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