Before Adam Page #2

"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

								

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

								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes