I have said that in my dreams
I never saw a human being. Of
this fact I became aware very
early, and felt poignantly the
lack of my own kind. As a very
little child, even, I had a feeling,
in the midst of the horror of
my dreaming, that if I could
find but one man, only one human,
I should be saved from my dreaming,
that I should be surrounded no
more by haunting terrors. This
thought obsessed me every night
of my life for years--if only
I could find that one human and
be saved!
I must iterate that I had this
thought in the midst of my dreaming,
and I take it as an evidence
of the merging of my two personalities,
as evidence of a point of contact
between the two disassociated
parts of me. My dream personality
lived in the long ago, before
ever man, as we know him, came
to be; and my other and wake-a-day
personality projected itself,
to the extent of the knowledge
of man's existence, into the
substance of my dreams.
Perhaps the
psychologists of the book will
find fault with
my way of using the phrase, "disassociation
of personality." I know their
use of it, yet am compelled to
use it in my own way in default
of a better phrase. I take shelter
behind the inadequacy of the
English language. And now to
the explanation of my use, or
misuse, of the phrase.
It was not till I was a young
man, at college, that I got any
clew to the significance of my
dreams, and to the cause of them.
Up to that time they had been
meaningless and without apparent
causation. But at college I discovered
evolution and psychology, and
learned the explanation of various
strange mental states and experiences.
For instance, there was the falling-through-space
dream--the commonest dream experience,
one practically known, by first-hand
experience, to all men.
This, my professor told me,
was a racial memory. It dated
back to our remote ancestors
who lived in trees. With them,
being tree-dwellers, the liability
of falling was an ever-present
menace. Many lost their lives
that way; all of them experienced
terrible falls, saving themselves
by clutching branches as they
fell toward the ground.
Now a terrible fall, averted
in such fashion, was productive
of shock. Such shock was productive
of molecular changes in the cerebral
cells. These molecular changes
were transmitted to the cerebral
cells of progeny, became, in
short, racial memories. Thus,
when you and I, asleep or dozing
off to sleep, fall through space
and awake to sickening consciousness
just before we strike, we are
merely remembering what happened
to our arboreal ancestors, and
which has been stamped by cerebral
changes into the heredity of
the race.
There is nothing strange in
this, any more than there is
anything strange in an instinct.
An instinct is merely a habit
that is stamped into the stuff
of our heredity, that is all.
It will be noted, in passing,
that in this falling dream which
is so familiar to you and me
and all of us, we never strike
bottom. To strike bottom would
be destruction. Those of our
arboreal ancestors who struck
bottom died forthwith. True,
the shock of their fall was communicated
to the cerebral cells, but they
died immediately, before they
could have progeny. You and I
are descended from those that
did not strike bottom; that is
why you and I, in our dreams,
never strike bottom.
And now we come to disassociation
of personality. We never have
this sense of falling when we
are wide awake. Our wake-a-day
personality has no experience
of it. Then--and here the argument
is irresistible--it must be another
and distinct personality that
falls when we are asleep, and
that has had experience of such
falling--that has, in short,
a memory of past-day race experiences,
just as our wake-a-day personality
has a memory of our wake-a-day
experiences.
It was at this stage in my
reasoning that I began to see
the light. And quickly the light
burst upon me with dazzling brightness,
illuminating and explaining all
that had been weird and uncanny
and unnaturally impossible in
my dream experiences. In my sleep
it was not my wake-a-day personality
that took charge of me; it was
another and distinct personality,
possessing a new and totally
different fund of experiences,
and, to the point of my dreaming,
possessing memories of those
totally different experiences.
What was this personality?
When had it itself lived a wake-a-day
life on this planet in order
to collect this fund of strange
experiences? These were questions
that my dreams themselves answered.
He lived in the long ago, when
the world was young, in that
period that we call the Mid-Pleistocene.
He fell from the trees but did
not strike bottom. He gibbered
with fear at the roaring of the
lions. He was pursued by beasts
of prey, struck at by deadly
snakes. He chattered with his
kind in council, and he received
rough usage at the hands of the
Fire People in the day that he
fled before them.
