Shadowings Part 26

[Decoration]

OUT of some upper-story window I was looking into a street of yellow-tinted houses,--a colonial street, old-fashioned, narrow, with palm-heads showing above its roofs of tile. There were no shadows; there was no sun,--only a grey soft light, as of early gloaming.

Suddenly I found myself falling from the window; and my heart gave one sickening leap of terror. But the distance from window to pavement proved to be much greater than I supposed,--so great that, in spite of my fear, I began to wonder. Still I kept falling, falling,--and still the dreaded shock did not come. Then the fear ceased, and a queer pleasure took its place;--for I discovered that I was not falling quickly, but only _floating_ down. Moreover, I was floating feet foremost--must have turned in descending. At last I touched the stones--but very, very lightly, with only one foot; and instantly at that touch I went up again,--rose to the level of the eaves. People stopped to stare at me. I felt the exultation of power superhuman;--I felt for the moment as a G.o.d.

Then softly I began to sink; and the sight of faces, gathering below me, prompted a sudden resolve to fly down the street, over the heads of the gazers. Again like a bubble I rose, and, with the same impulse, I sailed in one grand curve to a distance that astounded me. I felt no wind;--I felt nothing but the joy of motion triumphant. Once more touching pavement, I soared at a bound for a thousand yards. Then, reaching the end of the street, I wheeled and came back by great swoops,--by long slow aerial leaps of surprising alt.i.tude. In the street there was dead silence: many people were looking; but n.o.body spoke. I wondered what they thought of my feat, and what they would say if they knew how easily the thing was done. By the merest chance I had found out how to do it; and the only reason why it seemed a feat was that no one else had ever attempted it. Instinctively I felt that to say anything about the accident, which had led to the discovery, would be imprudent. Then the real meaning of the strange hush in the street began to dawn upon me. I said to myself:--

"This silence is the Silence of Dreams;--I am quite well aware that this is a dream. I remember having dreamed the same dream before. But the discovery of this power is not a dream: _it is a revelation!_ ... Now that I have learned how to fly, I can no more forget it than a swimmer can forget how to swim. To-morrow morning I shall astonish the people, by sailing over the roofs of the town."

Morning came; and I woke with the fixed resolve to fly out of the window. But no sooner had I risen from bed than the knowledge of physical relations returned, like a sensation forgotten, and compelled me to recognize the unwelcome truth that I had not made any discovery at all.

This was neither the first nor the last of such dreams; but it was particularly vivid, and I therefore selected it for narration as a good example of its cla.s.s. I still fly occasionally,--sometimes over fields and streams,--sometimes through familiar streets; and the dream is invariably accompanied by remembrance of like dreams in the past, as well as by the conviction that I have really found out a secret, really acquired a new faculty. "This time, at all events," I say to myself, "it is impossible that I can be mistaken;--I _know_ that I shall be able to fly after I awake. Many times before, in other dreams, I learned the secret only to forget it on awakening; but this time I am absolutely sure that I shall not forget." And the conviction actually stays with me until I rise from bed, when the physical effort at once reminds me of the formidable reality of gravitation.

The oddest part of this experience is the feeling of buoyancy. It is much like the feeling of floating,--of rising or sinking through tepid water, for example;--and there is no sense of real effort. It is a delight; yet it usually leaves something to be desired. I am a low flyer; I can proceed only like a pteromys or a flying-fish--and far less quickly: moreover, I must tread earth occasionally in order to obtain a fresh impulsion. I seldom rise to a height of more than twenty-five or thirty feet;--the greater part of the time I am merely skimming surfaces. Touching the ground only at intervals of several hundred yards is pleasant skimming; but I always feel, in a faint and watery way, the dead pull of the world beneath me.

Now the experience of most dream-flyers I find to be essentially like my own. I have met but one who claims superior powers: he says that he flies over mountains--goes sailing from peak to peak like a kite. All others whom I have questioned acknowledge that they fly low,--in long parabolic curves,--and this only by touching ground from time to time.

Most of them also tell me that their flights usually begin with an imagined fall, or desperate leap; and no less than four say that the start is commonly taken from the top of a stairway.

[Decoration]

For myriads of years humanity has thus been flying by night. How did the fancied motion, having so little in common with any experience of active life, become a universal experience of the life of sleep?

It may be that memory-impressions of certain kinds of aerial motion,--exultant experiences of leaping or swinging, for example,--are in dream-revival so magnified and prolonged as to create the illusion of flight. We know that in actual time the duration of most dreams is very brief. But in the half-life of sleep--(nightmare offering some startling exceptions)--there is scarcely more than a faint smouldering of consciousness by comparison with the quick flash and vivid thrill of active cerebration;--and time, to the dreaming brain, would seem to be magnified, somewhat as it must be relatively magnified to the feeble consciousness of an insect. Supposing that any memory of the sensation of falling, together with the memory of the concomitant fear, should be accidentally revived in sleep, the dream-prolongation of the sensation and the emotion--unchecked by the natural sequence of shock--might suffice to revive other and even pleasurable memories of airy motion.

