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.
Prologue-Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Albert Einstein sits in a quiet patent office in Berne, Switzerland at six o’clock in the morning, holding his theory of time, which he’ll mail today after the typist cleans up his notes. He’s a patent clerk who has been dreaming about the nature of time for months, and he’s tired. He believes that all his dreams represent possible theories of time, though only one seems right for this world. He struggles to discern his waking self from his dreams.
Chapter 1 Summary: “14 April 1905”
The novel leaps into a dream vignette through a narrator that is likely Einstein himself. In this dream, Einstein imagines a world in which, “time is a circle, bending back on itself” (6). Most of humanity is unaware that they’ve lived before and will live again in exactly the same way. The dream zooms in on an unnamed woman in Germany whose husband is dying of cancer; he has died and will always die in exactly the same painful way. She’s unaware of this. Those who are vaguely aware of the cyclicality of time are “stricken with the knowledge that they cannot change a single action, a single gesture” (8) and live tortured existences. This version of time calls free will into question; the cyclicality of time results in world of predeterminism.
Chapter 2 Summary: “16 April 1905”
This is Einstein’s second dream, wherein he imagines a world in which “time is like a flow of water” (10), which can be altered by outside forces. People, things, and animals are sometimes transported through time, getting trapped in the past. The dream hones in on a nameless woman in Berne who hides in the shadows, scared that any small movement she makes could disrupt the flow of time and change the future. She knows every storyline that has led to the future she once knew, and she spends her time trying not to change anything. She lives in fear of disrupting the future by altering the past. These time travelers are tortured by their knowledge and their inability to participate in society. Time travelers “can be found in every village and every town” (12), highlighting the extent of potential risk to the future.
Chapter 3 Summary: “19 April 1905”
Einstein dreams of a world in which, at each decision point, three possible scenarios happen simultaneously: “For in this world, time has three dimensions like space” (16). An unnamed man in Berne decides against seeing a woman he fancies again. At the same time, he visits her again. They marry and spend their lives together. In a third, simultaneous world, he sees her again but leaves unfulfilled. All three lives split apart and continue on from this one pivotal decision point, and each subsequent decision splits into three outcomes, which results in an infinite number of worlds. The paradox of this world is that the people in it are aware of the infinite number of outcomes that could result from every decision, and consequently, they either shun responsibility for their actions or spend their lives attempting to commit to only the best choices.
Chapter 4 Summary: “24 April 1905”
In this dreamworld, two types of time exist: “mechanical time and […] body time” (18). These two contradictory theories of time coexist, showing time as subjective. In this world, those who believe in body time don’t acknowledge mechanical time, and vice versa. The mechanical time proponents believe in science without art, while the body time followers believe in the beauty of life and art, and they doubt the mechanical aspects. These two sides represent the internal (and societal) struggle between head and heart. This version of time grapples with the conflict between logic and emotion, science and art, head and heart, a central theme in the author’s life and work as a physicist, novelist, and educator in the sciences and humanities. Through this theory of time as subjective and all-defining, the novel demonstrates what a society divided by head and heart could look like: “Each time is true, but the truths are not the same” (20).
Chapter 5 Summary: “26 April 1905”
In this dreamworld, time moves more quickly the closer to Earth’s core one is. As a result, people have built their homes on stilts perched on the peaks of mountains. Time is the most valuable thing, and the length of time one gets links to happiness. At great heights, people live longer than the valley dwellers and are smug. Over time, people forget why they went to the mountains, and “become thin like the air, bony, old before their time” (24). In this world, the human obsession with time eventually strips people of it, showing the folly of valuing time only for time’s sake.
Chapter 6 Summary: “28 April 1905”
In this dreamworld, time is an absolute that nears Godliness in its precision. People worship time because “nothing could be universal and not be divine” (25). An unnamed woman who recently lost her job takes solace in the march of time, when she’ll meet her friend for tea: “For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable” (27). Like the previous dream, this one explores the concept of human happiness as tied to the understanding of time. In this world people don’t find peace or joy in one another, but in the certainty of time as absolute and predictable. In the previous dream, people worked to preserve time for time’s sake. Time itself was the reward. In this world, people act, but their faith lies only in time, which is their solace.
