went on to suggest that this “series” of time dimensions extends infinitely, and each person’s consciousness exists in this infinite series of dimensions at once—hence the term “Serialism.”


Even though, as Dunne postulated, each person has access to all of these dimensions at any time, he determined that a person’s consciousness habitually follows their third- dimensional perspective instant-to-instant through time while the third-dimensional self is awake. When the third- dimensional self is asleep, though, attention wanders, and the person’s consciousness in the fifth dimension (or higher) focuses on different moments in the fourth dimension—in other words, different moments in the entirety of a person’s lifetime. Dreams, then, according to Dunne, are our consciousnesses observing our lives from higher dimensions and exploring our past and future experiences. With this, Dunne had devised an explanation for his and his subjects’ nighttime “clairvoyance.”


Dunne’s theory was not ultimately embraced by the larger scientific community. In the time since Dunne proposed Serialism, Einstein’s theory of relativity has shown to be a much more accurate descriptor of the nature and behavior of spacetime. But Dunne’s theories surely sparked the imaginations of his contemporaries and served as an important step in the path toward a deeper understanding of our universe.•


FIGURE 2


The third, fourth, and fifth dimensions can be thought of as the different components of a Youtube video, like this one HERE that tracks across a computer keyboard. A third-dimensional observer is analogous to a still image captured at any instant that the video is paused. The fourth- dimensional observer is like the grey timeline bar at the bottom of the screen, which contains every moment of the video in one entity. The fifth-dimensional observer is akin to well, you, the viewer, who can jump between moments on the timeline bar and watch the video forwards or, in theory, backwards. The fifth-dimensional observer’s point of attention is symbolized by the location of the red bar, which tells the viewer where in the “life” of the video they are watching.


TIME AND THE CONWAYS UPSTAGE GUIDE


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