And these, again, might quicken other combinations of interrelated memories able to furnish all the incident and scenery of the long phantasmagoria.

But this hypothesis will not fully explain certain feelings and ideas of a character different from any experience of waking-hours,--the exultation of voluntary motion without exertion,--the pleasure of the utterly impossible,--the ghostly delight of imponderability. Neither can it serve to explain other dream-experiences of levitation which do not begin with the sensation of leaping or falling, and are seldom of a pleasurable kind. For example, it sometimes happens during nightmare that the dreamer, deprived of all power to move or speak, actually feels his body lifted into the air and floated away by the force of the horror within him. Again, there are dreams in which the dreamer has no physical being. I have thus found myself without any body,--a viewless and voiceless phantom, hovering upon a mountain-road in twilight time, and trying to frighten lonely folk by making small moaning noises. The sensation was of moving through the air by mere act of will: there was no touching of surfaces; and I seemed to glide always about a foot above the road.

Could the feeling of dream-flight be partly interpreted by organic memory of conditions of life more ancient than man,--life weighty, and winged, and flying heavily, _a little above the ground?_

Or might we suppose that some all-permeating Over-Soul, dormant in other time, wakens within the brain at rare moments of our sleep-life? The limited human consciousness has been beautifully compared to the visible solar spectrum, above and below which whole zones of colors invisible await the evolution of superior senses; and mystics aver that something of the ultra-violet or infra-red rays of the vaster Mind may be momentarily glimpsed in dreams. Certainly the Cosmic Life in each of us has been all things in all forms of s.p.a.ce and time. Perhaps you would like to believe that it may bestir, in slumber, some vague sense-memory of things more ancient than the sun,--memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation, where the normal modes of voluntary motion would have been like the realization of our flying dreams?...

Nightmare-Touch

[Decoration]

I

WHAT _is_ the fear of ghosts among those who believe in ghosts?

All fear is the result of experience,--experience of the individual or of the race,--experience either of the present life or of lives forgotten. Even the fear of the unknown can have no other origin. And the fear of ghosts must be a product of past pain.

Probably the fear of ghosts, as well as the belief in them, had its beginning in dreams. It is a peculiar fear. No other fear is so intense; yet none is so vague. Feelings thus voluminous and dim are super-individual mostly,--feelings inherited,--feelings made within us by the experience of the dead.

What experience?

Nowhere do I remember reading a plain statement of the reason why ghosts are feared. Ask any ten intelligent persons of your acquaintance, who remember having once been afraid of ghosts, to tell you exactly why they were afraid,--to define the fancy behind the fear;--and I doubt whether even one will be able to answer the question. The literature of folk-lore--oral and written--throws no clear light upon the subject. We find, indeed, various legends of men torn asunder by phantoms; but such gross imaginings could not explain the peculiar quality of ghostly fear.

It is not a fear of bodily violence. It is not even a reasoning fear,--not a fear that can readily explain itself,--which would not be the case if it were founded upon definite ideas of physical danger.

Furthermore, although primitive ghosts may have been imagined as capable of tearing and devouring, the common idea of a ghost is certainly that of a being intangible and imponderable.[118]

[118] I may remark here that in many old j.a.panese legends and ballads, ghosts are represented as having power to _pull off_ people's heads. But so far as the origin of the fear of ghosts is concerned, such stories explain nothing,--since the experiences that evolved the fear must have been real, not imaginary, experiences.

Now I venture to state boldly that the common fear of ghosts is _the fear of being touched by ghosts_,--or, in other words, that the imagined Supernatural is dreaded mainly because of its imagined power to touch.

Only to _touch_, remember!--not to wound or to kill.

But this dread of the touch would itself be the result of experience,--chiefly, I think, of prenatal experience stored up in the individual by inheritance, like the child's fear of darkness. And who can ever have had the sensation of being touched by ghosts? The answer is simple:--_Everybody who has been seized by phantoms in a dream._

Elements of primeval fears--fears older than humanity--doubtless enter into the child-terror of darkness. But the more definite fear of ghosts may very possibly be composed with inherited results of dream-pain,--ancestral experience of nightmare. And the intuitive terror of supernatural touch can thus be evolutionally explained.

Let me now try to ill.u.s.trate my theory by relating some typical experiences.

II

When about five years old I was condemned to sleep by myself in a certain isolated room, thereafter always called the Child's Room. (At that time I was scarcely ever mentioned by name, but only referred to as "the Child.") The room was narrow, but very high, and, in spite of one tall window, very gloomy. It contained a fire-place wherein no fire was ever kindled; and the Child suspected that the chimney was haunted.

