An Experiment With Time - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

In literature, interest in Dunne's theory may be reflected in T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton, from Four Quartets, which opens with the lines:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

J. B. Priestley used Dunne's theory directly in his play Time and the Conways, professing in his introduction that he believed the theory to be true. Other writers contemporaneous to Dunne who expressed enthusiasm for his ideas included Aldous Huxley, who was also interested in the expansion of human consciousness to experience time, and Adolfo Bioy Casares, who mentioned this book in the introduction to his novel The Dream of Heroes (1954).

Charles Chilton used Dunne's analogy of time as a book to explain time travel in his radio play Journey Into Space. Philippa Pearce's childhood fantasy Tom's Midnight Garden also makes use of Dunne's ideas.

The idea that time might be experienced differently in enfolded space is one posited by quantum physicist David Bohm, who also believed that consciousness defined how we perceived the world. Bohm, who called for a revolution in human consciousness to free us from the old, Newtonian, mechanistic understanding of the universe, even posited that through a transformation of consciousness Time could possibly cease to exist in the way we perceive it now (cf., "The Ending Of Time" by Jiddu Krishnamurti and Dr David Bohm).

The book is instrumental in Dr Philip Raven's production of his future history as 'edited' by H G Wells in his 1933 work The Shape of Things to Come.

The 1964 novel Froomb! by British writer John Lymington refers to and is inspired by some of Dunne's concepts. The protagonist, intended to be scientifically "killed" and revived to bring back an account of Heaven, is instead physically transported into the future, a parallel "time-band." He attempts to communicate with the controller of the experiment through dreams.

In the 1970 children's TV series, Timeslip, a time bubble allows two children to travel between past, present and future. Much of the show's time travel concepts were based on An Experiment with Time.

An Experiment with Time is referenced in the book Sidetripping by William S. Burroughs and Charles Gatewood.

It is also mentioned in the book "Last Men In London" by Olaf Stapledon (1932).

It is also mentioned in the story "Murder in the Gunroom" by H. Beam Piper, and in "Elsewhen" by Robert A. Heinlein.

The ideas of Dunne also form the basis for "The Dark Tower" a short story by C. S. Lewis, and the unpublished novel, "The Notion Club Papers" by J. R. R. Tolkien. Both Tolkien and Lewis were members of the Inklings.

In the 2002 French movie Irréversible, one of the characters is seen reading the book by Dunne. The movie also investigates the aspects of the book through the style of filming, in that the story is told backwards, with each beginning sequence beginning either minutes or hours prior to the one which preceded it in the narrative. Also, the tagline is Le temps détruit tout meaning "Time destroys everything" – it is the first phrase spoken and the last phrase written.