THE JACKET (THE STAR-ROVER)


CHAPTER I


All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have
been aware of other persons in me.--Oh, and trust me, so have you, my
reader that is to be. Read back into your childhood, and this sense of
awareness I speak of will be remembered as an experience of your
childhood. You were then not fixed, not crystallized. You were plastic,
a soul in flux, a consciousness and an identity in the process of
forming--ay, of forming and forgetting.

You have forgotten much, my reader, and yet, as you read these lines, you
remember dimly the hazy vistas of other times and places into which your
child eyes peered. They seem dreams to you to-day. Yet, if they were
dreams, dreamed then, whence the substance of them? Our dreams are
grotesquely compounded of the things we know. The stuff of our sheerest
dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you
dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as
things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged
creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces
nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than
you know now, looking back, you ever looked upon.

Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness, of
other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular
world of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds?
Perhaps, when you have read all that I shall write, you will have