“A luminous and helpful idea is that time is but a relative mode of regarding things; we progress through phenomena at a certain definite pace, and this subjective advance we interpret in an objective manner, as if events moved necessarily in this order and at this precise rate.  But that may be only one mode of regarding them.  The events may be in some sense of existence always, both past and future, and it may be we who are arriving at them, not they which are happening.  The analogy of a traveller in a railway train is useful; if he could never leave the train nor alter its pace he would probably consider the landscapes as necessarily successive and be unable to conceive their co-existence * * * We perceive, therefore, a possible fourth dimensional aspect about time, the inexorableness of whose flow may be a natural part of our present limitations.  And if we once grasp the idea that past and future may be actually existing, we can recognize that they may have a controlling influence on all present action, and the two together may constitute the ‘higher plane’ or totality of things after which, as it seems to me, we are impelled to seek, in connection with the directing of form or determinism, and the action of living being consciously directed to a definite and preconceived end.”

Sir Oliver’s illustration is somewhat akin to that of a person who sees a moving-picture show for the first time, and does not know how it is produced.  To him it looks as if the events of the pictured story actually were developing and happening in time, whereas, in reality the whole picture is existing at one time.  Its past, present and future is already pictured, and may be seen by one who knows the secret and how to look for the past or future scene; while, to the ordinary observer, the scene progresses in sequence, the present being followed by something else which is at this moment “in the future,” and therefore, unknowable.  To the senses of the ordinary observer only the present is in existence; while, in fact, the “future” is equally truly in existence at the same time, although not evident to the senses of the observer.  Think over this a little, and let the idea sink into your mind—­it may help you to understand something concerning the mystery of future-time clairvoyance, prevision, or second-sight.

Time, you know, is far more relative than we generally conceive it.  It is a scientific fact that a person in the dream state may cover years of time in a dream that occupies only a few seconds of time.  Persons have nodded and awakened immediately afterwards (as proved by others present in the room), and yet in that moment’s time they have dreamed of long journeys to foreign lands, great campaigns of war, etc.  Moreover, a loud sound (a pistol shot, for instance) which has awakened a sleeping person, has also set into effect a dream-state train of circumstances, constituting a long dream-state story which, after many events and happenings, terminated in the shot