Playing With Time: On the Art of Imagining in Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams

I first read Einstein’s Dreams in 1993, very shortly after it was published. The author, Alan Lightman, is a physicist at MIT whose writings have illuminated the intersection of science and the humanities. Einstein’s Dreams , his first work of fiction, explores the variety of dream scenarios that Albert Einstein might have dreamed in the months before submitting his special theory of relativity in June 1905. Each “dream”—there are thirty—imagines time running in a different fashion and its resulting effect on how people live and experience their lives. They feel philosophical and almost like fables: fantastical but rooted in the concretely familiar. In one, time is like the light that passes between two mirrors, making each individual one of an endless number of copies. In another, time rushes quickly at its outermost edges but stands suspended at its center—those who find refuge there are, as we might guess, parents of small children, and lovers. Can we—dare we?—imagine our way into the minds of historical subjects? And if we do, what will we find there? When I first read Einstein’s Dreams I was eighteen and had recently finished high school. I recall the feel of the book in my hands. Small, almost square, and slim with its soft-cover flaps, it stood out from my other books. It gave the impression of coming from somewhere else, like a book that had been translated, or imported. I read the book in one sitting while sprawled on my bedroom’s dusty-rose carpet, reading propped up on my elbows. Re-reading Einstein’s Dreams now, thirty years later, brings back that summer afternoon, a memory so wispy and vaporous that it feels almost like a dream itself. A few long-lost details float to the surface: the way my elbows itched, as I read, from their prolonged contact with the carpet, and the feeling that time was thick and viscous, essentially endless. And isn’t youth, in fact, a dream? Were I a character in Einstein’s Dreams , it would appear to me that between then and now I have jumped from one fable clear into another, so thoroughly […]

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