



Produced by John Hamm





BEFORE ADAM

by Jack London

1906



"These are our ancestors, and their history is our history. Remember
that as surely as we one day swung down out of the trees and walked
upright, just as surely, on a far earlier day, did we crawl up out of
the sea and achieve our first adventure on land."




CHAPTER I


Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder
whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for
they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day
life. They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of
nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my
kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.

In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My nights marked
the reign of fear--and such fear! I make bold to state that no man of
all the men who walk the earth with me ever suffer fear of like kind and
degree. For my fear is the fear of long ago, the fear that was rampant
in the Younger World, and in the youth of the Younger World. In
short, the fear that reigned supreme in that period known as the
Mid-Pleistocene.

What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I can tell you
of the substance of my dreams. Otherwise, little could you know of the
meaning of the things I know so well. As I write this, all the
beings and happenings of that other world rise up before me in vast
phantasmagoria, and I know that to you they would be rhymeless and
reasonless.

What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of the Swift One,
the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye? A screaming incoherence and no
more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise, the doings of the Fire
People and the Tree People, and the gibbering councils of the horde. For
you know not the peace of the cool caves in the cliffs, the circus of
the drinking-places at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite
of the morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark
sweet in your mouth.

It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your approach, as I made
mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was very like other boys--in my
waking hours. It was in my sleep that I was different. From my earliest
recollection my sleep was a period of terror. Rarely were my dreams
tinctured with happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with fear--and
with a fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality.
No fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear that
possessed me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind that transcended
all my experiences.

For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to whom the
country was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed of cities; nor did
a house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor, for that matter, did any of
my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen
trees only in parks and illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through
interminable forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere
blur on my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of
practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I saw and
knew every different leaf.

Well do I remember the first time in my waking life that I saw an oak
tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and gnarls, it came to me
with distressing vividness that I had seen that same kind of tree many
and countless times in my sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on
in my life, to recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees
such as the spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them
all before, and was seeing them even then, every night, in my sleep.

This, as you have already discerned, violates the first law of dreaming,
namely, that in one's dreams one sees only what he has seen in his
waking life, or combinations of the things he has seen in his waking
life. But all my dreams violated this law.