Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

I have been reading an epoch-making book, which only Titanic minds like that of its author (so I am told) can criticise; but Lilliputian minds, fortunately for me, may confess their personal bewilderment. At one point in his exposition the author deals with the theory of “recapitulation,” according to which the human body and soul repeat the development of the race from monad to man. Dwelling on the fishy stage of man’s career, he mentions the testimony of dreams to a former aquatic existence. “In sleep, which is a kind of decapitation of higher functions, ancient ancestral experiences crop out. . . . One of the present writer’s most persistent dream experiences was that, by holding the breath and controlling it in a peculiar way, he could rise from the ground and float through the air by slight movements of the limbs and body. So urgent and repeated was this experience that he has many times awaked with a sense, projected for some moments into waking life, that he could now demonstrate to his friends the astounding trick of levitation over houses and fields at will. . . . Now, as lungs have taken the place of swim-bladders, these unique hovering experiences of sleep suggest that here traces of a function have survived their known structure. Our ancestors floated and swam far longer than they have had legs, and why may the psyche not retain traces of this as the body does of its rudimentary organs? It may be that these are some of the oldest strata or elements of our psychic life, a reminiscent echo of the sea which was our primeval home and mother.”

This is very interesting, and most consoling to those who have a craving for experience but dislike the effort necessary to attain a sufficient variety. If, without leaving my easy chair or even my downy couch, I can recapitulate ancestral adventures of a multitudinous nature, why need I exert myself to see, hear, touch, and taste, or even to read historical novels ? Why need I laboriously do, since I am already a part of all that has been done ? Yet a suspicion irks me that I am not to be let off so easily. I, too, have had dreams. I, too, have murmured to myself: “This is a law of nature which is not ordinarily understood. They call it levitation.” I, too, have floated at will, downstairs, through the family sitting-room, two feet from the floor, up to the ceiling, through the window, over hill and dale, dependent on will-power for my buoyancy, on willpower and one other factor. As a child I floated without effort, sometimes against my will; terror made me float, rendering me not only lightheaded but lightfooted; but I always kept the vertical position, with feet downstretched to meet the first reassuring touch of firm earth. It is only within recent years — say eight or ten — that I have been able to transform myself at will into a flying-machine; but now I do it every two or three months, with about the same frequency as that with which I find myself in the school of my childhood, with lessons to recite, but with a vacant mind, with no books and with no knowledge of “the place.” While that is a painful experience, floating is in every way pleasurable, being a delight in itself, a convenient annihilation of space, and a demonstration of my superiority to my kinsfolk and acquaintance, none of whom can float. I feel myself, in fact, the Ivory Soap of humanity. And always there persists in me the determination to demonstrate in my waking hours what I discover in my sleep, that only faith and personal force and one other factor are necessary to conquer gravity and override its laws. Indeed, I sometimes find myself demonstrating in broad daylight what, I explain, has hitherto been possible to me only in sleep; and then, alas! I wake, — and behold, that, too, was a dream.

Now the other factor, to which I have twice referred, is the disturbing element in my hopes of “recapitulation.” Combined with the posture in which I float, or swim, it seems to set me aside from a truly human line of descent. In truth, I cannot figure that I am descended from anything, human, inhuman, aquatic, or nautical. The posture of the fish in the stream, of the sea-serpent in the sea, of everything that swims within the waters, is familiar to the keen-eyed naturalist. My posture, “when I float,” is that of a wise man in the easiest of easy chairs; I lean back upon the elastic atmosphere as if it were furnished with the most highlyevolved and responsive of springs, and so, in a sublimation of comfort, contingent merely upon my confidence that it exists, I sail through the window, feet first, and bend my way whither I will, dependent for buoyancy and direction not only on my will-power, but on a peculiar pedal dexterity, on a hitherto unsuspected intimacy between my psyche and my nether limbs. That is to say, I go whither my feet point the way; I rise in graceful curves, clear the church steeple, sweep to the right hand or to the left, and anon descend and skim the surface of the sea, all by an occult power resident in my pedal extremities. If it were not for this knack of rhythmic gliding, I remind myself, this power to rise, not by force of arms, but by force of feet, I should straightway grovel in the dust; and the moment I lose faith in my feet groveling symptoms set in, which are speedily rectified by pedal reassertion. So, by a sort of graceful sculling motion, my feel serve both as steeringgear and as means of propulsion; but I must infer that my ancestry is not nautical, because every known craft sails not toward but away from its propeller, is steered by a rudder not in front but in the rear. So ethereal is this experience that to speak of my pedaling as a means of propulsion gives too mechanical a connotation to a process that is purely psychical. The whole art lies in knowing how to aim: Point your feet in the right direction, and then follow them faithfully, is my subconscious law.

No explanation that I am able to invent is satisfactory, no analogy is analogous. Here I have a positive, oft-repeated, vivid experience, which cuts me off without a shilling from an ancestral inheritance. For what fish swims tail first ? What sea-serpent reclines at ease on the cushions of the deep, and watches his nethermost extremity insinuate itself in the desired direction while the whole self luxuriously follows ? What batrachian monster reposes on an imaginary Morris chair and wriggles himself by his toes into the haven where he would be ? If any, speak, out of sheer altruistic pity; for him I may claim as an ancestor. But until I know that I have a pedigree I cannot rest in any dream of “recapitulation,” I cannot brood over racial experiences, I cannot rock myself to sleep on the topmost branches of the family tree; I must be up and doing, in the sad suspicion that, like Topsy, I “jes’ growed.” I must at least conclude that I cannot claim descent from an old family. Things with the steeringgear in front are of modern invention, — bicycles, automobiles, — and I seem to feel in the importance of my dream-feet a much modified reminiscence of the time when I was learning to ride a wheel.