John William Dunne

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John William Dunne (1875 - 1949) established his career as an aeronautical engineer working on many early military aircraft.

After experiencing a precognitive dream of the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée, Martinique, Dunne became seriously interested in the nature of Time. Through years of experimentation with precognitive dreams and hypnagogic states Dunne posited that our experience of Time as linear was an illusion brought about by human consciousness. Dunne argued that past, present and future were in fact simultaneous and only experienced sequentially because of our mental perception of them. It was his belief that in the dream state the mind was not shackled in this way and was able to perceive events in the past and future with equal facility.

His two major works, An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934), elaborate on these ideas. As a scientific explanation for ideas of consciousness being explored on a wide scale at the time and as a theory corresponding to familiar ideas contained within the Mystical Traditions of the world's religions, they were enthusiastically embraced by such figures as Aldous Huxley and J. B. Priestley who based his play Time and the Conways on them. There are also parallels between Dunne's theory of Time and that put forward in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets although whether Eliot was directly inspired by Dunne is not clear.