This is about my earliest digital comic, drawn with a mouse on a low-res Amiga with 8 colors, later expanded to 16. It's Stone Age and it shows (if the print's hard to read, click for a doublesize version). The graphics are crude, but the dream makes a subtle claim about dreaming itself...

NOTE

• "Anxiety is necessary for the transformation": this dream claims that dreams NEED to be unsettling--or we don't change on a deep enough level! Shamanic traditions do say exactly that--that to master extraordinary abilities, intellectual lessons aren't enough, that handling uncertainty, stress & shock is essential. But is it true of all dreamwork, ALL maturation?

LIVING GLIDERS
Dreamed 1982/1/22 by Wayan

I’m a woman in a culture that builds step-pyramids the size of mountains. We’re plagued by a flock of predatory gliders. Made of metal and plastic, yet alive. I have a new idea on how to protect ourselves from them. I tell it to the old woman who’s our village leader. She says “Never mind us down here. They need that idea on top of the holy mountain.”

It’s a dangerous climb. I’m scared to go, but I join a pilgrim party. Terrible rickety ridge trail. Stone, but utterly rotten. We’ll never make it up; there’s a fearsome drop ahead. Narrow bridge. If it’s as rotten as this...

A pair of predatory gliders sweep round the pyramid, overhead. No: one’s chasing and diving on the other! We take our chance, run for the bridge. Thousand-foot chasm below. To cross the bridge, though, we must putt golf balls across. I compete with another pilgrim who putts first. It goes slightly crooked, falls off the bridge near the end, falls a thousand feet to the river. But it never reaches the water: something leaps up, opens gigantic jaws, and swallows the ball midair. A sharklike creature. I stare at it. One of many in the water. If I stop looking to get out a fish hook and line, I’ll lose the right shark and we’ll never get our ball back.

We won’t anyway. That shark never fell back in. The ball fertilizes it somehow. In mid-leap it transforms into a glider and climbs out of the canyon on its new wings... A glider of the opposite type sails by... and they start to fight.

Now I wonder--are the two types sexes? Maybe the fight is a mating dance. And if so...

How much more about them do we misinterpret?

NOTES

This earlier incarnation of the dream borrows images from two books by John Varley, Titan and Wizard:
• living, predatory gliders
• climbing to the top of the world where God lives
• golf balls as fertilizing agents--the Titanides reproduce in two stages, the first producing rubbery golf-ball eggs which can then be implanted into a third parent and fertilized by a fourth!

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