DIVINING THE TIME.
A DISCUSSION has be going on in the Society for Psychical Research as to the existence and the nature of the power by which so many people manage to wake them- selves precisely at the hour at which they have resolved to awake on the previous night. There is no question as to the fact. It is a matter on which probably the greater number of people can convince themselves. You may fix a time when no clock strikes, so that it cannot be a. half-heard sound which wakes you. You may fix five minutes before the hour in a house in which no clock strikes the quarters, or even in a house in which there is no striking-clock at all, and no church-clock within a couple of miles ; and yet not one person only, but a
great many,—we might perhaps say the majority of persons past middle age,—can wake themselves precisely at the right hour, if on the previous night they go to bed with the resolve to do so strong on their minds. It is a power which belongs to all sorts of persons,—not only persons who have been in the habit of getting up at given hours, but to persons who have not. Most nurses have it, most servants, most labourers, most professional men. Yet it is very difficult to account for, for, when you wake, you have no distinct nor, indeed, indistinct recognition of the time on you. You only know what
time you ought to have been awake, but, not in the least consciously, that this time has arrived, though, when you look
at your watch in a fright, you find as a matter of fact that it has arrived, and only just arrived. We believe that the same power would apply to the day-time under the same conditions, —namely, that you fix firmly in your mind some hours, or at least some considerable time, earlier, that you are to de something specific, and to be roused to a sense of the time at a specific minute, only people notice this less, since there are se many things in the day-time which warn us, and thus put us on the watch as to bow time is flying. The curious thing is that, though you can arrest your own attention and wake up at the
required time, you never seem to have the least assurance that it is the right time without consulting your watch. If you do. really " divine" the time, you have no power of recognising that you have "divined" it. You feel as if you had merely guessed it, and very probably guessed it wrong, until your watch confirms the guess. It is not by a keen sense of duration that you compute the hour, for that would imply that you knew at what time you made the
resolve,—at what time you went to sleep with the re- solve on your mind,—and this is often just what you do not know. If you measured time by the organic processes which go on within you, by a general sense of the number of pulsations of your heart, or the number of breaths drawn, then you would require to know accurately what the time was when you first resolved to awake, and you would measure only by the length of the thread subsequently drawn out. Not only would that be a very complicated process, but it is almost certainly not the actual process, for you may be quite uncon- scious at what hour exactly the resolve is formed. It seems to be a sense of time, as quite distinct from a sense of the duration of your sleep, or of the length of any organic process which has gone on since the resolve was made. Yet it is extremely difficult to imagine that the individual mind can be so closely identified in feeling with the revolution of the earth on its axis as would enable it to say at what hour, a.m. or p.m., you have arrived. The mind measures duration chiefly by the succession of its own thoughts ; but, as we have seen, it is not duration, but something quite different from duration, of which it appears to be conscious ; thus it can wake the body at any given hour without even knowing (consciously, at least) how much time has elapsed since the resolve to wake was first formed. In the "Journal of the Society of Psychological Research" for August, we are told of a lady, " well known to the editor," who chronicled her ex- periments in this matter during a part of last July, and for July 5th she makes the following entry :—
" July 5th.—Order given, again casually, with none of the seriousness of intention which I should have associated with it had I been going to act upon the sequence, instead of merely experimenting upon it. This time I said : ' Wake me to take a journey, at 4 o'clock,' meaning, wake me at 4, but not saying so. I was awaked with a struggle of consciousness, could not remem- ber where I was, or anything, but seemed to be down in a deep place, like a well ; and I heard an inner voice say : ' Wake and get up, it's just 3 o'clock, you need an hour to prepare for a journey at 4.' Still I was but half conscious, when the words were re- peated : ` It is 3, not 4; but you said, Wake me for a journey at 4' By that time I awoke completely, and the clock struck 3."
The editor regards this power of discerning the time as due to what he calls " the subliminal consciousness,"—in other words,
the consciousness which lies below all the acts of mere super- ficial consciousness of our life, and connects them when they are at variance with each other by its survey over all alike. We have never thought that Mr. Myers has explained any. thing by this assumption, and in the present case he has, if he can fully trust his witness's accuracy, only invented a new difficulty for himself by it. For it is quite evident that either the "subliminal consciousness" in this ease was not subliminal, and was no party to the trick which the lady had played upon the agency commissioned to awake her by speaking of a fabulous journey which was to be begun at 4, when she really only wished to be awakened at 4,—or else, if the " subliminal consciousness " was aware that 4 was the time intended for waking, and not 3, it determined to play a trick upon itself by taking the lady's words, and rejecting her meaning. This is a highly improbable explanation, so improbable that, far from being an elucidation, it is a complication of the problem. The agency which awoke this lady at the wrong hour because her words had been in- accurate, either had a grudge against her, and took advantage of her slip of the tongue to awaken her before she needed, in which case it could hardly have been her deepest self which did this, or it was really misled by her language, in which case it certainly was not her deepest self, for it took her at her word, and not at her meaning, though, if it had been her deepest self, it would have known her meaning. On the whole, the theory that it is a " subliminal consciousness" which gives us a knowledge of the lapse of time certainly explains nothing, and makes it more, instead of less, difficult to explain such a misunderstanding as this. It would be much easier to explain the incident • as a confused dream, in which the dreamer had caught up the words of her last resolve, and enlarged upon them without remembering her own meaning ; but a confused dream is certainly not what Mr. Myers means by a " subliminal consciousness," a consciousness at the base of all our various acts of superficial consciousness.
How we are to explain our consciousness of time as distinct from any knowledge of duration,—and, indeed, that we have in sleep any knowledge of duration we see no clear evidence, a very short time often appearing to us very long if it is crowded with a multiplicity of impressions, and a long time often appearing very short if a single impression has persisted throughout,—we do not know ; but that there is some transcendental power of discerning the time without external sounds to guide us, we feel no doubt. Of course, there are plenty of cases where the power fails. Indeed, another writer in this same number of the Journal gives us a long list of failures, and of failures unexpected by himself. But the experience of success is too common in all classes of persons to be accidental. Indeed, the present writer may assign the present article as a con- sequence (one of very many) of the power of waking at the exact hour desired, an hour which is often varied in accordance with the urgency of the case, so that it cannot be ascribed to a habit of waking at exactly the same hour. It is a very curious power, for which we can assign no parallel. We certainly have no similar power of waking ourselves on a journey at any exact point in space on which we may previously determine. If we resolve to wake up at the moment the express train in which we are travelling passes a particular point from which, suppose, a striking landscape is visible, we should not manage it unless the train were so punctual that we could effect it by determining to waken at the precise minute when the train was due there, though in that way we believe it might occasionally be effected. But there certainly are multitudes of persons who appear to carry some kind of clock about with them in their inner mind ; though whether it be the clock of the house, or the clock of the neighbourhood, it would be well to find out. In the present writer's case, it is not the clock of the house, which is kept fast, but, as near as he can judge, what he believes to be right time,—i.e., railway time ; though if he were, say, five minutes wrong in his impression of what right time is, it is probable that he would awaken by the time of his impression, and not by railway or Greenwich time.
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