“Our private consciousnesses registered their own times automatically then as now, by the passage of internal events. If events passed quickly, our private time outran clock time; if they dragged, it was behindhand. “Thus in dream experience there are many more events to the second than in waking experience; and consciousness registers by the tick-tick of events, so that in a dream we may live through crowded hours and days in the fraction of time that coincides with the knock on the door that waked us. It is absurd to say that in this case we do not live in two different time-systems.” “Yes, and—” Mr. Spalding cried out excitedly— “Einstein has proved that motion in public space-time is a purely relative and arbitrary thing, and that the velocity, or time value, of a ray of light moving under different conditions is a constant; when on any theory of absolute time and absolute motion it should be a variant.” “That,” said Kant, “is no more than I should have expected.” “You said, sir, that the only distinction between earthly and heavenly conditions is that this artificial character of standardized space-time is recognized in heaven and not on earth. I should have said that the most striking differences were, firstly, that in heaven our experience is created for us by our imagination and our will, whereas on earth it was, in your own word, sir, ‘given.’ Secondly that in heaven our states are not closed as they were on earth, but that anybody can enter anybody else’s. It seems to me that these differences are so great as to surpass anything in our experience on earth.” “They are not so great,” said Kant, “as all that. In dreaming you already had an experience of a world created by each person for himself in a space and time of his own; a world in which you transcended the conditions of ordinary space and time. In telepathy and clairvoyance you had experience of entering other people’s states.” “But,” Mr. Spalding said, “on earth my consciousness was dependent on a world apparently outside it, arising presumably in God’s consciousness, my body being the ostensible medium. Here, on the contrary, I have my world inside me, created by my consciousness, and my body is not so much a medium as an accessory after the fact.” “And what inference do you draw, Mr. Spalding?” “Why, that on earth I was nearer God, more dependent on him than in heaven. I seem to have become my own God.” “Doesn’t it strike you that in becoming more god-like you are actually nearer God? That in this power of your imagination to conceive, this freedom of your will to create your universe, God is cutting a clearer path for himself than through that constrained and obstructed consciousness you had on earth?”