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_ Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned,
did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures
that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures the
like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life.
They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a
procession of nightmares and a little later convincing
me that I was different from my kind, a creature
unnatural and accursed.
In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness.
My nights marked the reign of fear--and such fear! I
make bold to state that no man of all the men who walk
the earth with me ever suffer fear of like kind and
degree. For my fear is the fear of long ago, the fear
that was rampant in the Younger World, and in the youth
of the Younger World. In short, the fear that reigned
supreme in that period known as the Mid-Pleistocene.
What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I
can tell you of the substance of my dreams. Otherwise,
little could you know of the meaning of the things I
know so well. As I write this, all the beings and
happenings of that other world rise up before me in
vast phantasmagoria, and I know that to you they would
be rhymeless and reasonless.
What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of
the Swift One, the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye? A
screaming incoherence and no more. And a screaming
incoherence, likewise, the doings of the Fire People
and the Tree People, and the gibbering councils of the
horde. For you know not the peace of the cool caves in
the cliffs, the circus of the drinking-places at the
end of the day. You have never felt the bite of the
morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of
young bark sweet in your mouth.
It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your
approach, as I made mine, through my childhood. As a
boy I was very like other boys--in my waking hours. It
was in my sleep that I was different. From my earliest
recollection my sleep was a period of terror. Rarely
were my dreams tinctured with happiness. As a rule,
they were stuffed with fear--and with a fear so strange
and alien that it had no ponderable quality. No fear
that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear
that possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and
kind that transcended all my experiences.
For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather,
to whom the country was an unexplored domain. Yet I
never dreamed of cities; nor did a house ever occur in
any of my dreams. Nor, for that matter, did any of my
human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep. I,
who had seen trees only in parks and illustrated books,
wandered in my sleep through interminable forests. And
further, these dream trees were not a mere blur on my
vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms
of practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch
and twig; I saw and knew every different leaf.
Well do I remember the first time in my waking life
that I saw an oak tree. As I looked at the leaves and
branches and gnarls, it came to me with distressing
vividness that I had seen that same kind of tree many
and countless times n my sleep. So I was not
surprised, still later on in my life, to recognize
instantly, the first time I saw them, trees such as the
spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen
them all before, and was seeing them even then, every
night, in my sleep.
This, as you have already discerned, violates the first
law of dreaming, namely, that in one's dreams one sees
only what he has seen in his waking life, or
combinations of the things he has seen in his waking
life. But all my dreams violated this law. In my
dreams I never saw ANYTHING of which I had knowledge in
my waking life. My dream life and my waking life were
lives apart, with not one thing in common save myself.
I was the connecting link that somehow lived both
lives.
Early in my childhood I learned that nuts came from the
grocer, berries from the fruit man; but before ever
that knowledge was mine, in my dreams I picked nuts
from trees, or gathered them and ate them from the
ground underneath trees, and in the same way I ate
berries from vines and bushes. This was beyond any
experience of mine.
I shall never forget the first time I saw blueberries
served on the table. I had never seen blueberries
before, and yet, at the sight of them, there leaped up
in my mind memories of dreams wherein I had wandered
through swampy land eating my fill of them. My mother
set before me a dish of the berries. I filled my
spoon, but before I raised it to my mouth I knew just
how they would taste. Nor was I disappointed. It was
the same tang that I had tasted a thousand times in my
sleep.
Snakes? Long before I had heard of the existence of
snakes, I was tormented by them in my sleep. They
lurked for me in the forest glades; leaped up,
striking, under my feet; squirmed off through the dry
grass or across naked patches of rock; or pursued me
into the tree-tops, encircling the trunks with their
great shining bodies, driving me higher and higher or
farther and farther out on swaying and crackling
branches, the ground a dizzy distance beneath me.
Snakes!--with their forked tongues, their beady eyes
and glittering scales, their hissing and their
rattling--did I not already know them far too well on
that day of my first circus when I saw the
snake-charmer lift them up?
