Space in Dreams
However preposterous may appear to us this notion that the waking state, in which we feel ourselves most potent and alive, is really one of inhibition—that the world is only a “shoal of time”—it is curiously borne out by the baffling phenomena of dreams and is in perfect accord with the Higher Space Hypothesis. The possibility of shaking off the grip of sleep under appropriate circumstances, the fact that we can watch in our sleep, and awake at the right moment, that we can sleep and still watch and keep awake in regard to special objects and particular persons—these things form insuperable difficulties for all those plausible, and apparently scientific, theories of sleep current in the West; but they fit perfectly with the Eastern idea that “he, not asleep himself, looks down upon the sleeping.” And to the questions, “How, and from whence?” in the light of our hypothesis we may answer, “By the curvature of time, consciousness escapes into the fourth dimension.”
Myers shows that he was in need of just this clue in order to account for some of the dream experiences recorded in Human Personality, since he asks for “an intermediate conception of space—something between space as we know it in the material world and space as we imagine it to disappear in the ideal world.” He suggests that in dreams and trance there may be a clearer and more complete perception of space than is at present possible to us. A corresponding sublimation of the time sense is no less necessary to account for time in dreams. Although we seem to triumph over space and time to such a tune as to eliminate them, dream experiences have both form and sequence. Now because form presupposes space, and time is implicit in sequence, there arises the necessity for that “intermediate conception” of both space and time provided by our hypothesis.