dy 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 to-day know him, did not exist.
It was in the period of his becoming that I must have lived and had my
being.

CHAPTER III

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 hours, watching the play of sunlight on
the foliage and the stirring of the leaves by the wind. Often the nest
itself moved back and forth when the wind was strong.

But always, while so lying in the nest, I was mastered as of tremendous
space beneath me. I never saw it, I never peered over the edge of the
nest to see; but I KNEW and feared that space that lurked just beneath
me and that ever threatened me like a maw of some all-devouring monster.

This dream, in which I was quiescent and which was more like a
condition than an experience of action, I dreamed very often in my early
childhood. But suddenly, there would rush into the very midst of it
strange forms and ferocious happenings, the thunder and crashing of
storm, or unfamiliar landscapes such as in my wake-a-day life I had
never seen. The result was confusion and nightmare. I could comprehend
nothing of it. There was no logic of sequence.

You see, I did not dream consecutively. One moment I was a wee babe of
the Younger World lying in my tree nest; the next moment I was a grown
man of the Younger World locked in combat with the hideous Red-Eye; and
the next moment I was creeping carefully down to the water-hole in the
heat of the day. Events, years apart in their occurrence in the