Jack London. Before Adam -
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bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of our
arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the
shock of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but
they died immediately, before they could have progeny. You and
I are descended from those that did not strike bottom; that is
why you and I, in our dreams, never strike bottom.
And now we come to disassociation of personality. We never
have this sense of falling when we are wide awake. Our
wake-a-day personality has no experience of it. Then--and here
the argument is irresistible--it must be another and distinct
personality that falls when we are asleep, and that has had
experience of such falling--that has, in short, a memory of
past-day race experiences, just as our wake-a-day personality
has a memory of our wake-a-day experiences.
It was at this stage in my reasoning that I began to see
the light. And quickly the light burst upon me with dazzling
brightness, illuminating and explaining all that had been weird
and uncanny and unnaturally impossible in my dream experiences.
In my sleep it was not my wake-a-day personality that took
charge of me; it was another and distinct personality,
possessing a new and totally different fund of experiences,
and, to the point of my dreaming, possessing memories of those
totally different experiences.
What was this personality? When had it itself lived a
wake-a-day life on this planet in order to collect this fund of
strange experiences? These were questions that my dreams
themselves answered. He lived in the long ago, when the world
was young, in that period that we call the Mid-Pleistocene. He
fell from the trees but did not strike bottom. He gibbered with
fear at the roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beasts of