They were old friends of mine, enemies rather, that
peopled my nights with fear.
Ah, those endless forests, and their horror-haunted
gloom! For what eternities have I wandered through
them, a timid, hunted creature, starting at the least
sound, frightened of my own shadow, keyed-up, ever
alert and vigilant, ready on the instant to dash away
in mad flight for my life. For I was the prey of all
manner of fierce life that dwelt in the forest, and it
was in ecstasies of fear that I fled before the hunting
monsters.
When I was five years old I went to my first circus. I
came home from it sick--but not from peanuts and pink
lemonade. Let me tell you. As we entered the animal
tent, a hoarse roaring shook the air. I tore my hand
loose from my father's and dashed wildly back through
the entrance. I collided with people, fell down; and
all the time I was screaming with terror. My father
caught me and soothed me. He pointed to the crowd of
people, all careless of the roaring, and cheered me
with assurances of safety.
Nevertheless, it was in fear and trembling, and with
much encouragement on his part, that I at last
approached the lion's cage. Ah, I knew him on the
instant. The beast! The terrible one! And on my inner
vision flashed the memories of my dreams,--the midday
sun shining on tall grass, the wild bull grazing
quietly, the sudden parting of the grass before the
swift rush of the tawny one, his leap to the bull's
back, the crashing and the bellowing, and the crunch
crunch of bones; or again, the cool quiet of the
water-hole, the wild horse up to his knees and drinking
softly, and then the tawny one--always the tawny one!--
the leap, the screaming and the splashing of the horse,
and the crunch crunch of bones; and yet again, the
sombre twilight and the sad silence of the end of day,
and then the great full-throated roar, sudden, like a
trump of doom, and swift upon it the insane shrieking
and chattering among the trees, and I, too, am
trembling with fear and am one of the many shrieking
and chattering among the trees.
At the sight of him, helpless, within the bars of his
cage, I became enraged. I gritted my teeth at him,
danced up and down, screaming an incoherent mockery and
making antic faces. He responded, rushing against the
bars and roaring back at me his impotent wrath. Ah, he
knew me, too, and the sounds I made were the sounds of
old time and intelligible to him.
My parents were frightened. "The child is ill," said
my mother. "He is hysterical," said my father. I never
told them, and they never knew. Already had I
developed reticence concerning this quality of mine,
this semi-disassociation of personality as I think I am
justified in calling it.
I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did
I see that night. I was taken home, nervous and
overwrought, sick with the invasion of my real life by
that other life of my dreams.
I have mentioned my reticence. Only once did I confide
the strangeness of it all to another. He was a boy--my
chum; and we were eight years old. From my dreams I
reconstructed for him pictures of that vanished world
in which I do believe I once lived. I told him of the
terrors of that early time, of Lop-Ear and the pranks
we played, of the gibbering councils, and of the Fire
People and their squatting places.
He laughed at me, and jeered, and told me tales of
ghosts and of the dead that walk at night. But mostly
did he laugh at my feeble fancy. I told him more, and
he laughed the harder. I swore in all earnestness that
these things were so, and he began to look upon me
queerly. Also, he gave amazing garblings of my tales
to our playmates, until all began to look upon me
queerly.
It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I
was different from my kind. I was abnormal with
something they could not understand, and the telling of
which would cause only misunderstanding. When the
stories of ghosts and goblins went around, I kept
quiet. I smiled grimly to myself. I thought of my
nights of fear, and knew that mine were the real
things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and
surmised shadows.
For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos
and wicked ogres. The fall through leafy branches and
the dizzy heights; the snakes that struck at me as I
dodged and leaped away in chattering flight; the wild
dogs that hunted me across the open spaces to the
timber--these were terrors concrete and actual,
happenings and not imaginings, things of the living
flesh and of sweat and blood. Ogres and bugaboos and I
had been happy bed-fellows, compared with these terrors
that made their bed with me throughout my childhood,
and that still bed with me, now, as I write this, full
of years. _
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