If you’ve been keeping up with Lost so far this season, I hope you were as intrigued as I was by the most recent episode, “The Constant”. It certainly gave viewers plenty to think about, even if it did (as always) ultimately generate more questions than answers. In my online travels, I somehow stumbled across an interesting book that seems to have a strong connection to some of the events that took place in this particular episode.
This may get into spoiler territory here for anyone who’s not caught up, so I’ll continue the discussion after the jump.
SPOILER WARNING
In this week’s episode, Sayid and Desmond are flown off the island by helicopter, and along the way Desmond starts to experience a strange temporal shift in his consciousness. We see flashbacks from his past, but unlike previous episodes, he is actually experiencing the jump in time himself. Each time he bounces between time periods, he is momentarily disoriented but still retains his memory while his physical body goes comatose in the other timeline.
By now, many people are starting to wonder how J.J. Abrams and his peeps can possibly be holding true to their original promise that nothing on the show is supernatural and it all has a scientific explanation behind it. As we get further into the show, it is becoming clear that they must be relying at least partially on theoretical science in order to explain some of the things (I think). Which leads me to this book, An Experiment With Time by J.W. Dunne.
In this long essay, written by Dunne in 1927, he put forth the idea that all time is essentially constant. In other words, past, present and future all co-exist simultaneously, and the experience of linear time that we know is a created by human consciousness in order to help us make sense of it all. He cites precognitive dreams and deja vu as proof of his theory, and scientists have since tried to explain it using quantum physics. Pretty crazy stuff, right? This sounds to me like a perfect explanation for Desmond’s condition (although I still don’t quite understand how having a “constant” anchors him to a linear progression again). The big question is, what does it all mean?
That I don’t know. This idea of consciousness moving through time certainly conflicts with earlier ideas people had about time travel on the show. I don’t see how it could explain the time discrepancies that we are told exist between the people on the island and the outside world. Can someone out there read this book and then tell me how it relates to the secrets of Lost? I’ll give you a cookie.
