Hasheesh dreams, because they so often occur during some momentary lapse from normal consciousness and are therefore measurable by its time scale, are particularly rich in the evidence of the looping of time.  Fitzhugh Ludlow narrates, in The Hasheesh Eater, the dreams that visited him in the brief interval between two of twenty or more awakenings, on his walk homeward after his first experience with the drug.  He says, “I existed by turns in different places and various states of being.  Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice.  Now Alp on Alp towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle.  Now in the primeval silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice-gales over a river whose waves at once sent up clouds of music and perfume.  My soul changes to a vegetable essence, thrilled with a strange and unimagined ecstasy.”

Earlier in the same evening, when he was forced to keep awake in order not to betray his condition, the dream time-scale appears to have imposed itself upon his waking consciousness with the following curious effect.  A lady asked him some question connected with a previous conversation.  He says, “As mechanically as an automaton I began to reply.  As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced that it was some one else who spoke, and in another world.  I sat and listened:  still the voice kept speaking.  Now for the first time I experienced that vast change which hasheesh makes in all measurements of time.  The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama; the last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence.  Its enunciation might have occupied years.  I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun.”

This well-known fact, that we cannot measure dreams by our time scale, proves that subjective time does not correspond with objective, and that the “dream organ” of consciousness has a time scale of its own.  If in our waking state we experience one kind of time, and in dreams quite another, the solution of the mystery should be sought in the vehicle of consciousness, for clearly the limit of impressionability or power of response of the vehicle establishes the time scale, just as the size of the body with relation to objects establishes the space scale.  Time must be different for the ant and the elephant, for example, as space is different.

Our sense of time is wholly dependent upon the rapidity with which impressions succeed one another.  Were we capable of receiving only one impression an hour, like a bell struck every hour with a hammer, the ordinary term of life would seem very short.  On the other hand, if our time sense were always as acute as it is in dreams, uncounted aeons would seem to be lived through in the interval between childhood and old age.