If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?
I was born in Somerville, but I don't remember very much about it because we moved from there to Arlington when I was five years old, and it was in Arlington that I spent most of my childhood.
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 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.
There was at all events one advantage in the choice of this day to my birth; my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing.