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_ 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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