think of as _now_?"

* * * * *

Blake Hartley grinned. Already, he was accepting his small son as an
intellectual equal.

"Please, teacher; what?"

"Your consciousness. And don't say, 'What's that?' Teacher doesn't know.
But we're only conscious of one moment; the illusory now. This is 'now,'
and it was 'now' when you asked that question, and it'll be 'now' when I
stop talking, but each is a different moment. We imagine that all those
nows are rushing past us. Really, they're standing still, and our
consciousness is whizzing past them."

His father thought that over for some time. Then he sat up. "Hey!" he
cried, suddenly. "If some part of our ego is time-free and passes from
moment to moment, it must be extraphysical, because the physical body
exists at every moment through which the consciousness passes. And if
it's extraphysical, there's no reason whatever for assuming that it
passes out of existence when it reaches the moment of the death of the
body. Why, there's logical evidence for survival, independent of any
alleged spirit communication! You can toss out Patience Worth, and Mrs.
Osborne Leonard's Feda, and Sir Oliver Lodge's son, and Wilfred Brandon,
and all the other spirit-communicators, and you still have evidence."

"I hadn't thought of that," Allan confessed. "I think you're right.
Well, let's put that at the bottom of the agenda and get on with this
time business. You 'lose consciousness' as in sleep; where does your
consciousness go? I think it simply detaches from the moment at which
you go to sleep, and moves backward or forward along the line of
moment-sequence, to some prior or subsequent moment, attaching there."

"Well, why don't we know anything about that?" Blake Hartley asked. "It
never seems to happen. We go to sleep tonight, and it's always tomorrow
morning when we wake; never day-before-yesterday, or last month, or next
year."

"It never ... or almost never ... _seems_ to happen; you're right there.
Know why? Because if the consciousness goes forward, it attaches at a
moment when the physical brain contains memories of the previous,
consciously unexperienced, moment. You wake, remembering the evening
before, because that's the memory contained in your mind at that moment,
and back of it are memories of all the events in the interim. See?"

"Yes. But how about backward movement, like this experience of yours?"

"This experience of mine may not be uniq