I have no intention of regularly using my blog as a venue for describing dreams I've had, but I just had to mention this one before it fades away into the nothingness from which it originated. It' is simply too weird not to. Was I flying you might ask? No, I wasn't. Did I meat a famous person? No. Did I win the lottery? Unfortunately...No.
No, I spent all of last night reading/ perusing a ten volume set of books dedicated to describing the various ant species of the world. Isn't that about the most random thing you have ever heard? I don't even like ants, or have any interest in them at all. But I can still remember turning page after page (after page...), reading all sorts of interesting (and obviously untrue) things about ants, looking at pictures, trying to sound out their species names, and scrunching my nose in disgust at the look of some of them.
For example (I literally read this in my sleep), there were these ants from Africa ( Hymenoptera africaneus) that lived in the detritus under certain kinds of pine trees that existed in the rainforest there. The ants were big and black like carpenter ants, but they were covered in coarse hair (which was really gross by the way). The book said that the pine tree gave off a lot of C02 in the local vicinity of it's branches, and thus the bugs that were drawn to the scent of it's sap would suffocate, die and fall to the forest floor below where the ants ran back and forth along the base of the tree catching the bugs in the hair on their back and carry them (which was much easier than dragging prey with teeth or legs) to their nest. In return the ants provided nutrients for the tree when their dead bodies decomposed around it's roots, and so they were kind of symbiotic, and always where you found one, you found the other.
It kind of makes me sad to think none of it is true. I mean I just spent 7 hours reading a fictional encyclopedia on ants...for nothing. At least I am not tired though. Eh, anyway...that was my dream.
Just FYI, I looked up Hymenoptera (because it was really weird that the name sounded familiar), and it turns out to be the order that ants belong to, but so do bees and wasps etc. and I used it as a genus name. I recall reading an essay about wasps a few months ago, so maybe that's were I picked it up? So I guess I didn't make everything up.
Oh come now, you have some interest in ants...don't you remember the little ant study you, Bridge, and I did when we were camping at Dead Horse Point. They are really interesting creatures...especially those hairy ones you created.
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