Before Adam | Page 6

clutching 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 of
progeny, became, in short, racial memories. Thus, when you and I,
asleep or dozing off to sleep, fall through space and awake to sickening
consciousness just before we strike, we are merely remembering what
happened to our arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by
cerebral changes into the heredity of the race.
There is nothing strange in this, any more than there is anything strange
in an instinct. An instinct is merely a habit that is stamped into the stuff
of our heredity, that is all. It will be noted, in passing, that in this
falling dream which is so familiar to you and me and all of us, we never
strike bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our
arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the shock of
their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but they died
immediately, before they could have progeny. 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 this
sense of falling when we are wide awake. Our wake-a-day personality
has no experience of it. Then--and here the argument is irresistible--it
must be another and distinct personality that falls when we are asleep,
and that has had experience of such falling--that has, in short, a
memory of past-day race experiences, just as our wake-a-day
personality has a memory of our wake-a-day experiences.
It was at this stage in my reasoning that I began to see the light. And
quickly the light burst upon me with dazzling brightness, illuminating
and explaining all that had been weird and uncanny and unnaturally
impossible in my dream experiences. In my sleep it was not my
wake-a-day personality that took charge of me; it was another and
distinct personality, possessing a new and totally different fund of
experiences, and, to the point of my dreaming, possessing memories of
those totally different experiences.
What was this personality? When had it itself lived a wake-a-day life
on this planet in order to collect this fund of strange experiences? These
were questions that my dreams themselves answered. He lived in the
long ago, when the world was young, in that period that we call the
Mid-Pleistocene. He fell from the trees but did not strike bottom. He
gibbered with fear at the roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beasts
of prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with his kind in
council, and he received rough usage at the hands of the Fire People in
the day that he fled before them.
But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial memories are not
ours as well, seeing that we have a vague other-personality that falls
through space while we sleep?
And I may answer with another question. Why is a two-headed calf?
And my own 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 because I 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
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,