Archives, eh
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# Dreaming Derka Der
I had a dream last night.
I dreamed I was watching from a distance as a scene played out. There was a definite sense of remaining apart from what I was seeing as though I was an observer; an interested observer, not a casual one. I was watching this for a reason, but as usual I never found out why. All my dreams end before it gets interesting, before some sort of meaning drifts out of the chaos.
Anyway, in my dream there was this huge chamber inside a building in the middle of a city .When I say huge, I mean like the inside of the Telstra Dome, or similar enclosed stadium large enough to play cricket within. It had to be huge because it had to contain a pair of stone pillars. They were a single piece of rock and smooth but I got no impression that they were carved or constructed in any way. It felt like they had always been there and always been in that form. As is often the case in dreams, this chamber was a paradoxical or at least seemingly so because – despite a clear impression that the chamber was enclosed, that it had a roof and was part of a structure – the tops of these towers were high enough that their was a wind system at their top. This mattered because the tops of the two pillars had a hole that whistled and moaned when the wind gusted.
At the base of these two pillars were three giant apes. Not “King Kong, climb the Empire State Building and knock down bi planes” giant, just large; larger than a good-sized man; when they sat they seemed like they were roughly as bulky as a 4WD (SUV for non-english speakers). They squatted – hunched up like a gorilla does – on short and round pedestals that were lined up at the base of the two pillars, and for some reason they were wearing suits. Not tuxedos, business suits. No top hats, no monocles or any other comedic accouterments. Suits. They squatted there and ignored everything that was occurring at their feet.
At the feet, or rather at the base of the pedestals upon which the giant apes squatted, were dozens of apes. Apes of the standard sizes and shapes this time, and apes that remained resolutely non-anthromorphised – no wearing of suits for these apes. They were doing pretty much what you see apes doing when you see them in zoos. Sitting around doing not much at all. Grooming each other. Eating. Just living, I suppose; I don’t really know what apes do in their natural habitat so my subconscious just slotted in the behaviour I have observed. Not that I can say I actually “saw” any of this in the traditional sense, or in the way dreams are experienced in television or film; as usual it was all just impressions that my mind was throwing around, a few ideas with a whole lot of blanks filled in from stock footage summoned up out of long-term memory. The important thing was they all put on a show of not looking at the three giant apes on the pedestals.
All very well and good. It was a welcome change from my standard dreams where either a) It is the first day of finals for my last semester and failure was imminent because I hadn’t studied, b) endless iterations of whatever game I have been playing obsessively, or c) something roughly similar to a number of screensavers, the most familiar of which is probably the Pipes screensaver from older versions of Windows. Yes, I dream in screensavers sometimes. It is rare that I wake up with any sort of memory of a dream outside of those three basic types.
What I saw played out was this: the wind would pick up and start whistling and shrieking and moaning as it passed through the openings at the top of the stone pillars. This would carry on for some time, sometimes as brief as a dozen seconds, sometimes as long as a few minutes and rarely longer than five minutes. This is all dream time, of course; passage of time conveyed through impression and sub-conscious perception. The wind would die down and the echoes would die and the great apes squatting on the pedestals would stir, shifting on their haunches, look up and each would speak a single short syllable. Each ape’s syllable sounded similar to the others but there were differences that could be heard with careful listening. The apes gathered at the feet of the giants would all perk up when the great apes spoke, the great apes they were otherwise studiously “ignoring”. The apes on the ground would then break out into a cacophony of shrieks and howls. They’d gather into partially distinct groups, two large groups and a smaller group between, with some occasional mingling and shriek at the others in the same group. After some time they’d start shrieking between groups and, of course, hurling feces at each other, and occasionally within a group a smaller group would become the target of feces thrown by other members of their own group.
The shrieking and howling was indistinct at first, just a undifferentiated mass of noise, but eventually, if I listened carefully enough, I could pick out the same basic sounds; all the apes on the ground were saying essentially the same thing, just with different pronunciations.
All the while I am apart from it. Towards the end of the dream – when even my mind was beginning to think ‘Hang on a moment. Suits?!?’ – I started getting the idea I was watching this from an observation deck and explaining it all to someone. Must have been over some time, maybe dream-days, because after I woke up, the lingering impression floating in my head was that the person had started acting as if they could make sense of it all and I had come back from somewhere to find the room empty and the person I had been with was down in amongst the apes on the ground and starting to look and act all ape-ish themselves and yelling the same sounds as the apes – ‘Derka der’
So yeah. I had a dream last night. They won’t be talking about mind 40 years from now.
