Hopeless dreaming

I'm still resisting getting AI to summarize my rambling thoughts, so here is a dream which does more or less the same.

Dreams - the kind you have in the night - have been quite important to me, but I haven’t had many memorable ones recently. It isn’t hard to think of a reason why. I haven’t been putting myself out as ‘in the market’ for big dreams. I have been either (a) trying to make sense of the ones I’ve already had or (b) hiding from big truths with stories and pots of tea, explanations vary.

Dreams vary also, like literature. I think most of us can agree that there are big dreams and small dreams, just as there are big and small books - and articles. It does get kind of hard, though, when you try to identify which is which with any kind of consistency. I suppose that there are dreams, and books, which feel like they might be ‘putting you in touch with something’ and there are dreams and books which feel like they are ‘helping you to sort stuff out.’ And then there are dreams and books which maybe aren’t helping at all, but are just gears running. So, that’s three types.

Before this turns into the Spanish Inquisition, I’d like to say that this is a medium to smallish article about a medium to smallish dream. It didn’t feel like it was putting me in touch with something. In fact, perhaps, it was a dream about not being in touch with something any more. If you are new here, this substack is not mostly about me recounting my dreams, though it does happen when it’s relevant. That is, when I think it is relevant to the saola - a mysterious, Critically Endangered, possibly lost antelope from Vietnam and Lao, and my work on it. At least, I think that is still what I am talking about here.

Anyway….

This was a dream from last Friday, the 25th of April. It started with something about learning to scuba dive in a swimming pool with a boy of about eleven but the part I remember starts with myself and my wife in a cafe.

She wanted to swap tables but, as we got up, someone took the table we were moving to, and we couldn't find anywhere else, so then we were driving. I was driving, Hannah was in the passenger seat. We were somewhere in Cambridgeshire looking for another cafe but I couldn't get the sat-nav to work. It was as if the sat-nav was deliberately eliding information, refusing to tell us the name of the village I was trying to put in. It showed me the correct answer once and then wouldn’t do so again, giving me results in London or elsewhere. It appeared that we'd entered a region of Cambridgeshire where Google Maps either did not have all the info, or was deliberately concealing it. I saw the same village appearing twice on the map which looked like an error but might not be. We weren’t stressed about it, though, which was nice. We were driving along a big dyke above what were supposed to be fenland fields but were smaller, older and more full of crookedness than the real industrial fenland fields. We rounded onto a big road with pines growing by it and the sat-nav warned me, as it does about speed cameras, about an upcoming sign that read "Danger High Enchantment".

As I was telling my wife this, I realised it was some silly joke for some kind of Center Parcs type holiday camp, which we must now be approaching. Under a line of pines by the road, there was a row of stalls and caravans. I realised I'd been there before, but I didn't know why within the dream. Looking back, I am reminded of that place near Pù Mát with the Lagerstroemia forest¹. Anyway, somehow we ended up stopping. It is possible that, by this point, the dream had decided that our younger son was with us in the car and that I thought he’d like it. However, once we stopped, I had to head over the little ridge with the pine trees, into the woods behind. I’m not sure why, perhaps I was looking for a bush to wee behind. What I found was a little zoo. It didn't seem that there was any entrance or fence, I just walked straight in there. Hanging over a plywood wall by the first line of cages was a saola skin.

It was the full skin with horns, hanging head down, so I could only see the head over the wall. It hung in a way that it wouldn't do in real life, with the head in line with the neck and the heavy horns pointing up, as if the animal were still alive - or rather as if gravity were a less important force than the conventions of field-guide illustration. It wasn’t alive. It looked very like the illustration of the first skin in the first Nature paper. A saola skin, in a little random zoo in England.

The cages were the boxy kind that, in English zoos, have a high probability of holding owls. I went to look in the first one and found it held wombats. They were big, incredibly cartoonish, wombats. One of them rolled back on its bottom and held its face in its hands so that its mouth formed a big fake smile. They looked, not like cartoon animals, but like internet animals - photoreal meme-beasts, but living. They made me smile too. I was happy looking at them rather than at the skin. Still. I went back and looked at it and thought: "well I've got to tell somebody, they can't leave it draped over that wall in the open."

