Before Adam | Page 5

made were the sounds of old time and
intelligible to him.
My parents were frightened. "The child is ill," said my mother. "He is
hysterical," said my father. I never told them, and they never knew.
Already had I developed reticence concerning this quality of mine, this
semi-disassociation of personality as I think I am justified in calling it.
I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did I see that night.
I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick with the invasion of
my real life by that other life of my dreams.
I have mentioned my reticence. Only once did I confide the strangeness
of it all to another. He was a boy--my chum; and we were eight years
old. From my dreams I reconstructed for him pictures of that vanished
world in which I do believe I once lived. I told him of the terrors of that
early time, of Lop-Ear and the pranks we played, of the gibbering
councils, and of the Fire People and their squatting places.
He laughed at me, and jeered, and told me tales of ghosts and of the
dead that walk at night. But mostly did he laugh at my feeble fancy. I
told him more, and he laughed the harder. I swore in all earnestness that
these things were so, and he began to look upon me queerly. Also, he
gave amazing garblings of my tales to our playmates, until all began to
look upon me queerly.
It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was different from

my kind. I was abnormal with something they could not understand,
and the telling of which would cause only misunderstanding. When the
stories of ghosts and goblins went around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly
to myself. I thought of my nights of fear, and knew that mine were the
real things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and surmised
shadows.
For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos and wicked ogres.
The fall through leafy branches and the dizzy heights; the snakes that
struck at me as I dodged and leaped away in chattering flight; the wild
dogs that hunted me across the open spaces to the timber--these were
terrors concrete and actual, happenings and not imaginings, things of
the living flesh and of sweat and blood. Ogres and bugaboos and I had
been happy bed-fellows, compared with these terrors that made their
bed with me throughout my childhood, and that still bed with me, now,
as I write this, full of years.

CHAPTER II
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