Jack London. Before Adam -
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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