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 interspaces 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 Traité des Exhumés, 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 muffled drum,—and I wondered why nobody 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
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 massiveness 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 class 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 accumulating the e
xperience 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.
Footnote
1 I may remark here that in many old Japanese 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.
Readings from a Dream-book
Readings from a Dream-book
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 title-page; and there is no running title. 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 inter-connection, 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 pass 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 shores 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 passed, and will pass 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 pass,—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 passed 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 sex 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 Gods know,—the dim ones who dwell beyond Space,—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. . . ."
/> Fr. VI
. . . "The Animulæ making the Self do not fear death as dissolution. They fear death only as reintegration,—recombination with the strange and the hateful of other lives: they fear the imprisonment, within another body, of that which loves together with that which loathes. . . ."
Fr. VII
. . . "In other time the El-Woman sat only in waste places, and by solitary ways. But now in the shadows of cities she offers her breasts to youth; and he whom she entices, presently goes mad, and becomes, like herself, a hollowness. For the higher ghosts that entered into the making of him perish at that goblin-touch,—die as the pupa dies in the cocoon, leaving only a shell and dust behind. . .
Fr. VIII
. . . The Man said to the multitude remaining of his Souls:—
"I am weary of life."
And the remnant replied to him:—
"We also are weary of the shame and pain of dwelling in so vile a habitation. Continually we strive that the beams may break, and the pillars crack, and the roof fall in upon us."
"Surely there is a curse upon me," groaned the Man. "There is no justice in the Gods!"
Then the Souls tumultuously laughed in scorn,—even as the leaves of a wood in the wind do chuckle all together. And they made answer to him:—
"As a fool thou liest! Did any save thyself make thy vile body? Was it shapen—or misshapen—by any deeds or thoughts except thine own?"
"No deed or thought can I remember," returned the Man, "deserving that which has come upon me."
"Remember!" laughed the Souls. "No—the folly was in other lives. But we remember; and remembering, we hate."
"Ye are all one with me!" cried the Man,—"how can ye hate?"
"One with thee," mocked the Souls,—"as the wearer is one with his garment! . . . How can we hate? As the fire that devours the wood from which it is drawn by the fire-maker—even so we can hate."
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