Before Adam

hild, 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, th

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

lity." I know their use of it, yet am compelled to use it in my own way in default of a better phrase. I take she

ningless and without apparent causation. But at college I discovered evolution and psychology, and learned the explanation of various strange mental states and

them, being tree-dwellers, the liability of falling was an ever-present menace. Many lost their lives that way

mitted 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 cons

s 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 fa

e 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 experienc

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 dist

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

mories are not ours as well, seeing that we have a vague

answer to this is that it is a freak. And so I answer your question. I have t

e be more

e 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

f, the degree of possession is enormous. My other-personality is almost equal in power

lief in personal reincarnation experiences. It is very plausible to such people, a most convincing hypothesis. When they have visions of scen

er-personality. They think it is their own personality, that they have only one personal

t one that is only remotely a part of me, as my father and my grandfather are parts of me less remote. This other-self of mine is an ancestor, a progenitor of

alone do I possess racial memory to an enormous extent, but I possess the memories of one particular and

d from generation to generation. This medium is what Weismann terms the "germplasm." It carries the memories of the whole evolution of the race. These memories are dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some strains of germplasm carry an excessive freightage o

at the coherence of my dreams is due to overstudy and the subconscious projection of my knowledge of evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I have

life. I will say, however, that these details were mixed and incoherent until I came to know the science of evolution. Evolution was the key. It gave the explanation, gav

w him, did not exist. It was in the period of his