Shadowings Part 27

Whence the fancy of those shapes? I do not know. Possibly from some impression of fear in earliest infancy; possibly from some experience of fear in other lives than mine. That mystery is forever insoluble. But the mystery of the shock of the touch admits of a definite hypothesis.

First, allow me to observe that the experience of the sensation itself cannot be dismissed as "mere imagination." Imagination means cerebral activity: its pains and its pleasures are alike inseparable from nervous operation, and their physical importance is sufficiently proved by their physiological effects. Dream-fear may kill as well as other fear; and no emotion thus powerful can be reasonably deemed undeserving of study.

One remarkable fact in the problem to be considered is that the sensation of seizure in dreams differs totally from all sensations familiar to ordinary waking life. Why this differentiation? How interpret the extraordinary ma.s.siveness and depth of the thrill?

I have already suggested that the dreamer's fear is most probably not a reflection of relative experience, but represents the incalculable total of ancestral experience of dream-fear. If the sum of the experience of active life be transmitted by inheritance, so must likewise be transmitted the summed experience of the life of sleep. And in normal heredity either cla.s.s of transmissions would probably remain distinct.

Now, granting this hypothesis, the sensation of dream-seizure would have had its beginnings in the earliest phases of dream-consciousness,--long prior to the apparition of man. The first creatures capable of thought and fear must often have dreamed of being caught by their natural enemies. There could not have been much imagining of pain in these primal dreams. But higher nervous development in later forms of being would have been accompanied with larger susceptibility to dream-pain. Still later, with the growth of reasoning-power, ideas of the supernatural would have changed and intensified the character of dream-fear. Furthermore, through all the course of evolution, heredity would have been acc.u.mulating the experience of such feeling. Under those forms of imaginative pain evolved through reaction of religious beliefs, there would persist some dim survival of savage primitive fears, and again, under this, a dimmer but incomparably deeper substratum of ancient animal-terrors. In the dreams of the modern child all these latencies might quicken,--one below another,--unfathomably,--with the coming and the growing of nightmare.

It may be doubted whether the phantasms of any particular nightmare have a history older than the brain in which they move. But the shock of the touch would seem to indicate _some point of dream-contact with the total race-experience of shadowy seizure_. It may be that profundities of Self,--abysses never reached by any ray from the life of sun,--are strangely stirred in slumber, and that out of their blackness immediately responds a shuddering of memory, measureless even by millions of years.

Readings from a Dream-book

[Decoration]

OFTEN, in the blind dead of the night, I find myself reading a book,--a big broad book,--a dream-book. By "dream-book," I do not mean a book about dreams, but a book made of the stuff that dreams are made of.

I do not know the name of the book, nor the name of its author: I have not been able to see the t.i.tle-page; and there is no running t.i.tle. As for the back of the volume, it remains,--like the back of the Moon,--invisible forever.

At no time have I touched the book in any way,--not even to turn a leaf.

Somebody, always viewless, holds it up and open before me in the dark; and I can read it only because it is lighted by a light that comes from nowhere. Above and beneath and on either side of the book there is darkness absolute; but the pages seem to retain the yellow glow of lamps that once illuminated them.

A queer fact is that I never see the entire text of a page at once, though I see the whole page itself plainly. The text rises, or seems to rise, to the surface of the paper as I gaze, and fades out almost immediately after having been read. By a simple effort of will, I can recall the vanished sentences to the page; but they do not come back in the same form as before: they seem to have been oddly revised during the interval. Never can I coax even one fugitive line to reproduce itself exactly as it read at first. But I can always force something to return; and this something remains sharply distinct during perusal. Then it turns faint grey, and appears to sink--as through thick milk--backward out of sight.

By regularly taking care to write down, immediately upon awakening, whatever I could remember reading in the dream-book, I found myself able last year to reproduce portions of the text. But the order in which I now present these fragments is not at all the order in which I recovered them. If they seem to have any interconnection, this is only because I tried to arrange them in what I imagined to be the rational sequence. Of their original place and relation, I know scarcely anything. And, even regarding the character of the book itself, I have been able to discover only that a great part of it consists of dialogues about the Unthinkable.

