Some amazing strategies have been developed to preserve life under adverse conditions. The seeds of some desert plants can lie dormant for many years ignoring any moisture from above, which could be just from a light shower and they could sprout and die, but germinating when moisture from below indicates a rising water table and more generous supplies. The plants grow rapidly since it is vital that they set seed before the land dries again..
Temporary rock pools teem with shrimps that have adapted to desert conditions. Generation succeeds generation in a matter of days. When the pools dry up, the eggs left behind are so hardy that they may blow around the desert for years.
Even in our own country, mosquito lavae retain the spark of life even though completely dried out. I have seen this. As five-year-olds a friend and I caught some wrigglers in a shallow tobacco tin. The tin was left on a tank stand and forgotten. When rediscovered it had long been dry. In the bottom along with the rust were some tiny dried husks. We replaced the water, why I don’t know, and in minutes they were as active as ever. Knowing that such things can happen perhaps has something to do with my dream.
Dad came out from Sweden in the thirties and recently my brother and his wife and six-year-old daughter made the trip back to visit relatives. Apparently my niece Jodie made a hit with the family there. She’s a cute little blue-eyed blonde whose ancestry is obvious.
It is no wonder that they gave her a particular doll even though that doll is an heirloom. It has been in the family for so long that its origin has been long forgotten.
The doll is male and anatomically correct. I know, I’ve checked. Hardly the sort of doll considered suitable for young girls but, in a land of mixed saunas, maybe it’s O.K. The best way that I can describe it is to say that it looks remarkably like one of the Cabbage Patch Kids that were popular some yeatrs ago although itt must predate them by several hundred years. Maybe it’s where the Cabbage Patch idea came from. Down through the years, little girls in the Ostenis family have made clothes for this doll. The clothes have worn out. The doll has not. It still appears as new.
Jan and Wendy and Jodie got back about a week ago and came down to visit me just yesterday. While the parents seemed quite thrilled about the gift, honoured I suppose, I could see that Jodie was anything but pleased. Which probably explains how it came to be left behind. I found it this morning behind my recliner and put it on the petticoat table beside the chair as a reminder to post it back. That’s if I post it back. After a while, I had to put it away in a cupboard out of sight. I began to feel that it was aware of its surroundings. Impossible, silly I know, but it was just so unsettling.
I usually have a nap on afternoons when I’m alone and the weather is hot as it has been lately. This afternoon was no exception. I don’t usually dream, I could almost say that I never dream, but this time I did.
I found myself on a small planet somewhere and this planet was in a slowly declining orbit, gradually approaching its sun. The planet no longer had oceans nor any other permanent bodies of water. Whatever moisture existed was either in the ground or in the atmosphere. Over a long period of time, life had adapted to the increasingly desert-like conditions. Following rain, plants grew almost as one watched and set seed within days. Bare sand was quickly hidden under lush growth.
Animal life had developed two different strategies.for survival. All took their moisture solely from plants, their fruit and their leaves. When these disappeared, some burrowed down to moist sub-soil and damped down bodily functions to very low levels. Others simply dried up, became mummified and inanimate, lying on the surface until one of the rare down-pours plumped them up again. The same trick that our mosquitos use.
Even the planet’s highest life form followed this strategy lying out in the open and becoming at first comatose and finally sun-dried. While their lives were sometimes suspended for quite lengthy periods, they lived at a rather frantic speed when conditions were favourable.
It might seem that they must necessarily be quite primitive since they had no houses nor any other durable structures. We tend to think in terms of our own society. In fact, the were quite civilised with at least some basic understanding of the sciences. They had no libraries, no wise men to remember history and geneologies. Somehow, the sum total of their knowledge was shared in common. Each of them, should they be called upon, could recite the entire works of their poets of earlier times.
They knew that time was running out for their planet but realised that that was still at some fairly remote future. That more benign planets existed elsewhere they considered a strong possibility and their ability to close down all life functions would have made them ideal space travellers. But their science, being scarcely beyond our own Renaissance understanding, made space travel unlikely.
I don’t know how I came to see and understand as much as I appear to have seen in the course of this one short nap but can only say that it was a dream and that dreams have no boundaries. In dreams you can be omniscient and overcome time constraints.
You are probably way ahead of me and have realised that these people, and they must be called people, looked exactly like close relatives of Jodie’s doll. But again, that is the way of dreams.
Or was it just a dream? It was so vivid, so real, all those sights, those sounds, those smells. I could actually feel the dry heat and discomfort, the sweat chafing my under-arm and crotch. And it has left me feeling completely drained. It’s hard to believe that I wasn’t actually there. Could it be that I was being told something? Could this leathery doll that has survived the loving attention of little girls for several hundred years be in fact no doll at all? What would happen if I gave it a good soaking? But then one one would think that those same little girls would have given it many baths over the years.
I have taken the doll out again and, now that I look at it closely, I can see that someone, at sometime, has applied a coating of varnish, possibly as a protective measure. That might be the explanation. What if I removed this varnish with a solvent to allow the water through?
But! I am reluctant to try the experiment. Most likely I would do nothing more than ruin a valuable doll and make myself unpopular and then have my explanations turn me into a laughing- stock. In the remote chance that this is actually a ‘man’ creature in an extreme state of aestivation, what mischief would I be unleashing? Would it be fair to bring the creature forth to be the object of curiosity that he must become? What of my own privacy? And would it be a kind act to bring to life one who would find himself alone with no others from his cabbage-patch world?
On the other hand…….what if there is some vital reason why he wishes to return to life, needs to return to life, the carefully laid plans for the survival of an entire race frustrated by nothing more that a coat of varnish?