C. Lethbridge was right when he said that ‘time is one of those difficult words with many different meanings.’6

Dreams and How to Guide Them, Saint-Denys wrote that ‘I have invariably observed that the more vivid my dreams, the greater my difficulty in waking.’45

means is that our intellect – or left-brain consciousness – is useless when we try to grasp the nature of reality.

Catherine Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature, first published in 1848 to great success (and repeated printings) and still very readable today. According to Colin Wilson, Crowe’s book was the ‘first sustained attempt to treat paranormal phenomena in the scientific spirit that would later characterise the Society for Psychical Research.’64 And among th

C. Lethbridge recognised in his distinction between ‘true dreams’ and ‘drowsy thinking’, a kind of ‘slipshod form of re-thinking recent events and problems’.

we’ve seen, illusory or not, it is practically impossible for us to step out of this way of experiencing time. Aside from occasional moments when, for some reason, we find ourselves ‘out of time’ in a positive sense, we are for the most part carried along by this flow, riding in time’s chariot, heading at an equable pace into the future, one tick o

But, Camus tells us, ‘one day the “why” arises’ and with it ‘the absurd’, the sudden recognition that this routine, this life, is leading nowhere, and that perhaps all of human life is without meaning or purpose.28

any attempt to understand time will entail using terms that are just as imponderable as time itself. We cannot get behind or below time and in questioning time must accept as given the very time we are questioning.

Yet philosophers are just as baffled as we are. According to one authority, philosophers that have ‘grappled with the problem of time’ have ‘ended up in perplexity’.