ate, in which we feel ourselves most potent and alive, is really
one of inhibition--that the world is only a "shoal of time"--it is
curiously borne out by the baffling phenomena of dreams and is in
perfect accord with the Higher Space Hypothesis. The possibility of
shaking off the grip of sleep under appropriate circumstances, the
fact that we can watch in our sleep, and awake at the right moment,
that we can sleep and still watch and keep awake in regard to
special objects and particular persons--these things form
insuperable difficulties for all those plausible, and apparently
scientific, theories of sleep current in the West; but they fit
perfectly with the Eastern idea that "he, not asleep himself, looks
down upon the sleeping." And to the questions, "How, and from whence?"
in the light of our hypothesis we may answer, "By the curvature of
time, consciousness escapes into the fourth dimension."

Myers shows that he was in need of just this clue in order to
account for some of the dream experiences recorded in _Human
Personality_, since he asks for "an intermediate conception of
space--something between space as we know it in the material world
and space as we imagine it to disappear in the ideal world." He
suggests that in dreams and trance there may be a clearer and more
complete perception of space than is at present possible to us. A
corresponding sublimation of the time sense is no less necessary to
account for time in dreams. Although we seem to triumph over space
and time to such a tune as to eliminate them, dream experiences have
both form and sequence. Now because form presupposes space, and time
is implicit in sequence, there arises the necessity for that
"intermediate conception" of both space and time provided by our
hypothesis.

THE PHENOMENON OF PAUSE

Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to:
think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, of
arrested physical activity, universal throughout nature. The cell
itself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep--"perchance to dream,"
Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology and
psychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear,
feel and do not feel, in successive instants. We are asleep, in
other words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment--and
perhaps age by age as well.

Where is consciousness during these intervals, long or short, when
the senses fail to respond to the stimuli