Before Adam Read Free

memories than others.
    It is all a question of varying degree of possession of the other personality. In myself, the degree of possession is enormous. My other personality is almost equal in power with my own personality. And in this matter I am, as I said, a freak – a freak of heredity.
    I do believe that it is the possession of this other personality – but not so strong a one as mine – that has, in somefew others, given rise to belief in personal reincarnation experiences. It is very plausible to such people, a most convincing hypothesis. When they have visions of scenes they have never seen in the flesh, memories of acts and events dating back in time, the simplest explanation is that they have lived before.
    But they make the mistake of ignoring their own duality. They do not recognise their other personality. They think it is their own personality, that they have only one personality; and from such a premise they can conclude only that they have lived previous lives.
    But they are wrong. It is not reincarnation. I have visions of myself roaming through the forests of the younger world; and yet it is not myself that I see but one that is only remotely a part of me, as my father and my grandfather are parts of me less remote. This other self of mine is an ancestor, a progenitor of my progenitors in the early line of my race, himself the progeny of a line that long before his time developed fingers and toes and climbed up into the trees.
    I must again, at the risk of boring, repeat that I am, in this one thing, to be considered a freak. Not alone do I possess racial memory to an enormous extent, but I possess the memories of one particular and far-removed progenitor. And yet, while this is most unusual, there is nothing over-remarkable about it.
    Follow my reasoning. An instinct is a racial memory. Very good. Then you and I and all of us receive these memories from our fathers and mothers, as they received them from their fathers and mothers. Therefore there must be a medium whereby these memories are transmitted from generation to generation. This medium is what Weismann terms the ‘germ plasm’. 2 It carries the memories of the whole evolution ofthe race. These memories are dim and confused, and many of them are lost. But some strains of germ plasm carry an excessive freightage of memories – are, to be scientific, more atavistic than other strains; and such a strain is mine. I am a freak of heredity, an atavistic nightmare – call me what you will; but here I am, real and alive, eating three hearty meals a day, and what are you going to do about it?
    And now, before I take up my tale, I want to anticipate the doubting Thomases of psychology, who are prone to scoff, and who would otherwise surely say that the coherence of my dreams is due to overstudy and the subconscious projection of my knowledge of evolution into my dreams. In the first place, I have never been a zealous student. I graduated last of my class. I cared more for athletics, and – there is no reason I should not confess it – more for billiards.
    Further, I had no knowledge of evolution until I was at college, whereas in my childhood and youth I had already lived in my dreams all the details of that other, long-ago life. I will say, however, that these details were mixed and incoherent until I came to know the science of evolution. Evolution was the key. It gave the explanation, gave sanity to the pranks of this atavistic brain of mine that, modern and normal, harked back to a past so remote as to be contemporaneous with the raw beginnings of mankind.
    For in this past I know of, man, as we today know him, did not exist. It was in the period of his becoming that I must have lived and had my being.

3
    The commonest dream of my early childhood was something like this:
    It seemed that I was very small and that I lay curled up in a sort of nest of twigs and boughs. Sometimes I was lying on my back. In this position it seemed that I spent many