Before Adam

"Before Adam" by Jack London, published in 1907, is a unique blend of science fiction, evolutionary theory, and adventure. It explores the idea of genetic memory through a narrator who experiences vivid dreams of a prehistoric past.

• Action and Adventure
• Science fiction

								
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 in 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

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