# What is the "fourth dimension of existence"?

**In short:**
- It is Bill W.'s own phrase for the new life after drinking. It appears twice in the Big Book, both in the 1939 text: in "Bill's Story," "what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)), and in Chapter 2, "a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)).
- The book never defines it. What it says about it: on [p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/) Bill was "to know happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)); on [p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/) it comes from picking up "the simple kit of spiritual tools," and the next lines say what lies under it: "deep and effective spiritual experiences" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)).
- The book doesn't treat it as a technical term, and nothing in our sources explain where Bill got it. Any explanation beyond those two pages is someone's interpretation.

## Where it is

Our sources were searched for "fourth dimension," "fourth-dimension," "fourth dimensional," "4th dimension," "four dimension" and "dimension." The phrase appears exactly three times: Big Book [pp. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/) and 25, and one later book quoting [p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/) (*Pass It On*, 1984). No personal story, pamphlet or other history book uses it.

## In "Bill's Story" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/))

The phrase comes at Bill's lowest point. His wife has been told he will die of heart failure in delirium tremens or develop a wet brain ([p. 7](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-7/)). He has stepped from the hospital "a broken man," and "on Armistice Day 1934, I was off again" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)). Then:

"How dark it is before the dawn! In reality that was the beginning of my last debauch" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)). He was "soon to be catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)). The next sentence is all the explanation the chapter gives: "I was to know happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)).

The next paragraph is the phone call from "an old school friend" ([pp. 8–9](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)). So in Bill's telling the "fourth dimension" is where the story is going, named before he tells how he got there: his friend's visit, his last stay in hospital, and the work with other alcoholics ([pp. 9–16](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-9/)). See: *Who was the old school friend in "Bill's Story" (Ebby)?* "I like to call" ([p. 8](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-8/)) marks it as Bill's own way of putting it.

## In "There Is a Solution" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/))

The second use is in the "we" of the whole membership, and it comes with more around it. Chapter 2 has just described the alcoholic's hopeless state: "We are without defense against the first drink" ([p. 24](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-24/)), and "So many want to stop but cannot" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)). Then:

- "There is a solution" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)). Almost none of them liked the self-searching, "the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)), but they saw it worked in others and had come to believe in the hopelessness of life as they had been living it.
- So "there was nothing left for us but to pick up the simple kit of spiritual tools laid at our feet" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)).
- "We have found much of heaven and we have been rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)).
- And straight after: "The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God's universe" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)). "The central fact of our lives today," the book goes on, is the certainty that "our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)).

Read in place, the "fourth dimension" is the life on the other side of the spiritual tools, and the book's own explanation of it is the spiritual experience in the next sentence. The asterisk on "spiritual experiences" points to Appendix II ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)), which was added later and says most of their experiences are of "the 'educational variety'" that develop slowly, and that sudden transformations, though frequent, "are by no means the rule" ([p. 567](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-567/)). The book doesn't say more than that about the phrase itself.

## What it isn't

- **Not a definition.** The book never explains the word "dimension." It is a figure of speech for a life the writers say they couldn't have imagined beforehand: "of which we had not even dreamed" ([p. 25](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-25/)).
- **Not a promise that life would be easy.** Later in the same chapter, Bill says he was "plagued by waves of self-pity and resentment" that nearly drove him back to drink, and that work with another alcoholic saved the day ([p. 15](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-15/)).

## Later: Bill's depression

*Pass It On* (1984), the A.A. biography of Bill W., quotes the p. 25 phrase in telling of the depression that came on him in 1944. Bill, it says, had described sobriety in the Big Book as "a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed," and "he had meant it in all sincerity" (*Pass It On*, 1984). Scarcely five years later, he was plunged into a depression so deep it made him suicidal, and the depressions lasted, on and off, about eleven years, until 1955 (*Pass It On*, 1984). This is a 1984 biography, not the program text; it is here because it is the only other place in our sources that uses the phrase. By its account, the man who wrote the phrase meant it, and still went through years of suffering afterward.

## Read it yourself
- Chapter 1, "Bill's Story" ([pp. 1–16](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-1/)): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt1.pdf
- Chapter 2, "There Is a Solution" ([pp. 17–29](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-17/)): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_chapt2.pdf
- Appendix II, "Spiritual Experience" ([pp. 567–568](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-567/)): https://www.aa.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/en_bigbook_appendiceii.pdf
- *Pass It On* and the full Big Book are sold by A.A. World Services: https://onlineliterature.aa.org

## Sources
| Source | Pages | Date |
|---|---|---|
| *Alcoholics Anonymous*, Chapter 1, "Bill's Story" | 7–9, 15 | 1939 |
| *Alcoholics Anonymous*, Chapter 2, "There Is a Solution" | 24–26 | 1939 |
| *Alcoholics Anonymous*, Appendix II, "Spiritual Experience" | 567 | second edition (1955) |
| *Pass It On* | — | 1984 |
| All our sources (searched for "fourth dimension" and variants) | — | various |

Big Book page numbers are from the fourth edition (2001). The Preface says the program chapters have been "left largely untouched" since 1939 ([p. xi](https://recoverystarts.com/big-book/page-xi/)).

*Recovery Starts is independent and not affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous. Quotations are brief and cited; the Big Book and Pass It On are © A.A. World Services, Inc.*