The Shadow Out of Time | Page 8

must do
something. It was then that I began an intensive study of other cases of
amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby obectivise my trouble
and shake clear of its emotional grip.
However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly
opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so
closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early
to admit of any geological knowledge--and therefore of any idea of
primitive landscapes--on the subjects' part.
What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details
and explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and
jungle gardens--and other things. The actual sights and vague
impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by some
of the other dreamers savored of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all,
my own pseudo-memory was aroused to milder dreams and hints of
coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the
whole, an advisable one.
I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus
my son Wingate did the same--his studies leading eventually to his
present professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at
Miskatonic. Meanwhile, my examination of medical, historical, and
anthropological records became indefatigable, involving travels to
distant libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous
books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary personality had
been so disturbingly interested.

Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered
state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and
ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which
somehow seemed oddly unhuman.
These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various
books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though
obviously academic, facility. One note appended to von Junzt's
Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It
consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of
the German corrections, but following no recognized human pattern.
And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably alien to the
characters constantly met with in my dreams--characters whose
meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew, or was just on
the brink of recalling.
To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in
view of previous examinations and records of consultation of the
volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by
myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still
am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern,
anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of
myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed.
Only one thing consoled me, the fact that the myths were of such early
existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the
Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could
not even guess; but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed
for the formation of a fixed type of delusion.
Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth pattern--but
afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on
amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had
read and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse--my quest
had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent
dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by
what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state?

A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy
legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindu tales involving
stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern
theosopists.
Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that
mankind is only one--perhaps the least--of the highly evolved and
dominant races of this planet's long and largely unknown career.
Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the
sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian
forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea 300 million years ago.
Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos
itself, others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the
first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans
of thousands of millions of years, and linkages to other galaxies and
universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as
time in its humanly accepted sense.
But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race,
of a queer and intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to
science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent
of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of