Mid Week Inspirational Quotes

useless human beings, who formerly vegetated upon a soil that seemed barren of everything else.” The sheep were brought in by hundreds of thousands, and to some of the retreating population they became known as “the lairds’ four-footed clansmen.” Meanwhile, the clansmen themselves had three principal choices. They could move to the edge of the sea, which they hated, and live on fish, which most of them also hated. They could move to the Lowlands. Or they could emigrate to other continents. Into the middle of this tide went many of the original clansmen of Colonsay, some early, some later on, some after long stays on the mainland, others more directly from the island, some settling in the Lowlands, notably in Renfrewshire, others going to Australia, Canada, or the United States. Of those who left the Highlands as a result of the clearances, my own particular forebears were among the last. When my great-grandfather married a Lowland girl, in West Lothian, in 1858, he was in the middle of what proved to be a brief stopover between the bens and the glens and Ohio. He worked in a West Lothian coal mine, and the life underground apparently inspired him to keep moving. Serfdom in Scottish coal mines had been abolished in 1799, but Scottish miners of the mid-nineteenth century might as well have been serfs. They worked regular shifts of fifteen hours and sometimes finished their week with a twenty-four-hour day. Six-year-old girls in the mines did work that later, in times of relative enlightenment, was turned over to ponies. Wages were higher and hours a little shorter for mine work in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, and my great-

the simple likelihood of drawing a connection between a dream and a waking experience dwindles with temporal distance from the dream. At this point, it is hard to say if there is any kind of probability curve defining some temporal sweet spot when you are likeliest to identify a waking experience relating to a prior dream. This is one of the many, many open questions that we need armies of precognitive dreamworkers with fat dream journals to help figure out. While the bulk of my precognitive hits occur within about three days of a dream, it is not uncommon to find hits up to a couple weeks after a dream, as well as at yearly intervals (we will discuss calendrical resonances in more detail later). Dunne recommended returning to your dreams up to two days afterward and thereafter discarding dream records. He lived before word processors, and since no one would have the time to check all their dreams on an indefinite daily basis, he felt you had to set limits to make your search most effective. In our day of computer files, it is easy to keep permanent, detailed dream records—they no longer take up space—as well as to search them electronically and potentially perform other kinds of analyses if you are really hardcore. But it remains the case that nobody has the time to compare their entire dream journal, which may grow a bit each day, to their entire life, every day. You can see how that could begin to consume one’s life! You have to make compromises. Revisiting your dream records from the previous three days for a minute or two each evening is minimally sufficient. EMINENT COMPANY In taking the J. W. Dunne challenge, you will be in some brilliant and eminent company. Some of the most influential writers of the mid-twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, were powerfully inspired by Dunne’s book, and some undertook his experiment. Most fans of Tolkien’s fantasy epics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings don’t realize that the timeless worldview of his Elven races was based largely on the serial-universe cosmology developed by Dunne on the basis of his dream experiences.4 So far, no dream diary has emerged among Tolkien’s papers that would prove he carried out Dunne’s experiment systematically, but his friend C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, probably did. Lewis hints as much in a posthumously published novel called The Dark Tower, which is partly devoted to Dunne’s ideas.