Einstein's Dreams

In several dreamworlds, birds appear and disappear. As symbols of time, their fleeting and fluttering through the dreamworlds shows how fickle time is. Birds are most clearly symbolic in the final dreamworld, where people rush to trap them in order to preserve their own lives. In this world, birds are time. Time doesn’t want to be caught, and the birds whither once caged.

In the Epilogue, Einstein turns in his theory of special relativity to the typist and then looks without interest at the birds fluttering over the Alps. He has lost interest in time because he has come to understand it. Time has lost its mystery and thus its appeal. The novel concludes with a bird flying away from Einstein: “Higher up, the tiny black speck of a bird makes slow loops in the sky […] He feels empty, and he stares without interest at the tiny black speck in the Alps” (139).

Throughout the novel, none of the dream characters are named. Few are even described. Each of these unnamed characters, whose emotions, desires and griefs are much clearer than their physical descriptions, represents humanity. Through this motif, Lightman hones in on the relatable interior, the core of what it means to be human. In weaving a novel together without recognizable, consistent characters across chapters, the collective of humanity is apparent in the way that characters experience their worlds emotionally.

Humanism radiates through the novel, which explores the human reaction to time as much as time itself. Many worlds deal more with the human response to a world than the mechanical details of it. Dreams in which humanity suffers greatly end quickly, suggesting that Einstein ended his dream, abandoning worlds where humanism wasn’t permissible.

Many dreams depict nameless characters looking at photographs in sadness or with fondness. The photographs represent memory. In one world, a mother looks at her son’s photo and weeps. In another, a girl leaps down her timeline and then gazes at a photo of her youth. These photographs are laden with emotional baggage and thus can only be memories. Photographs take on outsized importance in the world without a future: When time impacts memory, tokens of memory become paramount, and photographs become treasures.

In the world where memory shifts, each person has an image in their mind of their past and believes that image exists for everyone else as well. Rather than a photograph, the image represents collective memory. In the world without memory, however, no photographs exist because “a world without memory is a world of the present” (61).