I'm coming up on the end of Dune, you know, where you read more slow, maybe less, just to savor the last few pages left. Being such a beow science fiction nerd, I don't know what took me so long to read the novel. It is truly tremendous and amazing.
Here's a little excerpt that I want to share—Paul's expanded awareness of time:
“Paul’s mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery—as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.
Abruptly, as though he had found a necessary key, Paul’s mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about. It was as though he existed within a globe with avenues radiating away in all directions . . . yet this only approximated the sensation.
He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.
He saw people.
He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities.
He knew the names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape.
The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future—from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures.
People.
People.
He saw them in such swarms they could not be listed, yet his mind catalogued them.
Even the Guildsmen.
And he thought: The Guild—there’d be a way for us, my strangeness accepted as a familiar thing of high value, always with an assured supply of the now-necessary spice.
But the idea of living out his life in the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurtling spaceships appalled him. It was a way, though. And in meeting the possible future that contained Guildsmen he recognized his own strangeness.
I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain; the available paths.
The awareness conveyed both reassurance and alarm—so many places on that other kind of terrain dipped or turned out of his sight.
As swiftly as it had come, the sensation slipped away from him, and he realized the entire experience had taken the space of a heartbeat.”