Whence the fancy of those shapes? I do not know. Possibly from some
impression of fear in earliest infancy; possibly from some experience of
fear in other lives than mine. That mystery is forever insoluble. But
the mystery of the shock of the touch admits of a definite hypothesis.
First, allow me to observe that the experience of the sensation itself
cannot be dismissed as "mere imagination." Imagination means cerebral
activity: its pains and its pleasures are alike inseparable from nervous
operation, and their physical importance is sufficiently proved by their
physiological effects. Dream-fear may kill as well as other fear; and no
emotion thus powerful can be reasonably deemed undeserving of study.
One remarkable fact in the problem to be considered is that the
sensation of seizure in dreams differs totally from all sensations
familiar to ordinary waking life. Why this differentiation? How
interpret the extraordinary massiveness and depth of the thrill?
I have already suggested that the dreamer's fear is most probably not a
reflection of relative experience, but represents the incalculable total
of ancestral experience of dream-fear. If the sum of the experience of
active life be transmitted by inheritance, so must likewise be
transmitted the summed experience of the life of sleep. And in normal
heredity either class of transmissions would probably remain distinct.
Now, granting this hypothesis, the sensation of dream-seizure would have
had its beginnings in the earliest phases of dream-consciousness,--long
prior to the apparition of man. The first creatures capable of thought
and fear must often have dreamed of being caught by their natural
enemies. There could not have been much imagining of pain in these
primal dreams. But higher nervous development in later forms of
being would have been accompanied with larger susceptibility to
dream-pain. Still later, with the growth of reasoning-power, ideas
of the supernatural would have changed and intensified the character of
dream-fear. Furthermore, through all the course of evolution, heredity
would have been accumulating the experience of such feeling. Under those
forms of imaginative pain evolved through reaction of religious beliefs,
there would persist some dim survival of savage primitive fears, and
again, under this, a dimmer but incomparably deeper substratum of
ancient animal-terrors. In the dreams of the modern child all these
latencies might quicken,--one below another,--unfathomably,--with the
coming and the growing of nightmare.
It may be doubted whether the phantasms of any particular nightmare have
a history older than the brain in which they move. But the shock of the
touch would seem to indicate _some point of dream-contact with the total
race-experience of shadowy seizure_. It may be that profundities of
Self,--abysses never reached by any ray from the life of sun,--are
strangely stirred in slumber, and that out of their blackness
immediately responds a shuddering of memory, measureless even by
millions of years.