Before Adam | Page 3

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Before Adam by Jack London 1906

"These are our ancestors, and their history is our history. Remember
that as surely as we one day swung down out of the trees and walked
upright, just as surely, on a far earlier day, did we crawl up out of the
sea and achieve our first adventure on land."

CHAPTER I
Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder
whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for
they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day
life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession
of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from
my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.

In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My nights
marked the reign of fear--and such fear! I make bold to state that no
man of all the men who walk the earth with me ever suffer fear of like
kind and degree. For my fear is the fear of long ago, the fear that was
rampant in the Younger World, and in the youth of the Younger World.
In short, the fear that reigned supreme in that period known as the
Mid-Pleistocene.
What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I can tell you of
the substance of my dreams. Otherwise, little could you know of the
meaning of the things I know so well. As I write this, all the beings and
happenings of that other world rise up before me in vast
phantasmagoria, and I know that to you they would be rhymeless and
reasonless.
What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of the Swift One,
the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye? A screaming incoherence and no
more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise, the doings of the Fire
People and the Tree People, and the gibbering councils of the horde.
For you know not the peace of the cool caves in the cliffs, the circus of
the drinking-places at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite of
the morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark sweet
in your mouth.
It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your approach, as I made
mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was very like other boys--in
my waking hours. It was in my sleep that I was different. From my
earliest recollection my sleep was a period of terror. Rarely were my
dreams tinctured with happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with
fear--and with a fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable
quality. No fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear
that possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind that
transcended all my experiences.
For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to whom the country
was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed of cities; nor did a
house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor, for that matter, did any of
my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep. I, who had

seen trees only in parks and illustrated books, wandered in my sleep
through interminable forests. And further, these dream trees were not a
mere blur on my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms
of practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I saw
and knew every different leaf.
Well do I remember the first time in my waking life that I saw an oak
tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and gnarls, it came to me
with distressing vividness that I had seen that same kind of tree many
and countless times n my sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on in
my life, to recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees such as
the spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them all before,
and was seeing them even then, every night,