Einstein's Dreams

In this world, time is a human construct that ensnares people, causing misery. The dream follows pilgrims to a cathedral in Rome, where thousands wait for their turn to pay homage to the Great Clock. Every person must make this pilgrimage, and everyone despises it. Before the invention of the Great Clock, people measured time by nature’s movements. Once the Great Clock was made, all other clocks were destroyed: “They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives” (118).

This chapter presents the following scenario: “In this world, time is a local phenomenon,” (120). Each city experiences time differently and thus time keeps people separated by place. Here, time and place are linked, but people aren’t. People who travel to another place experience time differently there than in their departure city, where time may have sped or slowed. Because cities are isolated from one another, they develop unique cultures that don’t interact or react with outside forces and are thus fascinating and unique. Paradoxically, “the abundances caused by isolation are stifled by the same isolation” (122), and although it’s a world of wild abundance and creativity, no one will ever know because they’re stuck in their locale of time. This dreamworld is one of many in which people are stuck in time and can’t liberate themselves from time in order to live full, compelling lives.

In this world, time is fixed, ensnaring its inhabitants in its rigidness: “Every action, every thought, every breath of wind, every flight of birds is completely determined, forever” (124). The characters in this world observe their lives, unable to change them but aware of their conscious desire to do so. Because the future is fixed, and they’re aware of their lack of free will, they live dull lives. There is no morality; there is only the future. Like several previous dreams, this one deals heavily with the concept of free will versus predeterminism. This world completely obliterates free will, and the future is known but unchangeable.

In this dreamworld, a man stands still and alone, playing the violin and looking out the window. His wife and child are downstairs. As he plays, another man appears, and another, until an infinite number are all playing violin and looking out the window and thinking: “For time is like the light between two mirrors. Time bounces back and forth, producing an infinite number of images, of melodies, of thoughts” (128). Each can feel the others. However, when he stops playing, he remembers nothing of the multiples of men and sounds and thoughts. This dream is likely a personal dream that has merged Einstein’s work on the theory of time and his marriage and life in Berne.

In this dreamworld, the past shifts continuously and thus has drastic impacts on the present (and future). A middle-aged man works with head bent, avoids people, and lives in shame because in grade school he once peed his pants. That one shameful moment defined his ever after: “In a world of shifting past, these memories are wheat in wind, fleeting dreams, shapes in clouds. Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night” (133). This dream can be categorized with others that challenge time’s directionality of or permanence: the dreamworld in which people have no memories; the dreamworld where people’s pasts can change because of their interactions with unwitting time travelers; the dreamworld where the past doesn’t exist.

In addition, this world questions how time and the perception of it are linked. The man who peed his pants could have perceived himself as a capable adult but was mired in the perception of himself in wet pants. This also suggests that one’s perception of time is malleable.

In the final dream, birds are time: “Indeed each man and each woman desired a bird. Because this flock of nightingales is time” (135). The people desire the birds so that they can stop time. The paradox of this world is that those who want to stop time the most are too frail to catch the birds, and children, who can catch them easily, don’t wish to stop time (or don’t consider doing so) because they have so much. On the rare occasions when a bird is caught, the moment is frozen until the bird, and that moment, withers. As in other dreams, this one shows the futility of attempting to control, trap, or alter time’s reality. Fixating too heavily on prolonging one’s time results in the loss of more time, as in the mountain world and the world moving at high speeds.

Einstein is in the patent office at eight o’clock in the morning on the same day as the Prologue. He’s still waiting for the typist to arrive. She walks in at t 8:04 am,. At 8:06 am, Einstein gives her his theory of time, which she types. Einstein looks out the window, gazing at the Alps and at birds looping in the sky: “He feels empty. He has no interest in reviewing patents or talking to Besso or thinking of physics” (139).