Dreams -- Fiction; Fantasy fiction; Prehistoric peoples -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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