Before Adam

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 midstof the horror of my dreaming, that if I could find but one man, only one human, I should be savedfrom my dreaming, that I should be surrounded no more by haunting terrors.

This thought obsessedme 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 ofthe merging of my two personalities, as evidence of a point of contact between the two disassociatedparts of me.

My dream personality lived in the long ago, before ever man, as we know him, came tobe; and my other and wake-a-day personality projected itself, to the extent of the knowledge ofman'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 indefault of a better phrase.

I take shelter behind the inadequacy of the English language. And now tothe 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 apparentcausation.

But at college I discovered evolution and psychology, and learned the explanation ofvarious strange mental states and experiences.

For instance, there was the falling-through-spacedream-the commonest dream experience, one practically known, by first-hand experience, to allmen.This, my professor told me, was a racial memory.

It dated back to our remote ancestors who livedin trees.

With them, being tree-dwellers, the liability of falling was an ever-present menace.

Many losttheir lives that way; all of them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves by clutching branches asthey fell toward the ground.Now a terrible fall, averted in such fashion, was productive of shock.

Such shock was productiveof molecular changes in the cerebral cells.

These molecular changes were transmitted to the cerebralcells of progeny, became, in short, racial memories.

Thus, when you and I, asleep or dozing off tosleep, fall through space and awake to sickening consciousness just before we strike, we are merelyremembering what happened to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by cerebralchanges into the heredity of the race.