Chapter 7 Summary: “3 May 1905”
In this dream vignette, cause and effect have no temporal relationship: “Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first” (29). The text gives several examples of the turmoil that this causes, including crime becoming rampant after the Zurich council and police enact strict security measures. Which came first is unclear. A woman in a garden blushes, later meeting the man who caused her to do so. Scientists can do nothing because no linear logic exists, while artists revel in chaos and flourish; instead, “each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own” (31), and as a result, impulses reign and every word is taken at face value. This world is an imagined counterpoint to the previous one, in which time was constant and absolute.
Chapter 8 Summary: “4 May 1905”
In this dreamworld, people perceive time moving forward only in relation to the progression of events. The dream explores the human connection to time through the passage of events. Little happens as two uninspiring couples dine together and comment on how their lives are much the same as at their last dinner a year earlier: “If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly” (35). Because time and events are linked, barely moving at all slows time down, while moving with ambition increases the passage of time. Consequently, life moves slowly. This story further explores time as presented in the 26 April 1905 dream, in which time is a precious thing to be protected at all costs.
Prologue-Chapter 8 Analysis
In the Prologue, Einstein is described as sometimes incapable of telling whether he’s asleep or awake. At long last he has arrived at a theory of time that seems plausible to him, having struggled through many dreams that offered alternative explanations for time, its role in society, its impact on humanity, and its mechanical properties. The Prologue sets the scene (Berne, Switzerland) and introduces Einstein (a young patent clerk with an obsession) and his goal (to understand time), and then each chapter describes a dream vignette that explores a world where time reacts differently than it does in the world Einstein inhabits while awake. He’s tired and weak but is no longer troubled by his obsession with time. The novel’s opening presumes that readers know who Einstein was and his general contribution to physics, and that they have a basic understanding of his biography. His past isn’t explained, and neither is his future. Like one of the vignettes, he exists in the Prologue only in the present.
The novel plays with time and the order of events. Initially, Einstein is depicted after his dreams have led him to the theory of relativity, sitting in the patent office at six o’clock in the morning, waiting for the typist. The next chapter jumps to his first dream, several months prior. The novel then follows a series of chronological dream vignettes, interspersed with several Interludes that take place during Einstein’s dream phase. The novel ends in an Epilogue at eight o’clock in the morning on the same day as the Prologue, when the typist finally arrives. Thus, time hardly moves at all between the Prologue and Epilogue, while time moves quickly between dreams and haphazardly in the Interludes. The chaotic nature of the novel’s structure is itself a statement about the passage of time.
The novel leaps from the conscious world, in which Einstein has worked out his theory of relativity, to the interior world of Einstein’s imaginative dreams, in which he struggles to understand how time works and the human connection to it. In this imagined scenario, the world’s most famous physicist reaches his theory through a wild exploration of his dreamworlds. He succeeds because he holds neither heart nor head above the other. In 1929, in an interview with George Sylvester Viereck, Einstein said, “I believe in intuitions and inspirations.” He continued, “I am enough of the artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge” (Viereck, George. “What Life Means to Einstein.” The Saturday Evening Post, 1929). This informs one of the novel’s central themes: Discovery at the Intersection of Art and Science. In Lightman’s novel, Einstein arrives at the world-altering theory of relativity after exploring multiple ideas through the lens of his imaginative dreams. For the author, himself a professor of both physics and the humanities, the intersection between art and science is where breakthroughs are made. The novel is a creation that blends theoretical physics with short stories, informing and educating while offering entertainment, philosophy, and beauty. Lightman’s creative prose balances the complicated theories and paradoxes that each vignette explores, which gives the novel a very human tone despite its academic content. A thread that runs throughout many of the dreams is the potential dangers of a society that doesn’t balance logic and art, regardless of how time functions.
Central to all the dreams is the human animal, introducing another of the novel’s central themes: Humanity as an Absolute. Because the characters in the various dream vignettes are unnamed, they take on representational qualities, demonstrating how humanity responds to and interacts with time in various imagined worlds and scenarios. By giving these nameless characters feelings, hopes, and families, the dreams clearly demonstrate how humanity might respond to the various concepts of time in very human terms. The nameless character are symbolic and static, they appear and disappear from the page, unchanged. As such, they’re meant to show how time tortures, blesses, or otherwise impacts people in a particular world. By zooming in on specific lives rather than societal wholes, the novel conveys empathy for imagined characters living in imagined worlds. This connection between reader and character enables the readers to analyze theories of time in terms of impact on human lives rather than the more sterile, common understanding of time as it impacts the cosmos abstractly.
