ake-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 prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with his kind in
council, and he received rough usage at the hands of the Fire People in
the day that he fled before them.

But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial memories are not
ours as well, seeing that we have a vague other-personality that falls
through space while we sleep?

And I may answer with another question. Why is a two-headed calf? And my
own answer to this is that it is a freak. And so I answer your question.
I have this other-personality and these complete racial memories because
I am a freak.

But let me be more explicit.

The commonest race memory we have is the falling-through-space dream.
This other-personality is very vague. About the only memory it has
is that of falling. But many of us have sharper, more distinct
other-personalities. Many of us have the flying dream, the
pursuing-monster dream, color dreams, suffocation dreams, and the
reptile and vermin dreams. In short, while this other-personality is
vestigial in all of us, in some of us it is almost obliterated, while
in others of us it is more pronounced. Some of us have stronger and
completer race 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 t