The Craziness and the Dullness in Einstein's Dreams


Alan Lightman’s Einstein’sDreams can feel a lot like a fever dream, as the author pitches the reader through 30 short imagined dreams that Albert Einstein might have had. Each dream is about time, and each dream has a different take on how time might function in the world contained within the dream. Head spinning? It will spin even more while reading this book.

At the root of the book is Einstein, a man so entrenched in our collective psyche, it’s hard not to imagine his face, his drooping mustache, and his quizzical expression while reading Lightman’s work.

Lightman places us in 1905, in Berne, Switzerland, where Einstein works on his paper on electrodynamics. The work affects the scientist and his dreams. In each, a world where time happens differently from the next is unveiled. In one, a human life lasts just a day. In another, they live forever. How time moves influences how the humans in that world live their lives.

The idea is fascinating; the writing, less so. Lightman doesn’t seem creative enough to pull off the worlds he wants us to imagine. While time changes in each world within a dream, the colors, the buttoned-up nature of the people in those worlds, don’t seem to. For such vastly different worlds, the tones seem similar, dull. Perhaps that was an intentional choice, as each dream is supposed to be from the brain of Einstein. But the choice leaves the reader bored, and wondering, wouldn’t Einstein’s mind be more exciting than this?

Thanks to one of my besties, Ms. Brown, for recommending Einstein’s Dreams. I was about 20% through a painful read of Outlander when I decided to drop that agony and switch to this late recommendation from Ms. Brown. I don’t regret the change.

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