(...) a Swiss tale speaks of a farmhand who wandered into a monastery which was said to have stood there in ancient times. He met an old man, an abbot, who asked him what time it was, and the youth replied: "Half past four." Hardly had he spoken when church and abbot vanished, and the farmhand found himself sitting on a great stone by the wayside. "If he had not spoken," say the villagers who tell the story, "he would have heard wonderful things and perhaps become a rich man too."

The comment by "the villagers who tell the story" goes straight to the psychological point: by naming our clock-time, consciousness enters the scene and the relative timelessness of the unconscious in which the youth was sunk vanishes for ever with its treasures.

The point at issue here is not that time, or a moment of time, is experienced by the youth as accelerated or retarded; an objective transformation of time has taken place. The moment has assumed a different quality by extending far into the past, as the story relates. Therefore the youth finds the long-vanished monastery in its old place. We may conclude from this that for some reason he was "touched" by the unconscious or, rather, by a archetypal content of the unconscious. Under its influence his actual consciousness was drawn into deeper layers of the soul where, as it were, it underwent a transformation corresponding to that of the time-moment. It stretched far into the past and the youth perceived objects and persons long since dissolved or dead.