MY DREAMS tend to be low-budget affairs. Mostly black and white, short, and
lacking any continuity whatsoever. I鈥檓 not complaining. It鈥檚 the best I can
expect if, as writer-producer-director, I鈥檓 sleeping on the job. That鈥檚 why I
awoke with a start from my late Sunday morning slumber. I鈥檇 had a dream which
actually meant something to me. And fortunately, my mental VCR had been
programmed to capture it so I could contemplate its significance at leisure.
I鈥檝e been using e-mail and the Web daily for seven years now, for
increasingly long periods. But never before had it taken up a scintilla of my
sleep. Trains, on the other hand, occupy a disproportionate space in my
reveries. You know the kind of thing鈥攄ashing along platforms, tugging
fruitlessly at moving doors and, inevitably, watching the express disappear with
a dachshund gloating from the guard鈥檚 van.
This is especially strange since I rarely travel by train, and I don鈥檛 have a
dog. Boulders and corridors also loom large in my dream time, although they tend
be surreal and terrifying in the style of Magritte. This time, however, the
dream was sharply focused: I had to investigate a claim by palaeontologists that
they had discovered remains of Homo habilis in South Carolina. To verify it, I
decided to check whether there had been a land route which early man could have
used to stroll between Africa and North America some 2.4 million years ago.
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If no such route existed, I reasoned, either the scientists had
misinterpreted the bones or early man had learned how to sail across oceans. The
notion of the first humans tacking and gybing across the Doldrums and the Gulf
Stream was electrifying.
But first I would have to consult geological websites to see if there had
been a simple surface route. It took a few minutes for the search engine to
return a list of likely URLs. One in particular seemed promising, containing all
my keywords: 鈥渟urface route between Africa and America during the late Pliocene
is utter nonsense鈥�.
So I clicked on the hyperlink and watched the browser鈥檚 logo haltingly
revolve. The progress bar at the bottom shuttled back and forth as image files,
text and applets came through steadily. The crucial data that would
revolutionise the theories of hominid evolution and prehistoric migration was
downloading onto my hard drive.
Then it crashed鈥攁nd I woke up. I should have been downhearted. After
all, I had failed in my mission. But wide awake, the real content of my dream
would have been clear to the most amateur psychoanalyst. Clearly, my psyche is
now past infantile infatuations with scary solo objects of childish fear.
Farewell, boulders, corridors, trains and dachshunds. I鈥檝e moved on to the fully
integrated, grown-up, joined-up world of the collective subconscious. The
Internet is my comfort blanket.