“But it’s impossible!” Blake Hartley hit the table with his hand, so hard that the heavy pistol bounced. The loose round he had ejected from the chamber toppled over and started to roll, falling off the edge. He stooped and picked it up. “How can you go back, against time? And the time you claim you came from doesn’t exist, now; it hasn’t happened yet.” He reached for the pistol magazine, to insert the cartridge, and as he did, he saw the books in front of his son. “Dunne’s Experiment with Time,” he commented. “And J. N. M. Tyrrell’s Science and Psychical Phenomena. Are you trying to work out a theory?”
“Yes.” It encouraged Allan to see that his father had unconsciously adopted an adult-to-adult manner. “I think I’m getting somewhere, too. You’ve read these books? Well, look, Dad; what’s your attitude on precognition? The ability of the human mind to exhibit real knowledge, apart from logical inference, of future events? You think Dunne is telling the truth about his experiences? Or that the cases in Tyrrell’s book are properly verified, and can’t be explained away on the basis of chance?”
Blake Hartley frowned. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “The evidence is the sort that any court in the world would accept, if it concerned ordinary, normal events. Especially the cases investigated by the Society for Psychical Research: they have been verified. But how can anybody know of something that hasn’t happened yet? If it hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t exist, and you can’t have real knowledge of something that has no real existence.”
“Tyrrell discusses that dilemma, and doesn’t dispose of it. I think I can. If somebody has real knowledge of the future, then the future must be available to the present mind. And if any moment other than the bare present exists, then all time must be totally present; every moment must be perpetually coexistent with every other moment,” Allan said.
“Yes. I think I see what you mean. That was Dunne’s idea, wasn’t it?”
“No. Dunne postulated an infinite series of time dimensions, the entire extent of each being the bare present moment of the next. What I’m postulating is the perpetual coexistence of every moment of time in this dimension, just as every graduation on a yardstick exists equally with every other graduation, but each at a different point in space.”
“Well, as far as duration and sequence go, that’s all right,” the father agreed. “But how about the ‘Passage of Time’?”
“Well, time does appear to pass. So does the landscape you see from a moving car window. I’ll suggest that both are illusions of the same kind. We imagine time to be dynamic, because we’ve never viewed it from a fixed point, but if it is totally present, then it must be static, and in that case, we’re moving through time.”
“That seems all right. But what’s your car window?”
“If all time is totally present, then you must exist simultaneously at every moment along your individual life span,” Allan said. “Your physical body, and your mind, and all the thoughts contained in your mind, each at its appropriate moment in sequence. But what is it that exists only at the bare moment we think of as now?”
Blake Hartley grinned. Already, he was accepting his small son as an intellectual equal.
“Please, teacher; what?”
“Your consciousness. And don’t say, ‘What’s that?’ Teacher doesn’t know. But we’re only conscious of one moment; the illusory now. This is ‘now,’ and it was ‘now’ when you asked that question, and it’ll be ‘now’ when I stop talking, but each is a different moment. We imagine that all those nows are rushing past us. Really, they’re standing still, and our consciousness is whizzing past them.”
His father thought that over for some time. Then he sat up. “Hey!” he cried, suddenly. “If some part of our ego is time-free and passes from moment to moment, it must be extraphysical, because the physical body exists at every moment through which the consciousness passes. And if it’s extraphysical, there’s no reason whatever for assuming that it passes out of existence when it reaches the moment of the death of the body. Why, there’s logical evidence for survival, independent of any alleged spirit communication! You can toss out Patience Worth, and Mrs. Osborne Leonard’s Feda, and Sir Oliver Lodge’s son, and Wilfred Brandon, and all the other spirit-communicators, and you still have evidence.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Allan confessed. “I think you’re right. Well, let’s put that at the bottom of the agenda and get on with this time business. You ‘lose consciousness’ as in sleep; where does your consciousness go? I think it simply detaches from the moment at which you go to sleep, and moves backward or forward along the line of moment-sequence, to some prior or subsequent moment, attaching there.”
“Well, why don’t we know anything about that?” Blake Hartley asked. “It never seems to happen. We go to sleep tonight, and it’s always tomorrow morning when we wake; never day-before-yesterday, or last month, or next year.”
“It never … or almost never … seems to happen; you’re right there. Know why? Because if the consciousness goes forward, it attaches at a moment when the physical brain contains memories of the previous, consciously unexperienced, moment. You wake, remembering the evening before, because that’s the memory contained in your mind at that moment, and back of it are memories of all the events in the interim. See?”
“Yes. But how about backward movement, like this experience of yours?”
“This experience of mine may not be unique, but I never heard of another case like it. What usually happens is that the memories carried back by the consciousness are buried in the subconscious mind. You know how thick the wall between the subconscious and the conscious mind is. These dreams of Dunne’s, and the cases in Tyrrell’s book, are leakage. That’s why precognitions are usually incomplete and distorted, and generally trivial. The wonder isn’t that good
