h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I never thought about the advantages of 'dream meat'.

Also I can eat as much of it as I want, with a clean conscience!

Anyways ... last night's dreams I can't remember very well. I do remember a bunch of folks and myself were auditioning for a play or movie. I think it was something like 'Bridge of Terabithia'. Anyways we were auditioning in a university hostel like place, in the rooms of some of the profs or something like that. I had brought some props ... weapons, including a long sword. I can't remember what happened next, except that I ended up having to go look for my weapons in a field in the dark. I did manage to find the sword.

Well it is probably good that you found it, before children tried playing with it.

They wouldn't have been able to do much with it. It was heavy, unwieldy and blunt.

Right ... last night's dream! This was a whopper with some of the most detailed imagery I've had in a long time. (Speaking of which ... if all goes well I might start making some simple illustrations based on some of the visual elements in my dreams.)

My father and I went hiking! We were going to explore a lovely forest ... a dream forest that was somewhere in the eastern Limpopo or Mpumalanga region (the dream version of those regions). But I also thought it had elements of an Eastern Cape forest. It was a fairly dry forest ... like one might find in Madagascar, not so much South Africa (but there are some like that in the Eastern Cape and Kwazulu-Natal). There were succulents growing around it. As we approached I saw some lovely plants: the one resembled a Ledebouria and had huge black spots on its leaves (decorative spots, not a fungal infection). But it couldn't have been a Ledebouria as it had a small trunk and branches ... Ledebourias grow from underground bulbs. There were Kleinias or Senecios as well with geometrically angular leaves. There were also beautiful Cotyledons with thick, fuzzy leaves ... they were the healthiest plants I'd yet seen of that genus.

So that's what we saw on the approach to the forest, and soon we saw the forest itself. It was low but dense, and many trees standing above the others had white trunks and branches. This was a particularly vivid image: the hills clothed in a vast forest with the foliage dark and the striking white trunks amidst them.

But then things went wrong. The forest was suddenly 'postponed' ... there were lots of buildings and people ... the place was not 'wild' ... we ended up walking for miles and for hours in this region, trying to get to the forest itself but never actually getting there. And worse ... my father got lost! He got ahead of me, and disappeared from my sight. And I could not find him again! Now the dream turned into horror. I was in this strange semi-urban environment, a huge sprawling place, in which I too totally got lost. At last I managed to get a bus to bring me back to somewhere I knew ... and I had a last look at the forest, and wondered where my dad was.

Upon WAKING from this dream I had the creeping horrors! I was suddenly terrified of getting lost in a forest AND of getting lost in a city. I don't yet have GPS or cellphone contact with lots of people. I thought with horror of the many times I'd been out in the wilds and walked wherever I wanted ... of the many times I'd been walking around the city as well without maps or a clear idea of the layout ... thinking of my father getting lost like that ... and of the awfulness of getting caught up in such a huge and confusing place and having to walk for miles and not finding anything or anyone familiar.

But ... IRL ... how is it that I've never got lost? How did I find my way around Pretoria back when I was there? How do I find my way when walking around on wild farms or in nature reserves? I honestly don't know! I do seem to have a sense of direction that I can't quite explain but have always taken for granted. This dream sort of showed me a scenario of what it might have been like if things had gone wrong.

I've had other 'getting lost' dreams before. Many times they're about getting lost in a city. Not in a wild area so much. In last night's dream, if my father and I had actually made it into the forest I would have had no worries ... I seem to be able to really find my way in truly wild environments.

But then a while ago I did dream of Simone Simons getting lost in a forest as well ...

My painful finger disrupted my sleep a lot over the past few days, so I didn't manage to dream well or remember any that I might have had. I hope things will soon be better again.

I'm sorry to hear your finger hurts Willem
I hope you heal quickly, and get back to a dreamy sleep soon.

I love reading about your dreams.
I think illustrations would be very interesting art , especially when done by you!

Thanks abbi! I'll see what I can do when fully functional again.

I just barely remember something from last night's dreaming. Just a scene. There was a large cage, like my friend professor Gigi Gottwald's bird cage. In there were lovely little parrots nesting in boxes! On the floor below were many quite large frogs, similar to the river frogs I've written of in Colours of Wildlife. There were also many snails. I was happy that the frogs would eat the snails. There was something about my uncle Kerneels as well. That's all I remember.

I'm trying to get back to this. Been sleeping better lately ... here are dreams from a couple of nights ago.

I was dreaming of an opera ... with the song 'Funiculi Funicula'. But it was about right-wingers, there was a guy with a thick black beard and moustache in it.

