46 pages • 1 hour read
Alan LightmanEinstein's Dreams
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Interlude 2-Chapter 24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Interlude 2 Summary
Content warning: This section of the guide mentions suicide.
Again, Besso and Einstein spend time together during the dream phase that leads to his theory of special relativity. Besso continues to worry about Einstein, who looks weak, tired, and run-down. Besso asks why Einstein married Mileva, but Einstein isn’t sure. He neglects her, as he does his son, Hans Albert. Einstein is singularly focused on his work, taking pride and joy not from his family or friend but from the fruits of his labor. Besso recalls how Einstein cawed like a crow for five minutes after seeing his name in print and knows that Einstein will devote himself to correcting a bottle centrifuge concept that he views as flawed and will send his correction to Rasmussen, the designer. Besso reveals that Einstein, in his work as a patent clerk, often anonymously expands on or corrects inventions delivered to the patent office while also writing corrections and enhancements for fellow physicists.
Chapter 17 Summary: “2 June 1905”
After the Interlude, the novel leaps back into Einstein’s dreams, resuming with the revelation of a world where time moves backward. Several examples are given, and this is the first dream in which Einstein himself appears as a dream character. He isn’t named but is a “middle-aged man” who accepts the Nobel Prize for physics in Stockholm from the Swedish Academy of Sciences and then ages backward to age 26, when he sits in an office with a pencil and pen. This is clearly Einstein’s Nobel Prize preceding his 1905 paper on special relativity. The old version of Einstein is eager for the young version filled with excitement and potential, which he’ll experience as time carries him to his youth. The story flows to an old man who has buried his friend and is now excited to dine with him as they grow younger. This friend is likely Besso.
In this dream, reality and the dreamworld have merged: Einstein involves himself and Besso in the dreamworld’s laws of time. In the Prologue, Einstein was sometimes unable to tell whether he was asleep or awake, dreaming or living. This dream provides a glimpse of Einstein living his life backward, perhaps unaware that he’s dreaming.
Chapter 18 Summary: “3 June 1905”
This chapter presents the following dreamworld scenario: “Imagine a world in which people live just one day” (83). In this dream, the lives of people are determined almost entirely by what season and what time of day they’re born. Summer babies grow up in light, while winter babies live in darkness. People born in daylight spend half their lives awash in light, working outdoors, and the other half in depressing darkness after night falls. Those born in darkness develop indoor trades and hide from the light when day comes: “In this world in which a human life spans but a single day, people heed time like cats straining to hear sounds in the attic” (85). Because they’re rushed in their limited time, they arrive at old age alone, knowing no one.
Chapter 19 Summary: “5 June 1905”
In this dreamworld, time is a sense like taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. Different people experienced time differently. Some experience it as racing, others as slow, still others as jumping backward and forward: “Philosophers sit in cafes on Amthausgasse and argue whether time really exists outside human perception” (89). Because everyone experiences the sense of time differently, a common understanding of time doesn’t exist, and consequently, people fail to connect with one another.
Chapter 20 Summary: “9 June 1905”
This dream supposes a near polar opposite to the dream of 3 June 1905 in which people live but a single day. In this world, people live forever. Society is divided into the “The Nows,” who want to do infinite things with their infinite time, and “The Laters,” who are in no hurry to do anything since time is eternal. The paradox of this world is that because no one ever dies, each person has an infinite number of relatives and, as a result, is never free: “Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die” (93). Only people who die by suicide are free, because they’ve broken from the infinite to the finite by choice.
Chapter 21 Summary: “10 June 1905”
This chapter muses, “Suppose that time is not a quantity, but a quality” (95). In this world, people observe but never measure time. An unnamed woman enjoys the company of her male companion; they don’t know how long they’ve been together, only that it has been good. The man’s mother watches the lovers dine but sees the boy as a child with childish qualities who ages quickly because she perceives the quality of this moment as poor. In this world, “events are triggered by other events, not by time” (97), leading to many misunderstandings between people who view actions in various qualities. People who attempt to quantify time turn to stone, which is then converted into building materials.
Chapter 22 Summary: “11 June 1905”
This dreamworld imagines that the concept of the future doesn’t exist: “In this world, time is a line that terminates at the present, both in reality and in the mind” (99). Because no one can imagine a future, goodbyes are tantamount to death, and people are reluctant to part from loved ones. Some choose to look to the past and marvel at the events that brought them to the forever present. Others choose to live in each moment and aren’t bothered by their lack of a future. In one vignette, a man watches the changing weather and is amazed that the world ends under rain, or clear sky, or at night. This man can see only the present, and the weather drives his interpretation of the present.
This world is the opposite of the world without memories. As in that world, in this one people either seize each day or “lie in their beds through the day” (101). Both worlds demonstrate that whether the future or the past exists is less important than how people choose to interpret their choices in this constraining environment.