I walked - I think - until I found myself in a room and a woman walked in with three other people who she was talking to. I realised that she was the owner of the zoo. I thought that she looked kind of cool. Her hair had one long pale lock and was also part-shaved. She was maybe a little bit older than me and looked serious and practical and, I felt sure, like a good person. She was talking very fast to the other people. I guessed they were potential donors, and she was trying to land some funds for the zoo, so I did not want to interrupt but I also had to get back to the car and couldn’t easily just wait for her to finish.

I was wondering how to interrupt when she went out, I think to get something, and I followed her and my problem was solved when the skin fell backwards off the other side of the wall. I ran round the wall - I don't want to say without thinking, because I was thinking about how this was the perfect conversation starter and also whether it was wrong for me to be thinking this way. I knew I should be thinking ‘I must save the precious skin’ but, really, I didn’t think it was in too much danger. It turned out that behind the wall was a makeshift plywood kitchen, half open to the air, and the skin had fallen in front of the cooker and, running in ahead of the zoo owner, I picked it up.

I picked it up and held it in my arms. The hair was so soft - way too soft. The legs seemed a bit short. And the colour of the fur on the head didn't seem to match the neck but it was certainly real. I think the head had been cut off and reattached. Possibly it was even the head of a different saola but it looked to me as if it had been stitched on a little further down the neck and the neck skin might be folded up underneath. Perhaps this skin at the top of the neck was damaged - perhaps by a neck-hold snare or a gunshot wound. The effect was a sudden shift in colour from darker brown of the head to a slightly lighter brown further down the neck. I don't think, in fact, that there would really be such a difference, or not such a noticeable one, but that is how it was in the dream. I was thinking, as I had with the wombats, that despite these slight oddities, the skin was clearly real. And it had been slit down the belly and sewed up again, although it hadn't been stuffed. It was a little hard, as an old skin would be.

The woman who owned the zoo had come in behind me and I didn't say who I was because I didn’t need to. I didn't even need to say that the skin was valuable. I knew that she knew that. I just sort of made a little noise in my throat again. She could see that I knew the significance of this thing and I could see that she knew it shouldn’t really have been hanging there. I said "you know…" and she interrupted: "yeah, we should take better care of it." I said, "yes, with de-extinction now becoming a possibility..." I thought about mentioning the Colossal ‘dire wolves’², with appropriate caveats but, again, this was unnecessary. “Well..”. I said, "maybe you should keep some samples, keep them in a lab." There is a cell culture somewhere in Hanoi that I don't know what's going to happen to, but I didn’t mention that either. She said, "yes, we could get people to take samples; maybe we could keep them in our lab."

I thought ‘Oh. Right, of course. She wants her proprietary stamp on it, even her, even here. She wants to keep it for herself, as something to help her organization get publicity." Of course, running a zoo is hard, and maybe their lab would be fine, but the skin and the lab sample shouldn't be in the same place in case something happened to that place. I didn’t try to argue though, we swapped email addresses.

I went back over the hill and I found my wife and son who had somehow joined a big bunch of kids in some activity. I think I said that I had found something and that it was important, or perhaps she could see that from my face. She said "what was it?" and I said "I'm not going to say now because I might start bawling with all these people around."

"You can start bawling if you need to," she said, but then looked around and thought about it. "Actually, maybe not now," she said.

"Yeah, not now."

"I'll be late for work."

We went back to the car and I woke up and had a fairly similar conversation with my wife in real life. "Are you alright?" she said said,

"I had a dream."

“I'm just going to the toilet. I had a dream too.”

“I have to get up, I have to record it." I told her very quickly what it was about, then asked: "what was your dream?"

"I didn't hear anything you just said," she answered.

Then I went downstairs and recorded what I remembered of it. It was spring and it was light and the birds were singing.

I haven't had a dream like that before, I don't think I've ever touched a saola in a dream before. Of course I've touched bits of dead saola in real life but it was never very emotional because the real saola were still out there in the forest and that was what mattered, not the specimens. My first thought about the dream when I woke up was "So I really have given up hope."

There is a stuffed toy saola on my bedside table which I bought in Edinburgh and, when I looked in its eyes after this dream they looked dead. I mean, of course they looked dead because they were the eyes of a stuffed toy. I suppose my noticing meant that, at one point, that had not seemed the case.

Spring sunlight shows up stuff like that. The house is such a mess.

1. See picture.

2. here’s the Wikipedia article. I find the story depressing, not because I think de-extinction is inherently foolish or evil, but because this doesn’t seem to be de-extinction at all, just advertising.