I dreamt I played a computer game. A very rudimentary old-school type computer game ... there were black dots driftinng downwards leaving black trails. Then there was a game about dinosaurs.

I dreamt I was planting bamboo in or just outside my 'plant house'. I was trying to plant them on a slope, which was difficult.

I dreamt my finger was horribly swollen ... I punctured it and pus and yucky stuff came out. (I wonder what that's about?!)

I dreamt fairly epically and vividly last night. Can't remember much of the story, but a bit of the imagery.

It was one of my 'wish fulfillment' dreams! I had a LARGE garden to work with ... I think I was living with some other people on a plot of land, but there was way enough room for planting lots of trees, shrubs, succulents and flowers. Unfortunately as usual I didn't dream this for long enough to really establish an elaborate dream garden.

The dream moved on. Now I had a chance of getting a farm-sized region of land, which already had some magnificent wilderness on it. I drove around to look at it ... I remember driving along a mountainside so I could look down at the land I would soon have.

Then the dream moved on some more. Now the wonderful part was the drive amidst the mountains themselves. They started beautiful, verdant and green. There were waterfalls and streams. Then there came a sign of decay ... soil erosion! The exposed soil on the peaks and slopes was reddish brown (as is a lot of the soil and sand over here) contrasting with the green vegetation on the unaffected slopes, and I was sad about that but thought that it could be fixed.

That's all I can remember.

Hello there abbi, thanks for ing!

The night before last: I dreamt of being on a roller-coaster-like contraption. It malfunctioned which was very scary! There were machines coming alive.

Then there was Ben Affleck in a robot suit! I think this was a different dream.

Then there was a dream of an American woman and her daughter. I was speaking to them in complete darkness and had no idea what they looked like. Then the lights came on and they turned out to be South African! The daughter was very smart. We went to see some movies. There were no carrots allowed in the theatre! But I somehow had brought a huge bag of carrots and as a result a disaster the details of which I can't remember happened.

Then there was a dream about adjustable dragon's wings. There were joints and folds by which their shape could be altered.

Last night I dreamt a lot but remember very little. Ron Perlman was there. There were also lots of elephant shrews on and in my bed! They were a nuisance, I'm not sure why they were there, but I remember flicking them off the bed covers by kicking!

Last night I dreamt a lot. I dreamt about a movie Kate Hudson was in that was being made here in South Africa ... actually at the University of Limpopo where my parents worked. They were still alive. My father had a job of looking out for her but we soon realised she could handle herself. Later the movie came out, and critics commented on how weird it was, it seemed as if it was very much out of fashion, because of being made here.

I remember being angry over how the movie misrepresented South Africa and my home town, which in the movie and dream was still Pietersburg. There were scenes in a city which were supposedly Johannesburg, but from the appearance and some hills in the distance I could tell it was Pietersburg. Then they headed out to the 'movie version' of Pietersburg which was very poor and backward, and I was angry, thinking "Pietersburg isn't like that!"

Then there was skydiving. I think Kate Hudson was skydiving as well ... I remember there was another girl as well, she was dark-haired and pretty. I drew a sketch of her as if I was planning out her appearance in the dream itself. There was one version with most of her face covered up, as if it was necessary for the sake of conservative cultural values, but I boldly drew another version with her face uncovered to show just how pretty she was. I was very proud of the character I had sketched.

Then the skydiving itself happened. There were two separate instances that somehow were the same one. There were also men involved. One was a brother of a friend of mine. In the one version this guy fell to his death, embedding himself deeply head first in soil in a small pot. But on the second version of the same jump, he was getting swept up higher and higher into the sky instead, and this time we feared he would never come down at all.

You are getting good at this, that's incredible detail.

Hi Dmitri! It goes better some nights than others. I had a bunch of dreams last night but can now only remember two.

One ended up with a Dr. Seuss-kind of story. There was a very complicated and of course impractical machine and I think it was on a cart with some weird animal towing it. There was also a doggy like thing and the term 'dogamalot' but I can't remember anything else, there must have been an entire story behind this stuff.

Then there was a dream in which I discovered a new kind of desert. This was a desert in a place where you would not expect it: where the climate is nice, not very hot or very cold, and with enough rain to support plants, but somehow they don't grow there. In the dream I found some man-made deserts of this type, I think I used imagery from orbiting satellites to pinpoint these regions. But I also found an extensive natural desert of this type in eastern Turkey. The reason for the desert was that, despite ample rainfall and an overall favourable climate, the soil was either completely infertile or poisonous.

Last two nights' dreams:

One was where I found an almost dead Parktown Prawn. This is a most horrendous looking member of the cricket and grasshopper order, a huge insect with a huge, fanged, red head. In the dream I nursed it back to life and health. There was more but I forget.

