The Dwellers Elsewhere

Abstract

When a grown man opens his eyes upon a sudden awakening, there normally occurs only the shortest interval before the shapes around him settle fixedly into recognizable objects which his consciousness arranges into a definite scene. Ordinarily he has no difficulty in establishing the location of his resurgent experiences, and accompanying his sense of a breach in their continuity there takes place a decisive recapture of his familiar self, flowing rapidly back into its worldly identity. Now it is not enough that, outside his consciousness and awaiting its return to the physical world, there should actually be an objective manifold of structured things, stationary or moving within a network of spatial, temporal, and causal relationships, and forming a relatively stable whole of organized meanings. Undoubtedly there is such an objective and independently significant manifold, which will persist essentially as it is even if he never re-awakens to it. But it is only because the returning consciousness has the capacity to construe new sense-impressions into old meanings that the awakening sleeper finds himself confronted by a discernibly patterned ensemble of which he can more or less make immediate sense. Colours, shadows, angles, and perspectives rush to form what he instantly knows to be a room, seeing this shape as a door and that expanse as a window, and comprehending without need of reflection that beyond both there exist other stretches of space, accommodating numberless other situations.