Musing on this experience led me afterwards to think about the meaning
of that fear which we call “the fear of darkness,” and yet is not really
fear of darkness. Darkness, as a simple condition, never could have
originated the feeling,--a feeling that must have preceded any definite
idea of ghosts by thousands of ages. The inherited, instinctive fear,
as exhibited by children, is not a fear of darkness in itself, but of
indefinable danger associated with darkness. Evolutionally explained,
this dim but voluminous terror would have for its primal element the
impressions created by real experience--experience of something acting
in darkness;--and the fear of the supernatural would mingle in it only
as a much later emotional development. The primeval cavern-gloom lighted
by nocturnal eyes;--the blackness of forest-gaps by river-marges, where
destruction lay in wait to seize the thirsty;--the umbrages of tangled
shores concealing horror;--the dusk of the python’s lair;--the place of
hasty refuge echoing the fury of famished brute and desperate man;--the
place of burial, and the fancied frightful kinship of the buried to
the cave-haunters:--all these, and countless other impressions of the
relation of darkness to death, must have made that ancestral fear of the
dark which haunts the imagination of the child, and still betimes seizes
the adult as he sleeps in the security of civilization.
Not all the fear of dreams can be the fear of the immemorial. But that
strange nightmare-sensation of being held by invisible power exerted
from a distance--is it quite sufficiently explained by the simple
suspension of will-power during sleep? Or could it be a composite
inheritance of numberless memories of _having been caught_? Perhaps
the true explanation would suggest no prenatal experience of monstrous
mesmerisms nor of monstrous webs,--nothing more startling than the
evolutional certainty that man, in the course of his development, has
left behind him conditions of terror incomparably worse than any now
existing. Yet enough of the psychological riddle of nightmare remains
to tempt the question whether human organic memory holds no record of
extinct forms of pain,--pain related to strange powers once exerted by
some ghastly vanished life.