The dream of yesterday that I can remember was of a book shop. I went round to the shop and found the lady who owned it outside, perhaps sweeping the sidewalk or something like that but not minding the store. I thought she was being quite irresponsible. Then she went back inside and scolded her workers, gave them some kind of punishment. I overhear her. She wanted to be a doctor, actually. But from what she was saying, or more properly ranting, I was getting the impression she was a bit of a bigot without much knowledge or understanding. She also quoted lots of religious texts, and repeatedly asked or prayed what she would need to do to become a doctor. I said, not speaking to her, but just muttering it softly, that she needs more science. She probably didn't hear what I said but was sensing it was something she wouldn't like. There was an Indian man in the shop who also overheard it. The owner later came to me and asked what that was about. I played it straight and told her my sister is a doctor and one actually has to study medical science. She would need to read and learn, I recommended she read some medical magazines in the store. Then she left, I hoped pondering what I said. The Indian man came up to me - I was browsing the books in the shop and was busy looking at one of all the monkey species in the world - and asked me what a good doctor would need. I then said, courage and guts ... as in, guts that don't get too easily upset. A doctor mustn't mind too much to see lots of blood, or even if their patient dies, because those things happen and if you can't cope with them you're in the wrong career.

Last night's dreams ... I completely forgot them during the day, but I found that I did put down a single word as a clue when in the middle of the night I woke up. And now reading that word, most of it comes back to me!

The word is simply 'hyraxes'.

I wrote about them in a Colours of Wildlife article! The thing with hyraxes is, they presently are small animals climbing around rocks and trees, all very similar to each other. But in ages past - I mean five million years ago and more - they were much more diverse. They ranged in size from that of a mouse to that of a horse. There were running types, there were even semi-aquatic types similar to tapirs and hippos. These hyraxes then went extinct when the more advanced horses and antelopes evolved to browse in the forests and graze on the plains. If we didn't have hyrax fossils we would never have known just how diverse they had once been.

Now this is reality. As for my dream ...

I had somehow stumbled on hyraxes that go way beyond even that diversity! There were fossils but I also saw living animals ... maybe I could travel in time. I learnt that there was a time when hyraxes were so diverse they filled almost all ecological niches for animals! There were ANT-sized ones. At the other extreme there were whale-sized ones living in the ocean. There was just about everything you could conceive in between. And yet, all of them were true hyraxes, closely related to each other in spite of the extreme physical modifications they had undergone to suit them to all those lifestyles and environments. Hyraxes were everywhere, if you saw any living animal you could be sure it was a hyrax. That was their particular heyday ... the age of hyraxes. And I was the one who discovered it! Nobody could dream today that there had once been a time like that, that there once had been running, climbing, digging, swimming and even flying hyraxes!

What had happened to everthing else? The dream didn't say! And what brought this glorious age of the hyraxes to an end when indeed they turned out to be so massively adaptable? It was just a dream after all. But the core idea of the dream was the evolutionary potential of creatures. Suppose a new world somehow opened up and hyraxes were the first animals to enter it, and subsequently all possible competitors were excluded. Wouldn't it be likely that after, say, fifty to a million years, the descendants of those hyraxes would have a myriad of new forms and lifestyles, perhaps even as extremely diverse as in my dream of an age that never was?

Ahem. Willem, I think I can say with no fear of contradiction that only YOU would have dreamt up all those hyraxes...

Hi Dmitri! I wish I could dream them into reality. I could write a book and illustrate it with all these insane alternate-reality hyraxes.

Anyways last night ... a complicated bunch of dreams, this is what I remember.

I call this the 'Chekov's Gunpowder' dream.

It all started with a record. One of those old vinyl things if anybody still remembers them. It was a single, I think, I played it on the record player. It was an old song, a nice one, and I thought it might have been the inspiration for a song by one of my fave bands, Nightwish. With the record ... in or attached to the sleeve ... there was a fireworks device. I got the impression that it was very explosive and I was afraid of blowing up the house.

I took it away. I went to a party ... a high class social gathering sort of thing, not a rowdy drunk and disorderly party. Angela Lansbury was there. The security searched me before I was allowed to enter, but they let the fireworks pass.

There was lots of food, nice cheese. I helped myself and put the fireworks on the table. Everything was fine, no explosions, and I took the fireworks and went home again.

I told my wife/girlfriend or whatever she was in the dream, of my fear. She knew just what to do. We were to go up on the building (a hign tower apartment block), light it, and throw it as far as possible so that it would harmlessly explode a good distance away. We took it up, lit it ... and then I dropped it instead of throwing it. It blew up the whole building.

What a plot.