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I
I doubt if there be any other form of terror that even approaches
the fear of the supernatural, and more especially the fear of the
supernatural in dreams. Children know this fear both by night and by
day; but the adult is not likely to suffer from it except in slumber,
or under the most abnormal conditions of mind produced by illness.
Reason, in our healthy waking hours, keeps the play of ideas far above
those deep-lying regions of inherited emotion where dwell the primitive
forms of terror. But even as known to the adult in dreams only, there
is no waking fear comparable to this fear,--none so deep and yet so
vague,--none so unutterable. The indefiniteness of the horror renders
verbal expression of it impossible; yet the suffering is so intense
that, if prolonged beyond a certain term of seconds, it will kill.
And the reason is that such fear is not of the individual life: it
is infinitely more massive than any personal experience could account
for;--it is prenatal, ancestral fear. Dim it necessarily is, because
compounded of countless blurred millions of inherited fears. But for the
same reason, its depth is abysmal.
The training of the mind under civilization has been directed toward
the conquest of fear in general, and--excepting that ethical quality
of the feeling which belongs to religion--of the supernatural in
particular. Potentially in most of us this fear exists; but its sources
are well-guarded; and outside of sleep it can scarcely perturb any
vigorous mind except in the presence of facts so foreign to all relative
experience that the imagination is clutched before the reason can
grapple with the surprise.
Once only, after the period of childhood, I knew this emotion in a
strong form. It was remarkable as representing the vivid projection of a
dream-fear into waking consciousness; and the experience was peculiarly
tropical. In tropical countries, owing to atmospheric conditions, the
oppression of dreams is a more serious suffering than with us, and is
perhaps most common during the siesta. All who can afford it pass their
nights in the country; but for obvious reasons the majority of colonists
must be content to take their siesta, and its consequences, in town.
The West-Indian siesta does not refresh like that dreamless midday nap
which we enjoy in Northern summers. It is a stupefaction rather than
a sleep,--beginning with a miserable feeling of weight at the base of
the brain: it is a helpless surrender of the whole mental and physical
being to the overpressure of light and heat. Often it is haunted by ugly
visions, and often broken by violent leaps of the heart. Occasionally
it is disturbed also by noises never noticed at other times. When the
city lies all naked to the sun, stripped by noon of every shadow, and
empty of wayfarers, the silence becomes amazing. In that silence the
papery rustle of a palm-leaf, or the sudden sound of a lazy wavelet
on the beach,--like the clack of a thirsty tongue,--comes immensely
magnified to the ear. And this noon, with its monstrous silence, is for
the black people the hour of ghosts. Everything alive is senseless with
the intoxication of light;--even the woods drowse and droop in their
wrapping of lianas, drunk with sun....
Out of the siesta I used to be most often startled, not by sounds,
but by something which I can describe only as a sudden shock of
thought. This would follow upon a peculiar internal commotion caused,
I believe, by some abnormal effect of heat upon the lungs. A slow
suffocating sensation would struggle up into the twilight-region between
half-consciousness and real sleep, and there bestir the ghastliest
imaginings,--fancies and fears of living burial. These would be
accompanied by a voice, or rather the idea of a voice, mocking and
reproaching:--“‘_Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is
for the eyes to behold the sun._’... Outside it is day,--tropical
day,--primeval day! And you sleep!!... ‘_Though a man live many years
and rejoice in them all, yet--_’ ... Sleep on!--all this splendor will
be the same when your eyes are dust!... ‘_Yet let him remember the days
of darkness_;--FOR THEY SHALL BE MANY!’”
* * * * *
How often, with that phantom crescendo in my ears, have I leaped in
terror from the hot couch, to peer through the slatted shutters at the
enormous light without--silencing, mesmerizing;--then dashed cold water
over my head, and staggered back to the scorching mattress, again to
drowse, again to be awakened by the same voice, or by the trickling of
my own perspiration--a feeling not always to be distinguished from that
caused by the running of a centipede! And how I used to long for the
night, with its Cross of the South! Not because the night ever brought
coolness to the city, but because it brought relief from the _weight_ of
that merciless sunfire. For the feeling of such light is the feeling of
a deluge of something ponderable,--something that drowns and dazzles and
burns and numbs all at the same time, and suggests the idea of liquified
electricity.
* * * * *
There are times, however, when the tropical heat seems only to thicken
after sunset. On the mountains the nights are, as a rule, delightful
the whole year round. They are even more delightful on the coast facing
the trade-winds; and you may sleep there in a seaward chamber, caressed
by a warm, strong breeze,--a breeze that plays upon you not by gusts
or whiffs, but with a steady ceaseless blowing,--the great fanning
wind-current of the world’s whirling. But in the towns of the other
coast--nearly all situated at the base of wooded ranges cutting off
the trade-breeze,--the humid atmosphere occasionally becomes at night
something nameless,--something worse than the air of an overheated
conservatory. Sleep in such a medium is apt to be visited by nightmare
of the most atrocious kind.