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9 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, in my sleep.
This, as you have already discerned, violates the first
law of dreaming, namely, that in one's dreams one sees
only what he has seen in his waking life, or
combinations of the things he has seen in his waking
life. But all my dreams violated this law. In my
dreams I never saw ANYTHING of which I had knowledge in
my waking life. My dream life and my waking life were
lives apart, with not one thing in common save myself.
I was the connecting link that somehow lived both
lives.
Early in my childhood I learned that nuts came from the
grocer, berries from the fruit man; but before ever
that knowledge was mine, in my dreams I picked nuts
from trees, or gathered them and ate them from the
ground underneath trees, and in the same way I ate
berries from vines and bushes. This was beyond any
experience of mine.
I shall never forget the first time I saw blueberries
served on the table. I had never seen blueberries
before, and yet, at the sight of them, there leaped up
in my mind memories of dreams wherein I had wandered
through swampy land eating my fill of them. My mother
set before me a dish of the berries. I filled my
spoon, but before I raised it to my mouth I knew just
how they would taste. Nor was I disappointed. It was
the same tang that I had tasted a thousand times in my
sleep.
Snakes? Long before I had heard of the existence of
snakes, I was tormented by them in my sleep. They
lurked for me in the forest glades; leaped up,
striking, under my feet; squirmed off through the dry
grass or across naked patches of rock; or pursued me
into the tree-tops, encircling the trunks with their
great shining bodies, driving me higher and higher or
farther and farther out on swaying and crackling
branches, the ground a dizzy distance beneath me.
Snakes!--with their forked tongues, their beady eyes
and glittering scales, their hissing and their
rattling--did I not already know them far too well on
that day of my first circus when I saw the
snake-charmer lift them up?
They were old friends of mine, enemies rather, that
peopled my nights with fear.
Ah, those endless forests, and their horror-haunted
gloom! For what eternities have I wandered through
them, a timid, hunted creature, starting at the least
sound, frightened of my own shadow, keyed-up, ever
alert and vigilant, ready on the instant to dash away
in mad flight for my life. For I was the prey of all
manner of fierce life that dwelt in the forest, and it
was in ecstasies of fear that I fled before the hunting
monsters.
When I was five years old I went to my first circus. I
came home from it sick--but not from peanuts and pink
lemonade. Let me tell you. As we entered the animal
tent, a hoarse roaring shook the air. I tore my hand
loose from my father's and dashed wildly back through
the entrance. I collided with people, fell down; and
all the time I was screaming with terror. My father
caught me and soothed me. He pointed to the crowd of
people, all careless of the roaring, and cheered me
with assurances of safety.
Nevertheless, it was in fear and trembling, and with
much encouragement on his part, that I at last
approached the lion's cage. Ah, I knew him on the
instant. The beast! The terrible one! And on my inner
vision flashed the memories of my dreams,--the midday
sun shining on tall grass, the wild bull grazing
quietly, the sudden parting of the grass before the
swift rush of the tawny one, his leap to the bull's
back, the crashing and the bellowing, and the crunch
crunch of bones; or again, the cool quiet of the
water-hole, the wild horse up to his knees and drinking
softly, and then the tawny one--always the tawny one!--
the leap, the screaming and the splashing of the horse,
and the crunch crunch of bones; and yet again, the
sombre twilight and the sad silence of the end of day,
and then the great full-throated roar, sudden, like a
trump of doom, and swift upon it the insane shrieking
and chattering among the trees, and I, too, am
trembling with fear and am one of the many shrieking
and chattering among the trees.
At the sight of him, helpless, within the bars of his
cage, I became enraged. I gritted my teeth at him,
danced up and down, screaming an incoherent mockery and
making antic faces. He responded, rushing against the
bars and roaring back at me his impotent wrath. Ah, he
knew me, too, and the sounds I 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 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, that they have only one personality; and
from such a premise they can conclude only that they
have lived previous lives.
But they are wrong. It is not reincarnation. I have
visions of myself roaming through the forests of the
Younger World; and yet it is not myself that I see but
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 my
progenitors in the early line of my race, himself the
progeny of a line that long before his time developed
fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.
I must again, at the risk of boring, repeat that I am,
in this one thing, to be considered a freak. Not alone
do I possess racial memory to an enormous extent, but I
possess the memories of one particular and far-removed
progenitor. And yet, while this is most unusual, there
is nothing over-remarkable about it.
Follow my reasoning. An instinct is a racial memory.
Very good. Then you and I and all of us receive these
memories from our fathers and mothers, as they received
them from their fathers and mothers. Therefore there
must be a medium whereby these memories are transmitted
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 of
memories--are, to be scientific, more atavistic than
other strains; and such a strain is mine. I am a freak
of heredity, an atavistic nightmare--call me what you
will; but here I am, real and alive, eating three
hearty meals a day, and what are you going to do about
it?