A law was made that no light should be left in the Child's Room at night,--simply because the Child was afraid of the dark. His fear of the dark was judged to be a mental disorder requiring severe treatment. But the treatment aggravated the disorder. Previously I had been accustomed to sleep in a well-lighted room, with a nurse to take care of me. I thought that I should die of fright when sentenced to lie alone in the dark, and--what seemed to me then abominably cruel--actually _locked_ into my room, the most dismal room of the house. Night after night when I had been warmly tucked into bed, the lamp was removed; the key clicked in the lock; the protecting light and the footsteps of my guardian receded together. Then an agony of fear would come upon me. Something in the black air would seem to gather and grow--(I thought that I could even _hear_ it grow)--till I had to scream. Screaming regularly brought punishment; but it also brought back the light, which more than consoled for the punishment. This fact being at last found out, orders were given to pay no further heed to the screams of the Child.

Why was I thus insanely afraid? Partly because the dark had always been peopled for me with shapes of terror. So far back as memory extended, I had suffered from ugly dreams; and when aroused from them I could always _see_ the forms dreamed of, lurking in the shadows of the room. They would soon fade out; but for several moments they would appear like tangible realities. And they were always the same figures.... Sometimes, without any preface of dreams, I used to see them at twilight-time,--following me about from room to room, or reaching long dim hands after me, from story to story, up through the inters.p.a.ces of the deep stairways.

I had complained of these haunters only to be told that I must never speak of them, and that they did not exist. I had complained to everybody in the house; and everybody in the house had told me the very same thing. But there was the evidence of my eyes! The denial of that evidence I could explain only in two ways:--Either the shapes were afraid of big people, and showed themselves to me alone, because I was little and weak; or else the entire household had agreed, for some ghastly reason, to say what was not true. This latter theory seemed to me the more probable one, because I had several times perceived the shapes when I was not unattended;--and the consequent appearance of secrecy frightened me scarcely less than the visions did. Why was I forbidden to talk about what I saw, and even heard,--on creaking stairways,--behind wavering curtains?

"Nothing will hurt you,"--this was the merciless answer to all my pleadings not to be left alone at night. But the haunters _did_ hurt me.

Only--they would wait until after I had fallen asleep, and so into their power,--for they possessed occult means of preventing me from rising or moving or crying out.

Needless to comment upon the policy of locking me up alone with these fears in a black room. Unutterably was I tormented in that room--for years! Therefore I felt relatively happy when sent away at last to a children's boarding-school, where the haunters very seldom ventured to show themselves.

They were not like any people that I had ever known. They were shadowy dark-robed figures, capable of atrocious self-distortion,--capable, for instance, of growing up to the ceiling, and then across it, and then lengthening themselves, head-downwards, along the opposite wall. Only their faces were distinct; and I tried not to look at their faces. I tried also in my dreams--or thought that I tried--to awaken myself from the sight of them by pulling at my eyelids with my fingers; but the eyelids would remain closed, as if sealed.... Many years afterwards, the frightful plates in Orfila's _Traite des Exhumes_, beheld for the first time, recalled to me with a sickening start the dream-terrors of childhood. But to understand the Child's experience, you must imagine Orfila's drawings intensely alive, and continually elongating or distorting, as in some monstrous anamorphosis.

Nevertheless the mere sight of those nightmare-faces was not the worst of the experiences in the Child's Room. The dreams always began with a suspicion, or sensation of something heavy in the air,--slowly quenching will,--slowly numbing my power to move. At such times I usually found myself alone in a large unlighted apartment; and, almost simultaneously with the first sensation of fear, the atmosphere of the room would become suffused, half-way to the ceiling, with a sombre-yellowish glow, making objects dimly visible,--though the ceiling itself remained pitch-black. This was not a true appearance of light: rather it seemed as if the black air were changing color from beneath.... Certain terrible aspects of sunset, on the eve of storm, offer like effects of sinister color.... Forthwith I would try to escape,--(feeling at every step a sensation _as of wading_),--and would sometimes succeed in struggling half-way across the room;--but there I would always find myself brought to a standstill,--paralyzed by some innominable opposition. Happy voices I could hear in the next room;--I could see light through the transom over the door that I had vainly endeavored to reach;--I knew that one loud cry would save me. But not even by the most frantic effort could I raise my voice above a whisper.... And all this signified only that the Nameless was coming,--was nearing,--was mounting the stairs. I could hear the step,--booming like the sound of a m.u.f.fled drum,--and I wondered why n.o.body else heard it. A long, long time the haunter would take to come,--malevolently pausing after each ghastly footfall. Then, without a creak, the bolted door would open,--slowly, slowly,--and the thing would enter, gibbering soundlessly,--and put out hands,--and clutch me,--and toss me to the black ceiling,--and catch me descending to toss me up again, and again, and again.... In those moments the feeling was not fear: fear itself had been torpified by the first seizure. It was a sensation that has no name in the language of the living. For every touch brought a shock of something infinitely worse than pain,--something that thrilled into the innermost secret being of me,--a sort of abominable electricity, discovering unimagined capacities of suffering in totally unfamiliar regions of sentiency.... This was commonly the work of a single tormentor; but I can also remember having been caught by a group, and tossed from one to another,--seemingly for a time of many minutes.

III