The Ant Dream

I dreamed I was an ant, but I had my own head and face. It was the face and head from a younger me, maybe one seen on me in the mid 1970s. I was running around, as were other ants. Seemed to be a frenzy going. I was confused because, I was an ant and I’m not normally an ant. As I saw the others running around with their human heads and faces, I wondered if they were going through the same process of self-realization.

A rough blackish wall was on either side. Although thinking like a human, I was acting like an ant, following the white ground beneath me, feeling things with frenzied antennae, following along the others in chaotic urgency. Same time, I’m thinking, “I’m an ant. Can’t I climb this wall and go up and see what’s up there?”

I do that but get up there and can’t make any sense of it. The view doesn’t help. My senses are limited. Then, epiphany, I’m a brick wall. I need to change the way I’m looking at things because up isn’t up, there really isn’t a firmly idealized up or down.

I awaken from that. Oddly, almost instantly, I thought about the novel in progress and experienced a burst of productive creativity.