Where the Green Ants Dream

I dreamed I went with a group of friends to see the Utah Jazz play the San Antonio Spurs, only the game was being played outdoors on a grass court. The court was as wide as a regular basketball court, but it was dozens of miles long and we rarely got a glimpse of the players at all because once they came over the horizon line, the other team would take possession of the ball and then they all disappeared off in the other direction again. We spent several days camped out to watch the game, and after a while we decided that we should all find a job that we could do to fill up our time and earn some money while we patiently waited for the game to reach our end of the court. So my friends and I, who included my sister Julie, my nephew Caleb, Monique Holmes from the cast of my recent opera performance (still wearing her costume and makeup), and Brady Emmett discovered that the field with the basketball court was next to a really steep slope that was covered with hundreds of anthills. Brady had his laptop with him, and he logged on to a website that had feeds from hundreds of surveillance cameras filming the anthills, both from the outside and the inside.

Our team functioned like this: Brady looked at the surveillance videos to see which anthill seemed the most promising, then he had Monique signal us with a flag, and then Julie, Caleb, and I descended down and stomped around near the anthill, attempting to agitate them so the would come after us. The ants came out in long chains branching out from the anthill in all directions. Caleb and I tried to lure the chain of ants out as far as possible from the anthill, because if they got too far out, the sun would dry out the ant-chain and it would harden into a brown stem. We then watched in time-lapse photography as the stems sprouted bunches of grapes. Julie then gathered up all the grapes into a basket and we moved on to the next anthill.

As soon as all of the ants on the hill had been transformed into bunches of grapes, we headed back to meet up with Brady and Monique again. I told Brady that our harvest techniques seemed really strange to me; I couldn't exactly remember how grapes grew, but it seemed to me like grapes didn't grow on chains of dried-up ants. But he assured me that grapes have always grown precisely thus, and he pulled up a YouTube clip on his laptop to prove his point. The clip was in black and white, produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1950's. It showed a smiling housewife and her kids in a sparkling 50's kitchen, wondering aloud where grapes come from. Then there was the shimmery dream effect and we saw footage of hundreds of migrant workers stomping around anthills and gathering up bunches of grapes. After seeing the clip I was convinced.

After a hard day of grape harvesting, we were all hungry, so we looked up and noticed that we were suddenly in the parking lot of the Mayan, so we filed inside for dinner as the sun set in the background.

P.S. - In another part of the dream my nephew Caleb found a lone door standing in the middle of the basketball field with no building attached to it. The door opened into a movie theater where they were showing a festival of the films of German director Werner Herzog (his 1977 film Stroszek was playing when we peeked in). The title of this post, Where the Green Ants Dream, is another film by Herzog - unseen by me, but the title seemed apropos (even though neither the ants nor the grapes were green).