Chapter 23 Summary: “15 June 1905”
Two months have passed since the date of the first dream on 14 April 1905. Einstein lives in this depleted half-dream, half-waking state for roughly two weeks: “In this world, time is a visible dimension” (102). As a result, people can see the future and choose to either linger in the present or leap to happier moments. A person refuses to leap into his future because he’s enjoying a moment with his mentor. In another vignette, a girl wishes to escape her poor home life and leaps into her future, finally pausing at 50, when her daughter is far away and her parents are dead. Her life was a blur that she can’t recall. As in many of the other worlds, this is one where people are stuck in time. No free will exists because the future is visible on a timeline. The only agency people have is how quickly or slowly to approach their predetermined futures.
Chapter 24 Summary: “17 June 1905”
In this world, time starts and stops randomly for brief milliseconds, but these imperceptible halts have a detrimental impact on people’s interactions with one another and their environment: “In this world time is not continuous. In this world time is discontinuous. Time is a stretch of nerve fibers: seemingly continuous from a distance but disjointed close up, with microscopic gaps between fibers” (107). The dream hones in on a man and woman on a date who sense the lapse in time and break off their relationship out of a fear that neither understands.
Interlude 2-Chapter 24 Analysis
This section begins with another of the novel’s Interludes. In this one, Besso considers Einstein’s obsession with improvement, as evident in his anonymously correcting designs as a patent clerk and returning them to their designers.
As in previous sections, the novel uses the paradox of each world to demonstrate how its drawback or inherent trait dooms, destroys, or otherwise diminishes the human spirit. These paradoxes often have little or nothing to do with time itself but concern how humans choose to interact with time. In the world where houses are on stilts and people grow prematurely old, their reaction to time is a choice that diminishes the quality of their lives. In the world where people can see the future, they make choices that haunt them as they either admit that they have no free will or fight against it. In nearly every world, humans’ choices about their environment dictate their well-being. Whether in a world that has free will or not, characters choose how to emotionally respond to the parameters of that world, thematically underscoring Humanity as an Absolute.
Similarly, the novel explores core human emotions in the dreamworlds to devastating effect. At times, the emotional impact of the world on its characters is more consuming than the theory of time that rules the world. Human nature, the novel implies, is ruled by emotion. Because emotion isn’t stripped from humanity in any of the worlds, humans suffer at various degrees as dictated by the rules governing time. For example, the world without memory is deeply sad, awash in loss, grief, and loneliness. The world in which time is infinite stifles its inhabitants with the curse of infinite family and thus lack of individuality. In the world where time moves backward, characters can’t view their future-selves without deep longing. In nearly every world, human emotion drives the response to time. In the world where time is a visible dimension, people’s decisions are driven entirely by human emotion, a theme that carries through most of the imagined worlds.
In the two juxtaposed dreams concerning length of life, characters live for only a day in one and infinitely in the other. The novel explains the benefits and drawbacks of each world, as well as the emotional cost. In the single-day world, people live as dictated by their birth season and time of day, and are alone and lonely at their death. In the infinite time world, people either act or refrain from action, cursed by never being alone and thus never whole. In both worlds, people have a choice as to whether to act or refrain from action. In these two worlds, free will exists, but time impacts it so heavily that the characters can’t remove time from their decision-making processes.
The world that explores the perception of time as a quality is similar to the one in which time is a sense. Both thematically emphasize Discovery at the Intersection of Art and Science, imagining time not as a scientific cornerstone of how the world works but as something driven entirely by human perception and thus open to variable interpretations, explanations, and truths. In these two worlds, the novel plays with the idea that time might not exist as a measurable, knowable thing but as a philosophical oddity that can never be fully understood. These two dreams stand apart from the others in their abstract, artistic, and whimsical interpretation of time. Likewise, the world where time doesn’t exist, only images do, entirely removes the idea of time as a foundational aspect of existence.
Several dreamworlds play with the speed at which time passes. In one, it stops and starts randomly after a millisecond’s delay. In another, it moves so quickly that a life begins and ends in a day. In several worlds, time moves differently depending on the speed or height of the populous and thus people can experience the passage of time differently. Time and speed are two concepts that ultimately become central to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, though they appear in the dreams as little more than imagined worlds.
In several dreamworlds, the novel plays with the directionality of time and its terminus. In one, time moves backward. In another, it can only move forward, and no past exists. In yet another world, people have a past but can have no future. In still another, time moves forward continuously without end. For characters in another world, time has no beginning because memory doesn’t exist. This fully explored range of directionality, beginnings, and ends understands time within Einstein’s real-world foundation of it as a beginning, a middle (present), and an end. Einstein, when awake, experiences time in a linear fashion wherein his time on Earth began at his birth and will end at his death. In all the various worlds defined by time’s directionality, beginning, and end, Einstein inflicts his real-world experiences with time on his dream interpretations, using variations on the linear model (which has a clear beginning and end) to consider how humanity might react to these changes.
