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.

THE PHENOMENON OF PAUSE

Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to:  think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, of arrested physical activity, universal throughout nature.  The cell itself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep—­“perchance to dream,” Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology and psychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear, feel and do not feel, in successive instants.  We are asleep, in other words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment—­and perhaps age by age as well.

Where is consciousness during these intervals, long or short, when the senses fail to respond to the stimuli of the external world?  It is somewhere else, awake to some other environment.  Though we may not be able to verify this from our own experience, there are methods whereby it can be verified.  Clairvoyance is one of these, hypnotism is another—­that kind of hypnotism whereby an entranced person is made to give a report of his excursions and adventures in the mysterious House of Sleep.  It is a well-known fact that these experiences increase in intensity, coherence and in a certain sort of omniscience, directly in proportion to the depth of the trance.  The revelations obtained in this way are sometimes amazing.  The inherent defect of this method of obtaining information is the possibility of deception, and for that reason science still looks askance at all evidence drawn from this source.  But in essaying to write a book about the fourth dimension from any aspect but the mathematical, the author has put himself outside the pale of orthodox science, so he is under no compulsion to ignore a field so rich merely because it appears to be tainted by a certain amount of fallibility and is even under suspicion of fraud.  Diseased oysters, though not edible, produce pearls, and a pearl of great price is the object of this quest.  Let us glance, therefore, at the findings of hypnotism and kindred phenomena.

VII THE NIGHT SIDE OF CONSCIOUSNESS