Vespertina Cognitio
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....