Stepping Out of Time

Stepping Out of Time

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Why time expands during accidents and near-death experiences.

About 20 years ago, on holiday in rainy Scotland, I went for a walk along a coastal path. I came to a bay and stopped to look at the scene. It was beautiful and dramatic, with the sea swelling wildly and giant waves crashing into rocks, spraying foam high into the air. I was completely alone except for a few seagulls flying over the beach. I kept staring at the cliffs, the rain-filled sky, and the sea stretching endlessly into the distance.

After a few minutes, my awareness shifted. Everything around me seemed to come to life, as if an extra dimension of reality had been added. I sat down on a rock to stare at the sea. I was aware that I was observing a scene that was unchanged for thousands of years, and would remain unchanged. All of a sudden, this wasn’t just an intellectual idea, but a reality. I felt as though I was actually there thousands of years in the past and thousands of years in the future. It was if time became spatial rather than linear, so that I was no longer confined to the present.

An Accident

In 2014, I had another strange temporal experience, during a car crash. I was driving in the middle lane of a busy motorway, with my wife. A lorry pulled out from the inside lane and hit the side of our car, spinning us around, and then hitting us again. Everything went into slow motion. I looked behind, and the other cars seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, almost as if they were frozen. I felt as though I had a lot of time to observe the whole scene and to try to regain control of the car. I was surprised by how much detail I could perceive. I could see the long rows of cars stretching back through the lanes behind us, and the shocked faces of the drivers right behind.

I was also surprised at my calmness. Rather than panicking, I thought clearly and methodically about the situation, as I tried to regain control of the car. Fortunately, the car spun towards the hard shoulder, where we crashed into a barrier, and came to a standstill. At that point, time seemed to return to its normal speed. With an incredible sense of relief, I looked my wife and then at my own body and realised that neither of us were injured (although the car was so badly damaged that it had to be scrapped).

Time Expansion Experiences

The above two experiences inspired my new book Time Expansion Experiences. In my role as a transpersonal psychologist, I began to collect reports of what I termed ‘time expansion experiences’ (or TEEs) and to examine their contexts and characteristics. I found that time expansion experiences are most common in accidents and emergencies, but occur in many other situations, including deep meditation, moments of intense presence, under the influence of psychedelics, or in sports and games.

I found that in TEEs time usually expands by 10 to 40 orders of magnitude. This means that a period of three seconds may seem to stretch for half a minute, or up to two minutes. One result of this is that, in emergencies, people can take preventative—in some cases, life-saving—action that would be impossible in normal time.

I also collected reports of what I termed ‘time cessation experiences’ (or TCEs). TCEs are much less common that TEEs, mostly occurring in intense spiritual experiences and near-death experiences. There are two types of time cessation experiences (or TCEs). In the first, time simply disappears. We transcend time in the same way that a swimmer steps out of a river and sits on the riverbank. In the second variant, time becomes spatial. The past and future are no longer hidden, but are laid out in a panorama, alongside the present. (My first experience above is a good example.)

TEEs show that time is a flexible construct, determined by our normal state of consciousness. As soon as we shift into a different state of consciousness, our sense of time changes. Even further, TCEs suggest that, at the most fundamental level, our normal linear view of time is illusory. In reality, the past never disappears, and the future already exists. Perhaps we live in linear time by practical necessity, since it would be difficult to function if we were continually aware of past and future events. (In Time Expansion Experiences, I suggest that this view of time is consistent with many theories and findings from modern physics too.)

I’m glad that I went for that walk on a rainy evening. I’m even glad I had a car crash, although I wouldn’t want to risk another.

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