If we were having coffee I would tell you that I have a lot of unusual and extremely vivid dreams. I would normally just share them with the people around me, but because this one occurred at the weekend, I thought I would allow it to be disseminated a little further.
Before I start I must confess that I do read and watch a helluva lot of science-fiction; so make of this what you will…
We were taken, not by force – about 7000 of us. It wasn’t as though we travelled across the stars or anything that implied a long distance: we were simply here one moment and there the next. Those that took us looked like us – looked human, but they continually reminded us that we did not look like them. In their eyes, we were a homogenous mass: all of the differences that lead us to kill each other on a daily basis could not be seen when they gazed upon us. And yet we still felt as though we mirrored their own diversity.
They explained that the reason we could not see how different we were from them (and they from us), was because of the way our brains were designed. Essentially we were missing a vital portion of cerebral tissue in between our frontal lobes. This reminded me of something that I’d heard about Dolphins – that their brain structure meant that their empathy centres were much larger and more effective than those of humans. I mentioned this, but I could only remember a small part of the information, then immediately worried that I was relaying said information incorrectly.
The concept of them looking like us but us bearing no resemblance to them was the thing that really piqued my curiosity: I knew that we were viewed as animals, but I couldn’t understand how we could see so much of ourselves in their faces whilst they saw nothing of themselves in ours. Then it dawned on me – we have no idea what our closest cousins in the animal kingdom see when they stare into our eyes. They may well see a compatible reflection while all we see is a uniform evolutionary step-down.
I will admit that this was sandwiched between a dream about Hockey Warriors (literally swords and beacons of fire) and an alternate dimension where all work had to be carried out against a musical backdrop (I had to help a man close up his shop for the Christmas break to the Ghostbusters theme song!), so this could merely be another ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ phenomenon; but like so many of these incredibly vivid dreams, the grounding was so hyper-real that, on awakening, the ‘authentic’ world seemed rather dull and muted.
Anyway – normal service will be resumed shortly…
The Martian Princess Chronicles 