tremendous impetus is given to their power over the sleeping subject by any shock which rouses them in real life. For instance, I trace this bull nightmare to having once been pursued by a cow when I was a small boy, and having narrowly escaped goring by jumping over a fence. I had often braved the peril before when crossing the same field, though not without inward misgivings. The shock caused by the actual fulfilment of my worst fears clinched matters and decided for me that forever afterwards all cows were dangerous and to be avoided. Even now it costs me an effort of will to pass through a herd of these harmless creatures, though the effect of emerging unscathed from many such encounters has nearly ousted my instinctive childish dread. Now I take the bulls to be a symbol of all the evil wild beasts (like the aurochs, for example) to whose attacks prehistoric man was exposed. A great deal of his mental activity - his psychological reactions-was necessarily concerned with these beasts; his ideas revolved around them, and they occupied a large place in the background of his conceptual existence. He must constantly have been directing his actions with reference to them, whether in pursuit or flight or vigilant neutrality, or for conversion of them into meat, clothing, weapons, and tools. His earliest art betrays this same obsession. What more natural, therefore, than that the attention of children should similarly be attracted toward strange beasts- an attraction not unmixed with thrills of terror - thus recapitulating the experience of the race? What more probable than that the shock of a single terrifying experience should outlive the days of childhood as a nightmare, if we assume that this individual experience merely releases the springs of a powerful race memory, wound up by centuries of habit? It seems likely that any shock which is thus connected with a racememory acting through the medium of environmental factors once possessing great survival-value, may have more potent and lasting effects than shocks unconnected therewith. During early childhood I was much harassed by another wild-beast nightmare, which has long ceased its troubling. I used to be taken by my nurse to play in some gardens near Regent's Park. These gardens were divided into two parts, connected by a tunnel under the Marylebone Road. This tunnel filled me with apprehension. The deep, hollow sound of voices in it, and the roar of the traffic overhead, were strange and terrifying phenomena. In my dreams I would find myself in this tunnel hemmed in on all sides by lions and tigers such as I had seen and heard roaring in the Zoological Gardens close by. My memories of this nightmare are now very dim, but I know that it was at the time most realistic and distressing. It derived none of its strength from nursery bogeys, with which I was never threatened. The same instinct was again responsible, I think, for seizing upon and magnifying an experience which bore a symbolic resemblance to ancestral dangers. Closely akin was my attitude toward lions and tigers in general. I took a great interest in their geographical distribution. I was told that wolves were still to be found at large in parts of France, and that England owed its immunity to the Channel. I at once jumped to the conclusion that the moment one landed in France one would have to keep on the alert for fear of being attacked by them. Similarly I imagined that as soon as one stepped off the gangway at Bombay one would see tigers on all sides, and that it would be madness to walk abroad unarmed. The details were supplied by family associations with India, but I know that I was thoroughly convinced of the correctness of my opinions, and would have wished to act upon them had I gone there. The fact that I had recently been born in India and might possibly return there some day gave a practical interest to these reveries. There are many strands woven into the fabric of our ancestry; some of them have their origin in very remote ages, some refer to more recent but still lengthy stages of development. Among those which lie midway may be placed our life in the trees. Everyone probably has experienced the sensation of flying in dreams. I can only speak for myself and one friend, but in both cases the flying is not like a bird's, but consists of progress by means of long hops, becoming longer and easier. Now, we are not descended from any flying mammal, but we are descended from a tree-living animal which progressed by swinging from branch to branch at a rapid rate, maintaining an upright posture with the feet. This dream-hopping, it may be said, does not resemble that swinging gait. Not, perhaps, to the extent of absolute identity, but then we have never actually so progressed during our individual lives; and I believe that racememory is normally a generalized phenomenon, and takes its imagery from actual individual experience, sometimes symbolizing by means of that which approaches most nearly to the original model. Now in bathing I have often moved along the bottom in shallow water by half hopping, half floating in the water. Doing so seems to satisfy an instinct, but, however this may be, I think that the motion is seized upon by this tree-swinging memory as a symbol which conforms most nearly to its requirements. It is also possible that the memory is derived from an earlier ancestor in the kangaroo habits. Many reincarnation myths' are probably due to revivals of racememory under appropriate stimuli. Kipling's story of the spirit of Keats 'temporarily reinduced' into the body of a chemist's assistant is a case in point. The author, with characteristic sureness of insight, attributes the occurrence to the suggestive power of outward circumstances, recalling through association certain incidents in the poet's life. In another story the ancestral memories of a reincarnated galley-slave are aroused by reading Longfellow's lines: Wouldst thou, so the helmsman answered, In both stories the fleeting revival of a latent idea or ancestral phase is accompanied by a wealth of detail and local coloring which renders it abnormal. Far be it from me to deny the possibility of such a phenomenon occurring under exceptional conditions. I quote these cases from the realm of fiction merely because there one sees in the bright imagery of creative art the same kind of revivals as may be observed less vividly in one's own life. Come, Marybud, with me Is dazzling shining eyes. The silver and the blue: This morn the world's so fair That love's most happy self is lovelier too; Up the rainbow's span of splendor From floral citadels To mimic mists and showers. And dazzling to the dancing eye the flowers; But oh! the dazzling beauty of a joy that shall be ours! Marybud, the big bee's drum Sounds among the lupin spires. Hark! the elves' processions come; List! the tanging elfin lyres Hum: Columbines all tip-toe stare; Magic, magic fills the air! Marybud, oh, come and share Come! DOUBT NO MORE THAT OBERON BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY DOUBT no more that Oberon Lived, and played a reed, and ran |