Everyone experiences the vagaries of time; the sudden feeling of deja vu, the sense that years pass by faster with age, or the unnoticed passage of time when we enter the state of flow. Time is ephemeral and its true nature is hard to define. One of Einstein's great achievements was to demonstrate that time and space are inextricably linked and neither could exist without the other.

But this was not a book about the physical nature of time. It was a collection of short vignettes, beautifully written, that served as representations of Einstein's dreams about time. Each vignette imagined a different kind of time. In one dream, time flowed like a stream. Most of it moved in one direction. But occasionally, a rivulet of time would back eddy and people from the future could visit the past. In another vignette, time is imagined as being rigid, where the past, present, and future are fixed. Another shows time as discontinuous. Other vignettes imagined time as a physical dimension; or as concentric rings, moving slowly in the centre but faster at the margins; or time where the past and future are intertwined.

The novel is set in Bern, Switzerland, during a time when Einstein was working as a patent clerk with his close friend and colleague, Besso. Besso worries about Einstein, who is so engrossed in his own thoughts that he doesn't eat or sleep well, sometimes falling asleep in the office sitting in a chair at his desk. He dreams of the people outside, going about their business under the constraints of one kind of time or another. Some people thrive, and some people languish during their particular time. But no one is given a choice about the kind of time they are given. Despite its ephemeral nature, it shapes people's lives in unexpected ways. Those who thrive make the best use of the time they have. Those who languish never adapt to time's constraints.

Einstein's Dreams is an exploration of time as seen through the dreams of time's greatest champion. On one hand, it is an exploration of the role of creativity (in this case, dreams) in scientific discovery. On the other hand, it probes deeper questions about free will and fate. By setting the story in one place—the streets of Bern outside the patent office where Einstein spends his days—space is separated from time. But the setting is a physical place where Einstein spent his early years, before time revealed itself to him. And in his dreams in this place, time and space are merged together in revelation, neither existing in isolation.