Fr. I

... Then the Wave prayed to remain a wave forever.

The Sea made answer:--

"Nay, thou must break: there is no rest in me. Billions of billions of times thou wilt rise again to break, and break to rise again."

The Wave complained:--

"I fear. Thou sayest that I shall rise again. But when did ever a wave return from the place of breaking?"

The Sea responded:--

"Times countless beyond utterance thou hast broken; and yet thou art!

Behold the myriads of the waves that run before thee, and the myriads that pursue behind thee!--all have been to the place of breaking times unspeakable; and thither they hasten now to break again. Into me they melt, only to swell anew. But pa.s.s they must; for there is not any rest in me."

Murmuring, the Wave replied:--

"Shall I not be scattered presently to mix with the mingling of all these myriads? How should I rise again? Never, never again can I become the same."

"The same thou never art," returned the Sea, "at any two moments in thy running: perpetual change is the law of thy being. What is thine 'I'?

Always thou art shaped with the substance of waves forgotten,--waves numberless beyond the sands of the sh.o.r.es of me. In thy multiplicity what art thou?--a phantom, an impermanency!"

"Real is pain," sobbed the Wave,--"and fear and hope, and the joy of the light. Whence and what are these, if I be not real?"

"Thou hast no pain," the Sea responded,--"nor fear nor hope nor joy.

Thou art nothing--save in me. I am thy Self, thine 'I': thy form is my dream; thy motion is my will; thy breaking is my pain. Break thou must, because there is no rest in me; but thou wilt break only to rise again,--for death is the Rhythm of Life. Lo! I, too, die that I may live: these my waters have pa.s.sed, and will pa.s.s again, with wrecks of innumerable worlds to the burning of innumerable suns. I, too, am multiple unspeakably: dead tides of millions of oceans revive in mine ebb and flow. Suffice thee to learn that only because thou wast thou art, and that because thou art thou wilt become again."

Muttered the Wave,--

"I cannot understand."

Answered the Sea,--

"Thy part is to pulse and pa.s.s,--never to understand. I also,--even I, the great Sea,--do not understand...."

Fr. II

... "The stones and the rocks have felt; the winds have been breath and speech; the rivers and oceans of earth have been locked into chambers of hearts. And the palingenesis cannot cease till every cosmic particle shall have pa.s.sed through the uttermost possible experience of the highest possible life."

"But what of the planetary core?--has that, too, felt and thought?"

"Even so surely as that all flesh has been sun-fire! In the ceaseless succession of integrations and dissolutions, all things have shifted relation and place numberless billions of times. Hearts of old moons will make the surface of future worlds...."

Fr. III

... "No regret is vain. It is sorrow that spins the thread,--softer than moonshine, thinner than fragrance, stronger than death,--the Gleipnir-chain of the Greater Memory....

"In millions of years you will meet again;--and the time will not seem long; for a million years and a moment are the same to the dead. Then you will not be all of your present self, nor she be all that she has been: both of you will at once be less, and yet incomparably more. Then, to the longing that must come upon you, body itself will seem but a barrier through which you would leap to her--or, it may be, to him; for s.e.x will have shifted numberless times ere then. Neither will remember; but each will be filled with a feeling immeasurable of having met before...."

Fr. IV

... "So wronging the being who loves,--the being blindly imagined but of yesterday,--this mocker mocks the divine in the past of the Soul of the World. Then in that heart is revived the countless million sorrows buried in forgotten graves,--all the old pain of Love, in its patient contest with Hate, since the beginning of Time.

"And the G.o.ds know,--the dim ones who dwell beyond s.p.a.ce,--spinning the mysteries of Shape and Name. For they sit at the roots of Life; and the pain runs back to them; and they feel that wrong,--as the Spider feels in the trembling of her web that a thread is broken...."

Fr. V

"Love at sight is the choice of the dead. But the most of them are older than ethical systems; and the decision of their majorities is rarely moral. They choose by beauty,--according to their memory of physical excellence; and as bodily fitness makes the foundation of mental and of moral power, they are not apt to choose ill. Nevertheless they are sometimes strangely cheated. They have been known to want beings that could never help ghost to a body,--hollow goblins...."