On the afternoon of Sunday 21 November 2010, I was sitting in my study, having just finished tying my shoelaces, and was preparing to go outside when I heard a scream.
It was my wife, Penny, who was upstairs. I just had time to think: ‘Oh, bloody hell, another spider crisis!’ (Penny hates spiders and is prone to a spontaneous scream if she sees one.)
The penny drops
But this scream sounded different. I got up from my chair and went to the foot of the stairs. I have just measured this distance and it is about four metres. As I arrived, I saw Penny, literally in mid-air, falling down the stairs. I positioned my body to catch her in my arms. I even had time to angle her body so that her head did not smash against the door frame. She had fallen about two metres, at speed, head first. Had I not been in that exact position I have no doubt she would have hit the wall at the bottom of the stairs and broken her neck or cracked her skull. We are both sure she would have been killed.
We were both in a state of shock and Penny was clearly quite traumatized by it all. After we calmed down (I have never experienced such a rush of adrenaline) we looked at each other and realized that what had just happened was impossible. Let’s break it down:
Penny trips on the stairs and launches into space. As she does so she screams. I am in the study four metres away when I hear her scream as she starts to fall. My brain processes the sound waves that travelled from Penny to my ears. These are then converted into electrical impulses that are presented to my conscious awareness. I have ‘time’ to think that this is probably Penny encountering a spider in the upstairs bathroom. The sound of her voice tells me that this is not the case. I get up and go to the foot of the stairs. I recall not being in a great hurry as my intention was to call up the stairs and ask if she was okay. I get to the foot of the stairs to see Penny in mid-air, flying down the staircase. I have time to evaluate the trajectory of her fall and catch her in such a way that her head does not hit the protruding door frame to my right. I also position my body so that Penny’s momentum does not knock me over and push me backwards into the wall (thus injuring both of us).
A complete impossibility
I was so intrigued by this that I took my video camera and I timed how long it would take for me to react to a sound from a sitting position in my study and get to the foot of the stairs. The video runs for four seconds. In my opinion there was no possible way that I could have crossed the distance any quicker. This suggests that either Penny was ‘in flight’ for nearly four seconds or something very strange took place with regard to time on that potentially fateful afternoon. In some yet-unexplained way I was able to expand time or shrink space, or possibly even both. The distance between my chair in the study and the foot of the stairs cannot be traversed faster than four seconds and yet I was at the foot of the stairs watching Penny in mid-air. In other words, at the point when she had just started to fall, my mind had managed, in some amazing way, to do the impossible. It had affected the flow of time itself.
What took place that afternoon? Clearly, I seemed to enter some form of altered state of consciousness in which I was able to warp time or space, or both. To say that this was a subjective experience is simply incorrect. I managed to cross a distance in a time scale that was simply impossible. Is this evidence that time perception is far from fully understood by modern science?
The adventure of discovery
It is clear that there are many different times. There is, as we know all too well, ‘clock time’. But is this really time? I have often experienced that sensation of ‘nowness’ – an immediate feeling that time is an illusion and that in reality there is no time, just a permanent ‘now’. For me, these incidents happen not only if I see something of great beauty, like the sun setting over the sea at Santorini, but also when I receive bad news or when I have an accident. During times of physical pain, time seems to lose all meaning.
So what exactly is time and how can we really understand its true nature? The Labyrinth of Time is my attempt to bring together possible answers to this question. I review the philosophy, the physics and the neurology of temporal flow and then I turn to the subjective experiences of time. I discuss evidence that under certain circumstances people can precognize things yet to happen, visit the past, journey into the future, slow time down and even speed it up. I visit the furthest reaches of human understanding and discuss how such ideas have stimulated some of the greatest writers, poets and film-makers. By the end of the journey, we should know a great deal more about time. Whether we will be any closer to understanding what it is may be open to debate. However, if you enjoy the adventure half as much as I have then we will have at least not wasted too much of that most precious of commodities – time itself.
From The Labyrinth of Time, © 2012 by Anthony Peake, published by Arcturus.
THE LABYRINTH OF TIME Anthony Peake
In The Labyrinth of Time Anthony Peake explores the relationship between consciousness and reality and in the process puts forward an amazing hypothesis that can explain many enigmatic phenomena, including déjà vu, precognition, near-death experience and altered states. Central to Peake’s hypothesis is a new understanding of the nature of time and a radical updating of the theories of two of the twentieth century’s most original thinkers, Peter Ouspensky and J W Dunne. Peake then looks at the concepts of time and how they have shaped our thinking as individuals through the prism of science, philosophy and literature. Featuring a cutting-edge account of modern time theory, covering ‘time-slips’, precognitive dreams and the elasticity of time during moments of extreme stress, near-death experience and certain stages of hypnotic trance. The Labyrinth of Time is as compelling and persuasive as Peake’s groundbreaking Is There Life After Death? [200921, £4.20] and The Daemon [201009, £4.20].
Thanks for posting this short section of my new book. I am really excited at the reactions this bok is receiving. I have just posted a reference to this on my own Facebook Wall that you may find amusing: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=596170414&ref=tn_tnmn ……
Hello Mr Peake,
i read your article with interest. I remember reading Dunne’s book many years ago.
I am just wondering if the following interpretation of the incident you describe could be possible
If anyone trips at the top of a normal flight of stairs they would most likely strike the stairs around halfway down and either roll or slide the rest of the way. Serious injury or death is a common result. Even a standing leap would result in a crash before reaching the bottom of the stairs. In normal circumstances there is no way that Mrs Peake would have been on a course, in the air, to land beyond the foot of the stairs. There is no doubt that time slips and other time phenomena occur and are is well documented. In this case, however, was it more likely to have been a case of intervention by an agency either from within Mrs Peake or from outside. In other words, levitation. This agency could have supported Mrs Peake and lowered her, “flying through the air” and if you had not been there it may well have deposited her gently on the ground floor. Very likely a time slip also took place as described but levitation, I think, could have beenthe main factor in this case. Levitation is also documented and the “crude” form, in Poltergeist phenomena, is well known.
Scientists, of course, would ridicule all this and come up with some psychological explanation more ridiculous than ours seems to them.
I mean no disrespect to you, Mr Peake, through my comments and would be interested to hear what you and others may say.
My wife and I had and unnervingly similar experience that happened some time back. She also slipped at the very top of the stairs, shouted out and I immediately rushed from the kitchen sink and got half way up the stairs to stop her falling to the bottom. The distance was probably around 5 – 6 metres, but when time collapses distance does not matter. Unfortunately my wife broke her arm, not a bad break, near the shoulder. I say unfortunately, which for her it certainly was, but it got us out of a situation we had got into which was helping us materialy but not spiritually.
Another time warp, in the same year I think, was when returning from Cornwall after staying over Christmas with friends. We both had colds and were feeling quite ill and it had not been a particularly happy time for us and were glad to get away. We left mid morning the day after Boxing Day in the teeth of a gale, feeling ill, but on hitting the main dual carriage way we had a rainbow sitting on the driver’s side window, which stayed with us for around 70 – 80 miles. It was like being in a warm cocoon or bubble, meanwhile the radio was telling us of big queues on the M5 due to bad weather and heavy traffic. We saw none of this!! We got home to Mid Wales in around 4 hours with a stop for coffee! It usually took us, with stop, around 5 – 6 hours and it felt to us both that we got home far, far quicker. We had asked, as we always do, for guidence, protection etc from spirit and they helped us out. Bless ‘em.
I can also remember various journeys we undertook in the early – mid 90′s that, as the driver, I could remember nothing of the journey at all; it was like being in a medatative state. Strange but true. The Native Americans would be able to explain it, although now much of the old teachings have been lost, but they knew about shape shifting and squashing time.
Finally, and I am sure many people will have had a similar experience, we were due to take a speaker, who’d been staying with us, to a Spiritualist church some 45 miles away, a round trip of nearly a 100 miles. It was summer time and we realised we had little petrol, we had a mini then, and only £5 in our joint pockets (those were days lad eh?) We pulled into a local petrol station and started to fill up. The sky was a beautiful blue it being a warm summers afternoon/evening. Suddenly out of a clear blue sky there was a rumble of thunder, a flash of lightning and the petrol pumps zeroed so there was no way of recording what we had already put in! Needless to say we got to Shrewsbury and back with petrol to spare! They look after us, our friends in spirit!
In Love, Truth and Light
Brian & Judy Poole.