In their dreams, of course.
My friends Betty and Hilary call all nature programs “bug shows.” I watch these bug shows because I love non-human beings and want to be near them, and often the screen is as close as I can get. I roll my eyes at the inevitable ridiculous commentary, the narration that explains all behavior in terms of the three f’s — feeding, fighting, & fucking. These voices reduce the astonishment and variety of life to a mere fff … would they explain Mozart like this, or crème brulee, poetry or hopscotch? No matter, I keep listening through the nonsense, to glean the interesting bits of information scattered amidst the blather.
In a radio program about cicadas — their differences, their sounds, the different sounds they make at different times — one of the hosts made a comment about mating, that cicadas spend 17 long years waiting underground, sucking on tree roots, getting ready to do what they were born for, the fleeting moment of copulation — and I thought Ding, ding, ding! They’ve got it totally backwards! It isn’t that the cicadas dream underground for 17 years so they can mate for a moment, it’s that they mate for a moment so they can dream underground for 17 years!
To dream: perhaps this is why we feed and fight and fuck, not the other way around (though I do not here intend to discount the possible pleasures to be found in the three f’s). Sleep scientists are currently busy busy busy delving into the “mystery” of why we sleep — it seems nonsensical to them, like wasted time: Why, they ask, would evolution do this inefficient thing? They need statistics, data from machines, to convince them of the critical importance of sleep. Their lived experience is not enough; only fMRIs and bloodwork will do. And what do they keep finding? By every metric they can devise, sleep is essential.
Lions spend between 16 and 20 hours a day lazing and sleeping; in the bug shows we only see the bursts of hunting, combat, and mating, accompanied by an endless droning on about survival of the fittest, blah, blah, blah. Perhaps the King of the Jungle (so dumb; lions don’t even live in jungles) feeds, fucks, and fights so that he can laze and sleep, not the other way around. When sleeping and dreaming, there are no limits — lions can fly, right alongside pigs. Virtual Reality and CGI are feeble (and expensive) facsimiles of what’s possible in our dreams.
Is evolution itself both a product of and a means for dreaming, a caper that all beings are dreaming their way through? What if the dreaming is essential to the motion, the creativity, to opening the way, and we do not sleep so that we can work, be productive, etc. etc., but do these things precisely so that we can sleep and dream?
Something beddish to ponder as we approach the darkest time of year, burrowing our way under the covers. Or down even deeper, to suck on tree roots …
Sweet dreams.