And now, before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate
the doubting Thomases of psychology, who are prone to
scoff, and who would otherwise surely say that 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 never been
a zealous student. I graduated last of my class. I
cared more for athletics, and--there is no reason I
should not confess it--more for billiards.
Further, I had no knowledge of evolution until I was at
college, whereas in my childhood and youth I had
already lived in my dreams all the details of that
other, long-ago 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, gave sanity to the pranks of this
atavistic brain of mine that, modern and normal, harked
back to a past so remote as to be contemporaneous with
the raw beginnings of mankind.
For in this past I know of, man, as we to-day know him,
did not exist. It was in the period of his becoming
that I must have lived and had my being.
CHAPTER III
The commonest dream of my early childhood was something
like this: It seemed that I was very small and that I
lay curled up in a sort of nest of twigs and boughs.
Sometimes I was lying on my back. In this position it
seemed that I spent many hours, watching the play of
sunlight on the foliage and the stirring of the leaves
by the wind. Often the nest itself moved back and
forth when the wind was strong.
But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered
as of tremendous space beneath me. I never saw it, I
never peered over the edge of the nest to see; but I
KNEW and feared that space that lurked just beneath me
and that ever threatened me like a maw of some
all-devouring monster.
This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more
like a condition than an experience of action, I
dreamed very often in my early childhood. But
suddenly, there would rush into the very midst of it
strange forms and ferocious happenings, the thunder and
crashing of storm, or unfamiliar landscapes such as in
my wake-a-day life I had never seen. The result was
confusion and nightmare. I could comprehend nothing of
it. There was no logic of sequence.
You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I
was a wee babe of the Younger World lying in my tree
nest; the next moment I was a grown man of the Younger
World locked in combat with the hideous Red-Eye; and
the next moment I was creeping carefully down to the
water-hole in the heat of the day. Events, years apart
in their occurrence in the Younger World, occurred with
me within the space of several minutes, or seconds.
It was all a jumble, but this jumble I shall not
inflict upon you. It was not until I was a young man
and had dreamed many thousand times, that everything
straightened out and became clear and plain. Then it
was that I got the clew of time, and was able to piece
together events and actions in their proper order.
Thus was I able to reconstruct the vanished Younger
World as it was at the time I lived in it--or at the
time my other-self lived in it. The distinction does
not matter; for I, too, the modern man, have gone back
and lived that early life in the company of my
other-self.
For your convenience, since this is to be no
sociological screed, I shall frame together the
different events into a comprehensive story. For there
is a certain thread of continuity and happening that
runs through all the dreams. There is my friendship
with Lop-Ear, for instance. Also, there is the enmity
of Red-Eye, and the love of the Swift One. Taking it
all in all, a fairly coherent and interesting story I
am sure you will agree.
I do not remember much of my mother. Possibly the
earliest recollection I have of her--and certainly the
sharpest--is the following: It seemed I was lying on
the ground. I was somewhat older than during the nest
days, but still helpless. I rolled about in the dry
leaves, playing with them and making crooning, rasping
noises in my throat. The sun shone warmly and I was
happy, and comfortable. I was in a little open space.
Around me, on all sides, were bushes and fern-like
growths, and overhead and all about were the trunks and
branches of forest trees.
Suddenly I heard a sound. I sat upright and listened.
I made no movement. The little noises died down in my
throat, and I sat as one petrified. The sound drew
closer. It was like the grunt of a pig. Then I began
to hear the sounds caused by the moving of a body
through the brush. Next I saw the ferns agitated by
the passage of the body. Then the ferns parted, and I
saw gleaming eyes, a long snout, and white tusks.
It was a wild boar. He peered at me curiously. He
grunted once or twice and shifted his weight from one
foreleg to the other, at the same time moving his head
from side to side and swaying the ferns. Still I sat
as one petrified, my eyes unblinking as I stared at
him, fear eating at my heart.
It seemed that this movelessness and silence on my part
was what was expected of me. I was not to cry out in
the face of fear. It was a dictate of instinct. And
so I sat there and waited for I knew not what. The
boar thrust the ferns aside and stepped into the open.
The curiosity went out of his eyes, and they gleamed
cruelly. He tossed his head at me threateningly and
advanced a step. This he did again, and yet again.
Then I screamed...or shrieked--I cannot describe it,
but it was a shrill and terrible cry. And it seems
that it, too, at this stage of the proceedings, was the
thing expected of me. From not far away came an
answering cry. My sounds seemed momentarily to
disconcert the boar, and while he halted and shifted
his weight with indecision, an apparition burst upon
us.
She was like a large orangutan, my mother, or like a
chimpanzee, and yet, in sharp and definite ways, quite
different. She was heavier of build than they, and had
less hair. Her arms were not so long, and her legs
were stouter. She wore no clothes--only her natural
hair. And I can tell you she was a fury when she was
excited.
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