off me. My Right Guard had long since failed, and I was beginning to tire. After shedding my backpack and slinging my epaulet of nylon rope down beside it, I slumped to the ground for a breather. A tree trunk was at my back, and although the savannah was visible through the foliage to the southwest, I had no real apprehension of the carnivores out there. I was certainly at risk, but I was also so rare a creature that, simply by being a rarity, I felt I generated a kind of armor about myself. I rested my hands on my stomach, closed my eyes, and felt myself drifting . . . drifting . . . drifting into dreamland. . . .
* * *
Drifting into dreamland.
If you adopt a literal interpretation of this phrase, a metaphysical puzzle presents itself.
My bodily venture into the distant past took place six years ago, when I was twenty-five. For the preceding quarter of a century, however, my every fourth or fifth dream had been a special one, an instance of what I had referred to, even as a child, as “spirit-traveling.” During these clairvoyant special dreams I visited, willy-nilly, the primeval landscapes of organic evolution in East Africa. Always a detached observer, I witnessed scenes that were commonplace in context but beautiful, bizarre, or frightening to one who had no waking experience or knowledge of such events. I had bucolic dreams in which hundreds of antelopes grazed in the somnolent heat of the savannah; horrifying dreams in which doglike animals tore the throats out of young or enfeebled gazelles and even devoured their own wounded; oddly poignant dreams in which naked quasi-people fed, cradled, or romped with their mischievous, monkeylike infants; and on and on. My spirit-traveling ranged across nearly the entire spectrum of Early Pleistocene life east of the Great Rift Valley. Some hologramic kernel in my collective unconscious opened up these vistas for me, and I tracked them in my sleep like the stylus on a seismograph recording the earth’s most subtle crustal movements.
Occasionally, although not often, events from our own era would become illogically commingled with my spirit-traveling. In the summer of 1969, for instance, not long after the first moon landing, I dreamed a prehistoric landscape into which a pair of astronauts in helmets and hulking white pressure suits emerged from a delicate lunar module. A volcano—probably Mount Tharaka—was erupting not far from their lander, and the air was filled with drifting ash. I could see the astronauts’ boots making herringbone patterns in the layers of buoyant soot blanketing the veldt. A pack of ragged hyenas, enormous creatures, came jog-trotting through the clouds of volcanic debris toward the men. While one of the astronauts performed dreamy slow-motion jumping jacks, his partner dispersed the hyenas by jabbing a stiff American flag at them. . . .
Most of my spirit-traveling episodes, though, were pure, untainted by anachronism. Long before Kaprow’s White Sphinx Project, in fact, I had familiarized myself with dinotheres, giant baboons, australopithecines, and most of their extinct fellow travelers. Such creatures, after all, were the aboriginal denizens of my dreams; and I knew them by their behavior and their anatomy, if not by their multisyllabic scientific names, which I learned only later through study. Simply by drifting into dreamland, I had become an expert natural historian—minus the diplomas, the degrees, the publications, and the terminology—at an age when most kids still believe in the reality of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
This, then, is the metaphysical puzzle I am trying to pose: What sort of dreams must come to those who, through the dire expedient of time travel, have drifted into the objectified territory of their subconscious, a “dreamland” that is no longer a dream but a palpable place? The answer is simple and perhaps not all that surprising. Such people will begin to dream about their native present, across the entire span of their lives before their actual bodily displacement into the past. They must relive their infancy, childhood, adolescence, and youth through the agency of spirit-traveling; and they must witness this procession of events at random, as if it were a slide program shuffled out of obvious sequence.
Sitting in a grove of acacia trees, two million years before my birth, I must have dreamed of my real mother and Spain, of Jacqueline Tru and the Mekong Restaurant, of President Tharaka and the Weightlessness Simulation Incline, of Mrs. Givens and Van Luna, Kansas. I do not recall exactly which