Unless you understand German, you won't gain much from this audiobook which is all there is on YouTube of Alan Lightman's book "Einstein's Dreams" — there's no point in learning German now; you blew your chance of learning it by total immersion by not letting us win the last war.
I can't even offer you a free online copy of the book, which is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the young Einstein is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, it's a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.
Which is perhaps a better way to explain his theory of relativity as we grapple with wanting to press the undo button of life, to unwind the reel of experience, to edit out the word spoken in anger, as we wonder what we would have done had we known then what we know now.
The book offers a wonderful vision of what time has been or might be.
