I just spent about 40 minutes after lunch observing the insect life in my front yard, near the north pine forest. It has been a long time since I observed insect life so I decided to go lay in the sun in my front yard and watch what was going on.
The sun was very warm and the sky very bright making it extremely easy to observe everything. I lay with my face on the grass to better observe the action nearby.
The first thing I saw was a large black ant carrying in its mandibles the head of another large ant. Just the head, and the head it carried was as large as its own head. The antenna were still attached too.
It was either a red ant’s head that had been been decapitated for awhile and had darkened, or the head of another black ant. Hard to tell without my magnifying glass. It carried the head laboriously and without pause making me consider three possibilities; either the head was toxic and sickening the porting ant, or the other ant and it had a long battle and it was exhausted and considered the head some kind of trophy, or perhaps the head was the head of an ant from the same colony that the first ant wanted to preserve or recover for some reason. The ant meandered slowly about in no discernible pattern that I could see and it seemed obsessed with the head. It would not relinquish it.
It was very atypical behavior for either a scouting ant of for one foraging for and collecting food. Finally I had to admit that the matter was probably inscrutable to me.
The next thing I saw was an old, large grasshopper eating. It did so merrily for about ten minutes and then it flew/leapt away. Then I saw a butterfly with a beautiful black and white wing pattern licking grass and other plants and gathering food into its mouth. I’m going to have to look up the exact species.
Then there was a large brown wolf spider, running about and on the hunt. It was ignoring smaller prey and having no luck with what it wanted to find and eventually slowed. I let it crawl across my shoulder and down my arm and onto my hand until I felt drowsy and decided I’d put him somewhere else while I napped. Didn’t wanna crush him or have him bite me if I rolled on him as I slept.
Before then though I saw a yellow-faced wasp (I think I know the species but I’m gonna look it up before commenting) who was making its way across the grass, sometimes in spurts, sometimes slowly, and sometimes stopping for two or three minute periods and just being absolutely still. It seemed undamaged but it never flew any higher than about two inches off the ground and never more than for more than a second or two at a time. So I’m figuring it must be near the end of its life-cycle.
It moved in a weird sort of semi-circular pattern across the ground, and every time it came within my shadow it paused as if going into a rest or sleep state. That seems odd to me as most any normal creature would be able to easily tell (from other cues and clues, smells, time of day, temperature, etc.) that it was not prematurely night. Or an eclipse. Again, making me think it was either sick, injured, or dying.
About that time the sun was so warm and I felt so good that I fell asleep and dreamed awhile. It is odd to fall asleep and dream immediately. And even though I couldn’t have been asleep for more than ten minutes I did just that.
The dream though was an almost exact reproduction of a dream I had about three nights ago. That dream was divided into three sections, each connected, and I understood the final two sections of the dream easily upon waking. However I never understood the first scene.
in this dream it was the same except that the guy I had seen in the original dream told me, “Now do you remember what the wasp was doing?” and I said, “yes.” Then he said, “now do you understand what I’m doing?” and I said, “yeah, now I get it perfectly!” And I did. Right as the dream went into the re-enactment of the second section my dog Sam licked me on the face and woke me but I still remembered the answer this dream had given me.
I thought to myself upon waking, “Now that’s a very odd looping pattern indeed. A reproduction of a previous dream in the future goes back and explains a prior dream after I observe something else happening in real life just a few minutes ago.”
And it was a very uncanny feeling. But a very pleasing and pleasant one. Then my wife drove by and told me she was leaving for her drive, and since it was getting cooler I went inside and made a cup o coffee and wrote this up.
Wyrdwend 