Next Stage of Human Development

With the fall of this dark knight, I was even­tu­ally rotated up top­side to stand watch under a mag­nif­i­cent dome of stars. As the winds of time sped past me, I imag­ined myself stand­ing on the earth many thou­sands of years ago, look­ing up into the same dome of stars. Sud­denly, I real­ized the stars had moved with the pas­sage of time, and that I’d changed too, for I was now a hairy, naked cave man. Instead of walk­ing upon the earth, I found myself lit­er­ally tra­vers­ing the ridges of my brain back into time. For under the dome of my own skull now shined brightly the stars of a pre­his­toric night sky.

Just then, I encoun­tered a large group of Nean­derthals. As they stood there star­ing at me, amazed at how dif­fer­ent I looked, I real­ized that I was the next evo­lu­tion­ary link in the devel­op­ment of mankind. Ere they could grab me, I was snatched back to the ship by my relief.

That night, I lay awake pon­der­ing over this most unusual reverie. Were the guys on the ship, the very Nean­derthals I had encoun­tered in this fan­tasy? Was I actu­ally car­ry­ing within my own despi­ca­ble body the next stage of human devel­op­ment? If so, what was it? Since I really had no answers to such far-​​reaching ques­tions, I sim­ply stored the reverie away, for the time being, to savor bits ’n’ pieces of it as the aroma of its sub­tle mean­ings arose from the ground of my being.