Dunne, J. W

(1875–1949)



English investigator of dreams.
By profession, John William Dunne was one of the earliest important aircraft designers. However, from childhood onward, he harbored a conviction that he had a message for humanity. When he attended a séance, the medium told him that he would be a great medium himself, the greatest the world had ever seen. He never was, but he made a major contribution to ideas of the paranormal.
In the spring of 1902, being then in South Africa, he had a vivid and distressing dream in which he stood on a mountainside where the ground was fissured and jets of vapor were spurting up. He recognized the place as an island he had dreamed of before, with a volcano on it, which he knew, in the dream, was going to explode. A nightmare sequence followed in which he was trying to save the lives of 4,000 inhabitants. He shouted at the local authorities, who were French, but was merely sent from one official to another. The mayor, “Monsieur le Maire,” was going out and told Dunne to return the next day when the office would be open. Throughout, he kept saying, “Four thousand people will be killed unless…” When a newspaper arrived, its main item was an account of the eruption of Mont Pelée on the French island of Martinique, in the West Indies. Dunne noted a headline as saying that an estimated 4,000 had died, the number in his dream. However, he reexamined the paper some years afterward and found that it gave the number as 40,000. His dream had anticipated, not exactly the event, but his own reading of the news item about it, which dropped a zero and was at variance with later reports.
This dream was not isolated; he had others that were also interesting. He began writing his dreams down, and often noticed waking events later that corresponded with them. Friends of his agreed to try. Neither he nor the others ever foresaw complete scenes, but they had previsions of parts of them, in the form of isolated images or images differently grouped.
For instance, an artist dreamed of a lifeboat painted the customary red and blue, standing on green turf with a net over it. Next day, he saw a boat painted red and blue like a lifeboat, similarly pointed at both ends, and standing on turf. It was not a lifeboat and there was no net, but some distance off he saw another boat that did have a net over it. A cousin of Dunne’s dreamed of meeting a German woman in a public garden, who wore a black-and-white striped blouse and a black skirt and had a distinctive hairstyle. Soon afterward, she stayed at a hotel and was told of another woman staying there, thought to be German. She met this guest in the hotel grounds, looking very much as in the dream, but the setting was different.
Dunne published his findings in 1927 in a book entitled An Experiment with Time, with his theorizing as to what happened and how it happened. The book sold well, and for some years, it was fashionable to keep a dream journal. The difficulty here is that dreams must be written down immediately on waking or they will probably fade away, and not many people have the necessary determination or stamina. However, some of the journal-keepers believed that they were having experiences of the right kind, and the popular dramatist J. B. Priestley wrote several plays exploiting the idea of irregularities in time.
In spite of his own impressive results, Dunne rejected the notion that he had a special prophetic talent. He inferred from the occasional successes of others that the thing

could happen for people in general and no one was exceptional in this respect. A sustained and fairly systematic project suggested otherwise. He assembled six volunteers—students at Oxford—and they, together with himself, wrote down their dreams: theoretically, until each had completed at least fourteen records. In practice, four of the students did not get so far, but two others produced more than the required number, and so did Dunne. Altogether, eighty-eight dreams were recorded. Thirty-four showed a credible resemblance to something in waking life within two and a half months before or after, usually with some degree of distortion. The records are summarized, with a few marginal cases not finally judged to be significant, in a later edition of Dunne’s book. Tabulating the thirty-four that he accepted, he counted images that related to the past as P-resemblances, images that were fulfilled in the future as F-resemblances, and he classified the resemblances under the headings “good,” “moderate,” and “indifferent.”
In all, there were fourteen P-resemblances and twenty F-resemblances. Since the natural expectation was that P-resemblances would predominate yet the reverse was true, Dunne’s belief that dreams could relate to the future seemed to be borne out. But the same did not apply to his belief that it could happen to anyone, without distinction. Dunne himself, a practiced dreamer, had five F-resemblances. The volunteers designated as B, C, and F had none; A had three, and D had two. E, however, had ten, as many as all the rest put together. Moreover, E had three “good” ones and the other five volunteers had only one among them. Dunne had one himself. The logical conclusion was that the volunteers could all be eliminated except E. Dunne resisted it; he said she had no “special faculty for precognition”; it was just that “her dreams were more clearly related to distinctive episodes of waking life.” Admittedly, she did better with P-resemblances, too, but she was manifestly unusual.
Against this reading of Dunne’s results may be set a study more favorable to him by Louisa E. Rhine, who claimed to have collected hundreds of precognitive experiences, mostly in dreams. However, this was published in 1955, and her criteria may have been unduly elastic. The year 1968 saw the inception of a long-term project of a fairly objective kind, which slowly accumulated data supporting the view that while such experiences do seem to happen, they happen for a minority only. Robert Nelson founded the Central Premonition Registry in New York. He allowed premonitions of any kind, including dreams that the dreamers thought revealed the future, and classified and filed them. In several thousand cases, he judged that only a very few were convincingly predictive—about one percent, and presumably even these were not all given in dreams. Such a meager result could have been dismissed altogether if it were not for the distribution being skewed. Half the good ones came from only five persons, each of whom scored several times.
Among those who attracted special interest was an English “psychic,” Malcolm Bessent. During one hectic night of dreaming late in November 1969, he had what he construed as advance notice of a disaster involving a Greek tanker owned by the shipping magnate Onassis; the death of the French ex-president Charles de Gaulle; and a change of government in Britain. He even had approximate time limits. His forecasts were written down, witnessed, and filed at the Central Premonition Registry. All three were fulfilled. Bessent was invited to take part in tests at the dream laboratory of the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. Several times after dreaming, he gave descriptions—not in precise detail but close enough to be interesting—of pictures that he was shown later.
Dream research became easier and more exact with the discovery of REMs, the rapid eye movements that accompany dreaming.

