. Critical essays on Serialism — some positive, some negative — appeared in popular works. Among others, H. G. Wells wrote an essay, "New Light on Mental Life: Mr. J.W. Dunne’s Experiments with Dreaming" in 1927, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short essay, "El Tiempo y J. W. Dunne" (Time and J. W. Dunne) in 1940. and J. B. Priestley gave an accessible account in his study Man and Time (1964). Interest remains today, with for example Gary Lachman discussing Dunne's Serialism in 2022.
== Sequels == Besides issuing new editions of An Experiment with Time, Dunne published sequels exploring different aspects of Serialism. The Serial Universe (1934) examined its relation to contemporary physics in relativity and quantum mechanics. The New Immortality (1938) and Nothing Dies (1940) explored the metaphysical aspect of Serialism, especially in relation to immortality. Intrusions? (1955) contained autobiographical accounts of the angelic visions and voices which had accompanied many of his precognitive dreams. It was incomplete at the time of his death in 1949; it was completed with the help of his family and finally published some years later. It revealed that he believed himself to be a spiritual medium. He had deliberately chosen to leave this material out of An Experiment with Time as he judged that it would have affected the scientific reception of his theory.
== Literary influence == The popularity of An Experiment with Time was reflected in the many authors who subsequently referenced him and his ideas in literary works of fiction. He "undoubtedly helped to form something of the imaginative climate of those [interwar] years". One of the first and most significant writers was J. B. Priestley, who used Dunne's ideas in three of his "Time plays": Time and the Conways, Dangerous Corner, and An Inspector Calls. Dunne's theory strongly influenced the unfinished novels The Notion Club Papers by J. R. R. Tolkien and The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis. Tolkien and Lewis were both members of the Inklings literary circle. Tolkien used Dunne's ideas about parallel time dimensions in developing the differing natures of time in The Lord of the Rings between "Lórien time" and time in the rest of Middle-earth. Lewis used the imagery of serialism in the afterlife he depicted at the end of The Last Battle, the closing tale in the Chronicles of Narnia. Other important contemporary writers who used his ideas, whether as a narrative or literary device, included John Buchan (The Gap in the Curtain), James Hilton (Random Harvest), his old friend H. G. Wells (The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper and The Shape of Things to Come), Graham Greene (The Bear Fell Free) and Rumer Godden (A Fugue in Time). Literary figures less overtly influenced included T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Flann O'Brien. Following Dunne's death in 1949, the popularity of his themes continued. Philippa Pearce's 1958 childhood fantasy Tom's Midnight Garden makes use of Dunne's theory of time and won the British literary Carnegie Medal. The writer Vladimir Nabokov undertook his own dream experiment in 1964, following Dunne's instructions, and it strongly influenced his subsequent novels, especially Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
== See also == Dreamtime, an Australian aboriginal merging of past, present and future. C. H. Hinton, an early proponent of time as the fourth dimension who influenced Dunne. P. D. Ouspensky, who proposed an alternative theory of cyclic time.
== References ==
=== Bibliography === Flieger, Verlyn (2001). A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien's Road to Faërie. Kent State University Press. pp. 38–47. ISBN 978-0-87338-699-9. Jones, Darryl (2020). "J. W. Dunne: The Time Traveller". In Ferguson, T. (ed.). Literature and Modern Time. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 209–231. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29278-2_9. ISBN 978-3-030-29277-5. Priestley, J. B. (1989) [1964 (Aldus)]. Man and Time. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1870630672. OCLC 796254114. Stewart, Victoria (Autumn 2008). "J. W. Dunne and literary culture in the 1930s and 1940s". Literature and History. 17 (2): 62–81. doi:10.7227/LH.17.2.5. S2CID 192883327.
== Further reading == Ernest Nagel. (1927). An Experiment with Time. The Journal of Philosophy 24 (25): 690-692. Samuel Soal. (1927). Review: An Experiment with Time. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 24: 119-123.
== External links == An Experiment with Time at Faded Page (Canada) An Experiment with Time at Internet Archive An Experiment with Time at HathiTrust