The Thinking, Walking Biped, part fourteen. Dreamscapes

When we walk, we each see our world in a different way, and differently at each stage of our lives. Let me tell you a personal example of this.

I grew up at the base of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. I could see the snow-covered peaks of the mountains in the clear air of winter, and I occasionally visited the magnificent forests of giant sequoia trees. But what I saw every day was the foothills. They were covered with grass. The only trees were oaks that grew amidst granite boulders on some of the hills. I am still not sure why the trees grew only amidst the boulders. Perhaps it was fire, or perhaps it was cattle, both of which could kill trees on smooth ground. But even on the smooth ground, there were occasional boulders, some of them large and craggy. They reminded my childish mind of menhirs and dolmans and other works of human art.

Boulders on smooth hills made me feel like I was looking at a heavenly landscape. Even today I have occasional dreams of entering an enchanted realm of boulders and grass. These are almost the only really beautiful dreams I have. Thankfully, I don’t have many nightmares. Most of my dreams are busy and stupid and quickly and thankfully forgotten.

The magical landscape of boulders and grass is not the real landscape. The weeds amidst the grass, such as fiddlehead Amsinckia, and even the grass itself, especially the wild oats Avena barbata, left prickles in my socks. Most of the year, all the plants had died back to the ground. Everywhere was the scent of cow dung. That is the reality. But that is not what I dream.

To get to the biological field station where I taught botany one summer, I drove through northeastern Kansas. There are interesting parts of Kansas, but this was not one of them. It was absolutely flat and often nothing but wheat fields was visible. Fortunately I had not passed judgment on this land, for it is where one of my students was from. “It is the most beautiful place on Earth,” she said. And she was right, about her dreamscape.

This sort of dreamscape is not reality, nor is it illusion. It is a transformed reality. I wonder if any other species of animal has this kind of imagination. And I wonder how much it is the product of our long history, and much longer prehistory, of long distance walking, of tribal leaders imagining themselves on the top of a distant mountain.

Maybe this is where the human obsession with heaven comes from.