Smakprov ur Before Adam

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