But, I hear you objecting,
why is it that these racial memories
are not ours as well, seeing
that we have a vague other-personality
that falls through space while
we sleep?
And I may answer with another
question. Why is a two-headed
calf? And my own answer to this
is that it is a freak. And so
I answer your question. I have
this other-personality and these
complete racial memories because
I am a freak.
But let me be more explicit.
The commonest race memory we
have is the falling-through-space
dream. This other-personality
is very vague. About the only
memory it has is that of falling.
But many of us have sharper,
more distinct other-personalities.
Many of us have the flying dream,
the pursuing-monster dream, color
dreams, suffocation dreams, and
the reptile and vermin dreams.
In short, while this other-personality
is vestigial in all of us, in
some of us it is almost obliterated,
while in others of us it is more
pronounced. Some of us have stronger
and completer race memories than
others.
It is all a question of varying
degree of possession of the other-personality.
In myself, the degree of possession
is enormous. My other-personality
is almost equal in power with
my own personality. And in this
matter I am, as I said, a freak--a
freak of heredity.
I do believe that it is the
possession of this other-personality--but
not so strong a one as mine--that
has in some few others given
rise to belief in personal reincarnation
experiences. It is very plausible
to such people, a most convincing
hypothesis. When they have visions
of scenes they have never seen
in the flesh, memories of acts
and events dating back in time,
the simplest explanation is that
they have lived before.
But they make the mistake of
ignoring their own duality. They
do not recognize their other-personality.
They think it is their own personality,
that they have only one personality;
and from such a premise they
can conclude only that they have
lived previous lives.
But they are wrong. It is not
reincarnation. I have visions
of myself roaming through the
forests of the Younger World;
and yet it is not myself that
I see but one that is only remotely
a part of me, as my father and
my grandfather are parts of me
less remote. This other-self
of mine is an ancestor, a progenitor
of my progenitors in the early
line of my race, himself the
progeny of a line that long before
his time developed fingers and
toes and climbed up into the
trees.
I must again, at the risk of
boring, repeat that I am, in
this one thing, to be considered
a freak. Not alone do I possess
racial memory to an enormous
extent, but I possess the memories
of one particular and far-removed
progenitor. And yet, while this
is most unusual, there is nothing
over-remarkable about it.
Follow my reasoning.
An instinct is a racial memory.
Very good.
Then you and I and all of us
receive these memories from our
fathers and mothers, as they
received them from their fathers
and mothers. Therefore there
must be a medium whereby these
memories are transmitted from
generation to generation. This
medium is what Weismann terms
the "germplasm." It carries the
memories of the whole evolution
of the race. These memories are
dim and confused, and many of
them are lost. But some strains
of germplasm carry an excessive
freightage of memories--are,
to be scientific, more atavistic
than other strains; and such
a strain is mine. I am a freak
of heredity, an atavistic nightmare--call
me what you will; but here I
am, real and alive, eating three
hearty meals a day, and what
are you going to do about it?
And now, before I take up my
tale, I want to anticipate the
doubting Thomases of psychology,
who are prone to scoff, and who
would otherwise surely say that
the coherence of my dreams is
due to overstudy and the subconscious
projection of my knowledge of
evolution into my dreams. In
the first place, I have never
been a zealous student. I graduated
last of my class. I cared more
for athletics, and--there is
no reason I should not confess
it--more for billiards.
Further, I had no knowledge
of evolution until I was at college,
whereas in my childhood and youth
I had already lived in my dreams
all the details of that other,
long-ago life. I will say, however,
that these details were mixed
and incoherent until I came to
know the science of evolution.
Evolution was the key. It gave
the explanation, gave sanity
to the pranks of this atavistic
brain of mine that, modern and
normal, harked back to a past
so remote as to be contemporaneous
with the raw beginnings of mankind.
For in this past I know of,
man, as we to-day know him, did
not exist. It was in the period
of his becoming that I must have
lived and had my being.
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