When these are observed, the sleeper can be awakened and asked to tape an account of the dream before memory fades. But cases continue to be noted of Dunne-type experiences on quite the old lines, happening to exceptional individuals. One such, Chris Robinson, was the subject of a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television program in October 1994. He had dreams that he could recognize as anticipatory, usually of some disaster, and recorded them promptly. When these were decoded, they were borne out by events often enough to interest the police. One of them foreshadowed a terrorist attack on an Air Force base; the security officer increased the number of guards for a week, then returned to normal, and the attack followed a month later. Robinson also dreamed in advance of the murder of a photographer in Somalia and warned the photographer’s mother, unhappily without effect.
Possibly, Dunne was correct, and many people have precognitive dreams but simply forget them or fail to recognize the fulfillment when it comes. It can only be said that the available evidence does not point that way. Whoever is right, the question remains. The thing apparently does happen, often or not. How does it happen?
Dunne developed a theory of his own with diagrams, scientific arguments, and philosophical deductions. As presented, it is too complicated for comfort. At the heart of it is a principle called serialism, involving much more than the explanation of dreams. Consciousness and time are regarded as “serial.” What Dunne seems to be arguing is that if you try to pin them down, you get into a regress with no visible end.
Suppose an individual, X, is experiencing something quite in the ordinary way—looking out of a window, for example. X may be aware of the experience as it happens and verbalize it and reflect on it, but the X who does this is distinct from the X who is simply looking out of the window. We could speak of X1 and X2. However, awareness of the X1 + X2 situation and reflection on that brings in an X3. And so on. With time, you can say as you go along a highway, “I’m moving through space at fifty miles an hour.” But how fast is the world moving through time as you do it? At the rate of an hour per… what? Measurement involves an additional dimension, but, again, there is a regress. Our normal time may be called T1; beyond it is the additional dimension with a time that may be called T2. And so on.
In another book, Dunne uses an analogy, the impossibility of painting a picture of a scene with yourself in it, painting. The picture must include not only yourself but your easel with the picture on it; and that smaller picture must include yourself with the easel and the picture on it… and so on again.
Dunne thinks the regresses reach a term in some kind of ultimate observer, a superbeing at infinity, of whom we are all parts. It is doubtful whether his application of serialism to dream prevision really has to go so far. Individual consciousness is in T1, seeming to move along it, and aware of only a brief “now” at a given moment. There is also consciousness in T2, and the T2 observer, in the additional dimension, can survey an indefinitely large part of the individual’s life span in T1, including what is future for the individual. From the T2 vantage point, this is like looking down from a height on a road with someone walking along it. The T2 consciousness can take in miles of the road, ahead of the person walking as well as behind. The T1 walker, who is actually on the road, sees only the immediate neighborhood. (This image was used by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century to show how God could have foreknowledge.) When the individual in T1 is asleep, the T2 consciousness can get through and communicate glimpses of the sleeper’s future—the road ahead—probably garbled.
As sometimes happens with puzzling phenomena, speculation diverts attention from

the facts. They are interesting as far as they go. But Dunne drastically limits prophetic scope. Dream prevision, on his showing, foreshadows experiences of the dreamer. Public events cannot be foreseen objectively as such; if they seem to be, as with Bessent, the key lies in Dunne’s volcano dream—the dream imagery is formed not by the future event itself but by the dreamer’s future experience of reading about it in a paper or learning of it otherwise. All the cases in the Oxford experiment were, in fact, personal/
Moreover, since the consciousness on the T2 level surveys only the individual’s mortal existence on the T1 level, no dream transmitted from T2 can portend anything after the individual’s death. And it appears that no dream ever does, within Dunne’s purview. He believed in an immortality in other dimensions, but it was not open to investigation and not relevant to what he was discussing. The precognition that he claims to define and account for is of no help at all with, say, the more remarkable prophecies of Nostradamus, which extend not merely beyond Nostradamus’s lifetime but into a future centuries away. Some of these prophesies are more challenging, more pressing in the demand for an explanation, than the dreams recorded by Dunne.
All the foregoing opens up questions that were already exercising minds in the Middle Ages. If the T2 consciousness can see what is future for the individual in T1, does that mean that the future is there, so to speak, and unalterable? The normal rejection of such a view raises problems, notably the much-discussed problem of prevention. If a dreamer foresees something undesirable, like an accident (that is, with no ordinary reason for anxiety or expectation), and goes to the place where it is foreseen happening and takes action so that it doesn’t, what did the dreamer see in the first place? A television critic, discussing Chris Robinson and his warnings to the police, understandably wondered. Louisa E. Rhine, in the study in which she claimed to have assembled hundreds of cases of precognition, also claimed that they included cases of prevention.
Dunne’s attempt to deal with this issue is not convincing. An arguable conjecture is that the T2 consciousness doesn’t see the future accident as a fact, but does see a situation in which it will be a possibility, and communicates that awareness to the individual in T1 as a dream-image of it actually happening, in the hope that the individual will take notice and forestall the possibility. But this would imply an independent purposiveness at the T2 level that An Experiment with Time does not provide for.
One literary point. William Morris presents his fantasy of the future, News from Nowhere, as a dream, if an impossibly long one. But he is following an old fictional convention (Bunyan does it, too, in The Pilgrim’s Progress), which has nothing to do with real dreaming or Dunne-style precognition.