Dream Table

A while back (like last year) I had a dream in which I lived in a really neat house, and had a very cool dining room table. I woke up the next day and made a quick sketch of the table in my notebook. It was weird because it didn't feel at all like I made it up. Instead I felt like I was copying something I'd seen somewhere, even though the only place I saw it was in my dream. Anyway, I finally got around to making a model of it.
The table itself was made out of the smooth concrete they use to make counters, and the pyramid in the middle was also concrete with water flowing out from the top and running down all sides into a narrow collecting area that recycled the water back through to the top. I added place mats with cups and plates to give a sense of the scale of the thing (which was pretty big).
...Oh the weird things we dream  hu?

DogSkiSoccer Boarding

Geez, it's been a while I know. But I've just been so busy! Things should be settling down a bit, and I should be able to get back to writing. Anyway, I had a dream two nights ago that I thought was worth describing. I'm not the kind of person who reads much into dreams and I'm glad, because this one would have me very confused as to a meaning.
In my sleep, I invented a game (well, in my dream I didn't invent it, I just knew how to play it) that is a combination of snowboarding, water skiing, soccer and dog sledding! And let me tell you, it was so FUN! I know because I played it!
In the dream we weren't playing on snow, but wet grass and the field was circular with one opening.
There were 4 or 5 of us, and we each had a snowboard-like thing where one foot was sort of hooked in, and the other was free. Then we each had a water ski rope attached to one dog.
The dogs pulled us around (and we trailed behind like a person water skis behind a boat) and we competed to kick the soccer ball through the opening with our free foot, while not getting tangled in anyone elses rope, or letting anyone else kick it through.
Isn't that....well, just about the silliest thing you ever heard of a person dreaming? I thought it was pretty funny that I invented a game in my sleep! It's even funnier to think that if I tried right now, I could never think of as cool a game as that in a million years. So...anybody want to play?

Hymenoptera africaneus

Hymenoptera africaneus*

*This is NOT a real species...see previous blog for further details.

Ants In My...Head

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.