Nightmare-Touch 24 



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 super- 

 natural 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 



