Before Adam Read online

  CHAPTER II

  I have said that in my dreams I never saw a human being. Of this fact Ibecame aware very early, and felt poignantly the lack of my own kind. Asa very little child, even, I had a feeling, in the midst of the horrorof my dreaming, that if I could find but one man, only one human, Ishould be saved from my dreaming, that I should be surrounded no moreby haunting terrors. This thought obsessed me every night of my life foryears--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, asevidence of a point of contact between the two disassociated parts ofme. My dream personality lived in the long ago, before ever man, as weknow him, came to be; and my other and wake-a-day personality projecteditself, to the extent of the knowledge of man's existence, into thesubstance of my dreams.

  Perhaps the psychologists of the book will find fault with my way ofusing the phrase, "disassociation of personality." I know their useof it, yet am compelled to use it in my own way in default of a betterphrase. 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 tothe significance of my dreams, and to the cause of them. Up to that timethey had been meaningless and without apparent causation. But at collegeI discovered evolution and psychology, and learned the explanation ofvarious strange mental states and experiences. For instance, there wasthe falling-through-space dream--the commonest dream experience, onepractically known, by first-hand experience, to all men.

  This, my professor told me, was a racial memory. It dated back to ourremote ancestors who lived in trees. With them, being tree-dwellers, theliability of falling was an ever-present menace. Many lost their livesthat way; all of them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves byclutching 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 ofprogeny, became, in short, racial memories. Thus, when you and I,asleep or dozing off to sleep, fall through space and awake to sickeningconsciousness just before we strike, we are merely remembering whathappened to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped bycerebral changes into the heredity of the race.

  There is nothing strange in this, any more than there is anythingstrange in an instinct. An instinct is merely a habit that is stampedinto the stuff of our heredity, that is all. It will be noted, inpassing, that in this falling dream which is so familiar to you andme and all of us, we never strike bottom. To strike bottom would bedestruction. Those of our arboreal ancestors who struck bottom diedforthwith. True, the shock of their fall was communicated to thecerebral cells, but they died immediately, before they could haveprogeny. 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 thissense of falling when we are wide awake. Our wake-a-day personality hasno experience of it. Then--and here the argument is irresistible--itmust be another and distinct personality that falls when we are asleep,and that has had experience of such falling--that has, in short, amemory of past-day race experiences, just as our wake-a-day personalityhas a memory of our wake-a-day experiences.

  It was at this stage in my reasoning that I began to see the light. Andquickly the light burst upon me with dazzling brightness, illuminatingand explaining all that had been weird and uncanny and unnaturallyimpossible in my dream experiences. In my sleep it was not my wake-a-daypersonality that took charge of me; it was another and distinctpersonality, possessing a new and totally different fund of experiences,and, to the point of my dreaming, possessing memories of those totallydifferent experiences.

  What was this personality? When had it itself lived a wake-a-day life onthis planet in order to collect this fund of strange experiences? Thesewere questions that my dreams themselves answered. He lived in thelong ago, when the world was young, in that period that we call theMid-Pleistocene. He fell from the trees but did not strike bottom. Hegibbered with fear at the roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beastsof prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with his kind incouncil, and he received rough usage at the hands of the Fire People inthe day that he fled before them.

  But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial memories are notours as well, seeing that we have a vague other-personality that fallsthrough space while we sleep?

  And I may answer with another question. Why is a two-headed calf? And myown 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 becauseI 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 hasis that of falling. But many of us have sharper, more distinctother-personalities. Many of us have the flying dream, thepursuing-monster dream, color dreams, suffocation dreams, and thereptile and vermin dreams. In short, while this other-personality isvestigial in all of us, in some of us it is almost obliterated, whilein others of us it is more pronounced. Some of us have stronger andcompleter race memories than others.

  It is all a question of varying degree of possession of theother-personality. In myself, the degree of possession is enormous. Myother-personality is almost equal in power with my own personality. Andin 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--butnot so strong a one as mine--that has in some few others given rise tobelief in personal reincarnation experiences. It is very plausible tosuch people, a most convincing hypothesis. When they have visions ofscenes they have never seen in the flesh, memories of acts and eventsdating back in time, the simplest explanation is that they have livedbefore.

  But they make the mistake of ignoring their own duality. They donot recognize their other-personality. They think it is their ownpersonality, that they have only one personality; and from such apremise they can conclude only that they have lived previous lives.

  But they are wrong. It is not reincarnation. I have visions of myselfroaming through the forests of the Younger World; and yet it is notmyself that I see but one that is only remotely a part of me, as myfather and my grandfather are parts of me less remote. This other-selfof mine is an ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the earlyline of my race, himself the progeny of a line that long before his timedeveloped fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.

  I must again, at the risk of boring, repeat that I am, in this onething, to be considered a freak. Not alone do I possess racial memoryto an enormous extent, but I possess the memories of one particular andfar-removed progenitor. And yet, while this is most unusual, there isnothing over-remarkable about it.

  Follow my reasoning. An instinct is a racial memory. Very good. Then youand I and all of us receive these memories from our fathers and mothers,as they received them from their fathers and mothers. Therefore theremust be a medium whereby these memories are transmitted from generationto generation. This medium is what Weismann terms the "germplasm." Itcarries the memories of the whole evolution of the race. These memoriesare dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some strainsof germplasm carry an excessive freightage of memories--are, to bescientific, more atavistic than other strains; and such a strain ismine. I am a freak of heredity, an atavistic nightmare--call me what youwill; 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 doubtingThomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff, and who would otherwisesurely say that the coherence of my dreams is due to overstudy and thesubconscious projection of my knowledge of ev
olution into my dreams. Inthe first place, I have never been a zealous student. I graduated lastof my class. I cared more for athletics, and--there is no reason Ishould not confess it--more for billiards.

  Further, I had no knowledge of evolution until I was at college, whereasin my childhood and youth I had already lived in my dreams all thedetails of that other, long-ago life. I will say, however, that thesedetails were mixed and incoherent until I came to know the science ofevolution. Evolution was the key. It gave the explanation, gave sanityto 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 rawbeginnings 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 mybeing.