For myriads of years humanity has thus been flying by night. How did the fancied motion, having so little in common with any experience of active life, become a universal experience of the life of sleep?
It may be that memory-impressions of certain kinds of aerial motion,—exultant experiences of leaping or swinging, for example,—are in dream-revival so magnified and prolonged as to create the illusion of flight. We know that in actual time the duration of most dreams is very brief. But in the half-life of sleep—(nightmare offering some startling exceptions)—there is scarcely more than a faint smouldering of consciousness by comparison with the quick flash and vivid thrill of active cerebration;—and time, to the dreaming brain, would seem to be magnified, somewhat as it must be relatively magnified to the feeble consciousness of an insect. Supposing that any memory of the sensation of falling, together with the memory of the concomitant fear, should be accidentally revived in sleep, the dream-prolongation of the sensation and the emotion—unchecked by the natural sequence of shock—might suffice to revive other and even pleasurable memories of airy motion. And these, again, might quicken other combinations of interrelated memories able to furnish all the incident and scenery of the long phantasmagoria.
But this hypothesis will not fully explain certain feelings and ideas of a character different from any experience of waking-hours,—the exultation of voluntary motion without exertion,—the pleasure of the utterly impossible,—the ghostly delight of imponderability. Neither can it serve to explain other dream-experiences of levitation which do not begin with the sensation of leaping or falling, and are seldom of a pleasurable kind. For example, it sometimes happens during nightmare that the dreamer, deprived of all power to move or speak, actually feels his body lifted into the air and floated away by the force of the horror within him. Again, there are dreams in which the dreamer has no physical being. I have thus found myself without any body,—a viewless and voiceless phantom, hovering upon a mountain-road in twilight time, and trying to frighten lonely folk by making small moaning noises. The sensation was of moving through the air by mere act of will: there was no touching of surfaces; and I seemed to glide always about a foot above the road.
Could the feeling of dream-flight be partly interpreted by organic memory of conditions of life more ancient than man,—life weighty, and winged, and flying heavily, a little above the ground?
Or might we suppose that some all-permeating Over-Soul, dormant in other time, wakens within the brain at rare moments of our sleep-life? The limited human consciousness has been beautifully compared to the visible solar spectrum, above and below which whole zones of colors invisible await the evolution of superior senses; and mystics aver that something of the ultra-violet or infra-red rays of the vaster Mind may be momentarily glimpsed in dreams. Certainly the Cosmic Life in each of us has been all things in all forms of space and time. Perhaps you would like to believe that it may bestir, in slumber, some vague sense-memory of things more ancient than the sun,—memory of vanished planets with fainter powers of gravitation, where the normal modes of voluntary motion would have been like the realization of our flying dreams?...
Nightmare-Touch
