Monday, April 30, 2012

A Kaleidoscopic Zoography

I had a dream the other night that everyone was named Suzy. Even me, although I think I got to be addressed by the more formal Susan. Then again, I seem to recall being called Suzy at some point, which, dream logic being what it is, suggested the general rule that everyone was called Suzy.

But that wasn't the weird part.

I try not to bring up my dreams too often, as I believe talking about them is interesting to, well, only me. Not so interesting to everyone else.

Like, for example, I have this one recurring dream where I have to deal with this retarded dwarf, about the size of a baby, and he's dressed up as the New Year's baby, with a top hat and diapers. And we are watching a movie, and the retarded dwarf baby is constantly annoying me by asking questions throughout the whole movie. He also wants to sit uncomfortably close to me.

I've been told dream elements are portions of yourself, and if so, I really don't want to know about that portion of my personality that is a retarded dwarf baby. It's just super creepy.

So anyway, Suzy, I'm having this dream where everyone is called Suzy. But the weird part is, it is 15 million years ago, I'm stuck on the African savanna, and almost every niche within the ecosystem is filled in by some kind of ape, some kind of primate. So there's no zebra or wildebeest or giraffes or gazelle or hyenas or lions or hippos or rhinos or elephants. It's all bipedal apes, although they have (through evolutionary convergence) successfully adapted to the niches, so that the elephant variant apes have trunks, and the giraffe apes have long necks, etc. Of course the really weird thing is the fur equivalent of plumage. The apes have every punker style lurid hair color you can imagine, and in every combination, stripes, spots, mohawk spikes, long feathery tails, and shit that Vegas show girls would prance around in.

And they are al doing their foraging or hunting thing, and it's like in a Tarzan movie where you have the cacophonous sound effects of the jungle, but instead of all the monkey howls and bird shrieks, and lion roars and hyena cackles, it's all "Suzy! Suzy! Suzy!"

And you know how dream logic informs you, almost like an omniscient invisible narrator supplying the background scoop sotto voce, that's it all the whale's fault.

They'd adapted to the oceans, kept their tiny cow brains for the longest times, but the toothed varieties of whale develop a taste for meat, and had gotten all social and cooperative with their hunting activities, and the next thing you know, their brains had trebled or quadrupled in size, and gotten all convoluted. And they had developed a sophisticated organic technology, all based upon sonic and ultrasonic manipulation, and had basically enthralled and ensorcelled any life form around them. And some of the whales re-evolved feet, and came ashore, and fashioned the more promising primates to do their bidding and become their slaves. These land-whales, masters of the savanna, had the primates build them wagons, and they were trundled around the entire African continent. And they humiliated the primates by insisting that they were all named Suzy.

I'm not sure what happened after that, because I woke up.

3 comments:

  1. Not nice, but I had a dream last night that my sack got caught on something and a big piece got torn off. And then but it didn't really hurt or anything, the big problem was the embarrassment. I was kind of carrying this extra piece around, and I kept meaning to talk to a doctor or something, but you know how it can be hard to get around to something?

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  2. Sorry, maybe I overshared there.

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    1. Not at all. My understanding is gruesome anatomical dreams are pretty common. Take, for example, the detachable penis dream. Fairly common, and apparently the biggest reaction of to this particularly traumatic event is more one of frustration than panic, more like "Geez, just one more inconvenient thing to put on the to-do list". I suspect there must be some type of psychic brake akin to the hypnogogic paralysis module (which generally keeps us from literally acting out our dreams) that keeps us from taking dream events too seriously.

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