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.

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 has my experience of time been altered.

Returning to the book now, I am struck by this fleeting contact with my younger self. At the same time, new points of interest arise that once eluded me. For one: the author’s age. As it turns out, Lightman was in his early forties when Einstein’s Dreams was published. Ah, midlife! That long moment when even non-scientists might feel compelled to comprehend time. To seek, sometimes with desperation, an answer to that suddenly urgent question: Where has the time gone? How is that I was 24 just yesterday, and 43 today? Can I stop it? Reverse it? Shift it around to my liking? Where is the emergency brake on this train rushing headlong into the night?

Lightman indulges in these questions, feels around at their outer edges. My pleasure at reading these fables in youth was intellectual and abstract; at middle age, it is visceral. “Yes, please,” I assent, nodding my head energetically, “let’s find an alternative to this predictable drumbeat, an eddy in which we can take refuge from the river’s strong current and float back a bit, upstream, even, if no one’s watching.”

Lightman indulges us in this fantasy, and to this forty-something reader, it feels at times like consolation. Except that it is also warning. Because in addition to exploring alternate mechanisms for the passage of time, Lightman describes the effects of those mechanisms on the way people live and experience their lives. That metaphor about the river eddy? That was Lightman’s, and those who end up in it are “exiles of time,” refugees from the future who are ignored and pitied by their contemporaries.

In another rather moving fable, Lightman explores what happens when a city’s various neighborhoods each get stuck in a different moment in time. The result: missed meetings, solitary meals, conversations rendered impossible, for “each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” Cautionary words for those to whom an irretrievable past sings its promises like sirens from a distant shore.

And what about the past? If we regard the novel from a different angle, Einstein’s Dreams is an imaginative foray into the subconscious of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated rational and scientific minds. That is, it employs art to illuminate both science and history. I was a historian before I became a writer, and so when I read this novel now, I cannot help but to see it through the lens of history, too. Can we—dare we?—imagine our way into the minds of historical subjects? And if we do, what will we find there?

I wrestled with this tension when writing my hybrid memoir, My Roman History. My head wanted to write the book in one way, my heart in another. I felt trapped, with rational thought and academic habits on one side of the chasm, and creative expression and intuition on the other. Whether Lightman ever experienced this duality when writing, I don’t know. But the exit that I ultimately found was to leave traditional history-writing behind and “indulge” (as historians might have it) in a deeply personal imagined conversation with my historical subject. A conversation in which I questioned him about his life and found in his experiences distant echoes of my own. Such acts of identification are largely off limits to the academic historian who relies on documentation. And for good reason.

And yet as a creative writer and general reader, I find value in this process. First, because it has allowed me to explore a broader and more encompassing kind of meaning in the often arcane historical work to which I devoted more than a decade of my life. Lightman, I think, was searching for this too—the kind of meaning found in communicating the substance of one’s work to others. And one byproduct of that effort is that you might at long last articulate its deeper relevance to yourself.

The other resonance I find in Einstein’s Dreams, a work born of both deep knowledge and expansive creativity, is that it provides access to the broad and sometimes quirky ways in which a mind like Einstein’s might have worked. We are not so naïve as to believe we know Einstein by the end of the novel; but perhaps we have made some fleeting contact with the kind of creative thinking necessary for scientific work of caliber. Our understanding of the scientific state of mind is enlarged. And it’s beautiful to think that that spacious state of mind might be common to work of value in science, the arts, and the humanities. That binding those disparate realms is a deep connectivity in which we all might, to some degree, aspire to share.

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My Roman History by Alizah Holstein is available from Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.