Rock Island Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1893-1920, 1916-04-15

| gritted my teeth at him, danced up
! and down. screaming an incoherent
mockery and making ante faces. lie
responded. rushing against the bars and
roaring back at me his impotent wrath.
All. he knew me, too. and the sounds
| made were the sounds of old time
and ineligible to him.
Nv parents were frightened. THE
child is ILL., said my mother. He is
historical" said my father. never
told them, and they never knew. Al
ready had | developed reticence con-
corning this quality of mine, this semi
| disassociation of personality as | think
| am justified in calling 1t.
saw the snake cbarmer. and no
more of the circus did | see that night.
| was taken home, nervous and over
wrought, sick with the invasion of my
real life by that other life of my
dreams.
have mentioned my reticence. Only
once did l confide the strangeness OF
1t all to another. He was a boy. my
,hum, and we were eight years old.
From my dreams I reconstructed for
him pictures Of that vanished world In
which l do believe | once lived. l
told him Of the terrors of that early
time, Of Lop Ear and the pranks we
played, Of the gibbering councils and
of the Fire People and their squatting
places.
He laughed at me and jeered and
told me tales Of ghosts and of the dead
that walk at night. But mostly did he
laugh at my feeble fancy. l told him
| more. and be laughed the harder. |
swore in all earnestness that these
things were so. and he began to look
upon me queerly; also he gave amaz-
ing garblings of my tales to our play
mates until all began to look upon me
queerly.
1t was a bitter experience, but l
learned my lesson. | was different
from my kind. l was abnormal with
something they could not understand
md the telling Of which would cause
only misunderstanding. When the sto-
res of ghosts and COLLINS went around
kept quiet. l smiled grimly to my
self. I thought Of my nights Of fear
and knew that mine were the real
things-real as life itself, not attenuat
ed vapors and surmised shadows.
For me no terrors resided in the
thought of bugaboos and wicked ogres.
The fall through leafy branches and
the dizzy heights, the snakes that
struck at me as l lodged and leaped
away in chattering fight. the wild dogs
that hunted me across the open spaces
to the timber-these were terrors con-
crete and actual, happenings and not
imaginings, things of the living flesh
and of sweat and blood. Ogres and
bugaboos and l had been happy bed
fellows compared with these terrors
that made their bed with me through
out my childhood and that still bed
with me now as I write this, full Of
years.
! have said that N my dreams I
never saw human being OF this
fact l became aware very early and
felt poignantly the lack Of my own
kind. AS very little child even | had
a feeling in the midst of the horror
Of my dreaming that If | could find
but one man. only one human. |
should be saved from my dreaming.
that | should he surrounded no more
by haunting terrors. This thought OBJ
sessed me every night of my life for
years-if only | could find that one
human and be saved,
| must iterate that had this thought
in the midst of my dreaming, and I
take it as an evidence of the merging
Of my two personalities as evidence
of a point of contact between the two
disassociated parts of me Ny dream
personality lived in the long ago, be-
fore ever man as we know him came
to be. and my other and wake-a-d day
personality projected itself to the ex-
tent of the knowledge of mans ex-
istence into the substance of my
dreams.
Perhaps the psychologists Of the
book will find fault with my way of
using the phrase DISSATISFACTION Of per
sonalitE.' I know their use of 1t, vet
am compelled to use 1t in my own way
In default of a better phrase. | take
shelter behind the inadequacy of the
English language. And now to the
explanation Of my use or misuse of the
phrase
1t was not till was a young man at
college that got any clew to the sig |
nlicance Of my dreams and to the