In the continuous present we experience an interior succession, in which contact is with qualities and conditions qua qualities and conditions and not as localized in the thing or event that bears them. Events arise successively, but the succession is a sequence of contiguous re-creations through which as an enlargement of the present there slowly emerges a unified impression. Gertrude Stein erected an equivalent movement into a principle of literary composition. Viewed within J. W. Dunne's serial perspective, the continuous present arises when our habitual, three-dimensional present is incompletely replaced by a four-dimensional, enlarged present. If, as Norman Brown's psychoanalytic hypothesis asserts, time has its origin in the dynamics of repression, or if, following Dunne, it is habit that maintains us in a contracted present, raising these mechanisms should lengthen our experiences of the continuous present.